14 DAY TRIAL // For the first time since she slurred her speech and then started speaking gibberish during a live broadcast at the Grammy Awards 2011 last weekend, reporter Serene Branson speaks: it was a migraine.
We also noted earlier today that Branson’s personal physician, Dr. Neil Martin, was given full liberty to speak out about the video that went viral: the segment when she was supposed to go on air to talk of the Grammys and was obviously unable to formulate a sentence.
He explained it as a cause of a “complex migraine,” which apparently manifests itself as a mini-stroke, which is why so many people thought Branson had a stroke on air, in front of the camera.
Bronson too is speaking out now, saying in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, that she knew something was wrong from the very beginning – she had no control over it, though.
Just like the video below will show, Serene could not find the words to express her thoughts, because she could not remember them, she says.
She also admits that looking back on the video is “troubling.”
“I started to get a really bad headache,” Branson says of how she was feeling before going on air. Still, she believed it would be nothing she couldn’t handle.
“At around 10 o’clock that night I was sitting in the live truck with my field producer and the photographer and I was starting to look at some of my notes,” she recalls.
“I started to think, the words on the page are blurry and I could notice that my thoughts were not forming the way they normally do,” Branson says.
She went on air nevertheless – perhaps because she’d suffered from migraines all her life and thought she could sail through this one as well.
“As soon as I opened my mouth I knew something was wrong. I was having trouble remembering the word for Grammy. I knew what I wanted to say but I didn’t have the words to say it,” she says.
As we also reported at the time, when producers realized that something was terribly wrong with Branson, the transmission was cut off and someone called the paramedics.
She was examined and was allowed to go home but, by that time, talk that she’d suffered a stroke live on television had already spread online.