Former Senator Harry Reid is in a Nevada court this week, suing the makers of TheraBand, a stretchy physical therapy resistance band that he says robbed him of sight in his right eye.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that Reid is suing Ohio-based Hygenic Intangible Property Holding Co., The Hygenic Corp. and Performance Health LLC, for $50,000, claiming that their faulty product caused him to suffer “a concussion, broken orbital bones, severe disfigurement to his face, bruising and lacerations on his face, hand injuries, scarring and broken ribs.”
Reid claims that he was doing physical therapy exercises with the TheraBand in his bathroom on New Years Day 2015 when the band slipped from his grasp, and he fell, sustaining major injuries. Two months later, because he was still contending with blindness in his right eye, he says he was forced to retire from his job in the Senate (at age 75).
Reid, now 79 and suffering from pancreatic cancer, has appeared in court, but it’s not clear whether he will testify; so far, only a few days into the trial, things don’t seem to be going Reid’s way.
According to the Associated Press, the lawyer for Hygenic ‘told a civil trial jury that congressional exercise advisers tried for months to teach Reid to improve his foot stance, balance and technique while using the resistance bands at his doctors’ recommendation,” and that Reid was using the band “improperly” when he tied it to his shower door.
Reid claimed at the time that the band broke, which is what caused him to fall forward and smash his face on a hard surface, but his lawyers, in their opening statement, agreed with the defendant that Reid was holding the band in his hand when he lost his grip.
“The evidence will show that he was using a band … it slipped from the hand, he spun to the right … and landed right on the eye,” his attorney said, adding that Reid’s bathroom was almost entirely clad in marble and granite — two very unforgiving surfaces.
Worse still, it seems Reid threw the band out after the incident, meaning that no one involved in the lawsuit has the exact item Reid was using, and it’s not immediately clear that the product was an actual TheraBand manufactured or sold by Hygenic.
Harry Reid has been mostly absent from politics since leaving Congress in 2015, though he has popped in from time to time to comment on President Donald Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s now-concluded investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian officials to impact the 2016 elections.
Just a few days ago, Reid took credit for kicking off concerns about Russian election interference, claiming that he wrote a letter to the FBI in August 2016 trying to force then-FBI director James Comey to take note of Russian interference in American elections.
“I wrote a letter in August [2016] to the Director of the FBI Comey and said Russia is messing with our elections and you need to do something about that. And by October he had done nothing,” Reid said, according to the Washington Examiner. “We now know he should have done something.”
Reid claims Comey didn’t get involved because everyone in Washington, D.C. was under the assumption that Hillary Clinton would sail to an easy victory.