Caitlyn Jenner shared an emotional message after her manager Sophia Hutchins’ unexpected death.
“Recently, my good friend Sophia passed away in a tragic accident,” Jenner, 75, said during the Thursday, August 28, broadcast of Fox News at Night, while reporting on the recent church shooting in Minnesota. “For the last seven weeks, I’ve been dealing with death, and it’s so difficult. So, when this [tragedy] happened, it really hit me hard.”
She continued, “Here I am dealing with my grief, and I just can’t even imagine parents who dropped their kid off at school and, like that father just said, ‘I’ll never get a chance to talk to him again.’ That is just so horrible. I’ve been dealing with grief, and these people have a long road ahead of them, and they’re going to be dealing with grief.”
Hutchins died following an ATV accident that occurred near Jenner’s Malibu home and was pronounced dead at the scene, TMZ reported on July 3. She was 29.
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The outlet noted that Hutchins’ vehicle plunged 350 feet into a ravine after colliding with the bumper of another car. The two people in the car she struck were not injured.
Less than three days after Hutchins’ death went public, Sergeant Eduardo Saucedo, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Malibu/Lost Hills division, provided some more details on the crash.
“It looks like she may have been speeding and rear-ended the other car, the other party, and then that caused her to veer to the right and go off the cliff,” Saucedo shared via The Daily Mail on July 6. “It doesn’t seem like she was following them. I think she just came up on them and then hit the car.”
Saucedo noted that Hutchins could have been trying to “maneuver” around the other car before crashing.
“She was going too fast and just ended up clipping the rear end of that Mazda, causing her to veer off and go off the cliff there,” he said.
The officer shared that Jenner did visit the accident site as the investigation was underway and that investigators would wait for the coroner’s department to prepare a toxicology report before determining whether or not Hutchins was impaired behind the wheel.
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That same day Saucedo revealed more details, Jenner was also spotted for the first time, telling the Daily Mail that she was experiencing “tough times.”
In pictures obtained by the outlet on Sunday, Jenner hid her face via a dark pair of glasses and a blue visor while telling reporters that she did “not want to talk” about the accident with Hutchins.
Hutchins, who was also a trans woman, appeared on several episodes of the E! docuseries I Am Cait in 2015 before eventually becoming Jenner’s business manager.
The twosome frequently sparked dating rumors after attending events together — but they always denied having any romantic connection.
“We are not going to get into that,” Jenner told Variety in 2018 when asked to explain her relationship with Hutchins. “But we are very close. We do a lot of things together. We’re kind of inseparable. We’re the best of friends.”
