What We Know About Kelly Ripa's Sister Linda And Her Tragic Accident

Linda Ripa was born in 1972, according to a post on her father Joe's Facebook profile. "As my second born she arrived at 4:11 AM on this date in 1972 and has continued to make her mother and I very proud," Joe wrote back in 2014. That makes her the younger sister of talk show host and actor Kelly Ripa, and for a while, it seemed that Linda was going to follow in her older sister's footsteps. She was hoping to be a model or an actor, hoping to match the success of her sister, who starred on "All My Children" before getting tapped to co-host "Live With Regis and Kelly."

Unfortunately, Linda's life went in another direction, one that left her unable to work as either an actor or a model in the wake of a horrific car crash. This is everything we know about Kelly Ripa's sister Linda and her tragic accident ... and, unfortunately, this is only one of many tragic details about Kelly Ripa's life you never knew.

In the summer of 1999, Linda Ripa was seven months pregnant when she decided to spend an afternoon running errands; she lived in Philadelphia at the time. That was where Ripa was stopped at a red light when a drunk driver smashed into her car head-on, sending her vehicle spinning into another. 

Ripa was badly injured in the crash. She had dozens of broken bones, including a crushed pelvis. Still, Ripa told The New York Times that she was touched by how passersby responded at the time of the accident. "[P]eople at the accident scene were amazing," she said. "People stayed there with me until the ambulance came. One man kept wiping blood from my face. Another person held my neck up. Many asked what they could do." While this was only the beginning of Ripa's tragic incident, she held on to that memory of people being willing to help. "I don't know who they were," she said, "but it did keep my faith in humankind."

Linda Ripa wasn't the only person injured in the accident that left her hospitalized with a crushed pelvis. The accident also affected her unborn son Sergio because her crushed pelvis pressed onto her womb and sent the child into a coma. While Ripa underwent numerous surgeries to repair her broken bones, she told The New York Times that she decided not to take pain medication out of concern for how that could affect baby Sergio's recovery.

Thankfully, the baby began to respond after a month in a coma. He was ultimately born almost two months premature. "We don't know how it happened, but it did and, of course, we call him Miracle Baby," Ripa recalled.

Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the accident, Ripa and her newborn son still struggled with issues related to their injuries. Sergio was born with breathing problems, while Ripa was confined to a bed for almost a year after the tragedy occurred. That meant she wasn't able to parent her newborn the way she would've wanted. "It was the worst thing you could imagine. As much as I hurt from all the broken bones and operations, the worst thing was not really being able to hold my son for very long," she said. "Any mother would tell you that.”

Helping Linda Ripa recover from her terrible accident turned out to be a family affair. According to The New York Post, her sister Kelly Ripa revealed in 2001 that their parents had taken on the primary responsibility of helping their daughter and new grandson in the wake of the crash. "They are older and raising their grandchild," she said. "My mother is a 24-hour-a-day nurse to my sister." At the time, Linda's prognosis wasn't particularly good. "She will never, ever know a normal life again," Kelly said. "And there's nothing they can do."

In a wheelchair, Linda attended the court hearing where the drunk driver who hit her was sentenced to six to 24 months in prison. She told The New York Times that she was met with vitriol from the friends and family of the perpetrator. "They called me the names you might imagine, as if it was my fault. They really showed no remorse, and I have no doubt that he could go and do this again," she said.

Family turned out to be crucial to Linda's recovery, and she no longer requires round-the-clock care. Still, Linda's father Joe Ripa frequently shouts out his daughter on his Facebook page. On her birthday in 2019, he shared a throwback photo and wrote, "Happy Birthday to our daughter, Linda. The sun came out for your special day."

Linda Ripa's extensive injuries left her with lingering pain, which she told The New York Times she expected would follow her forever. "I don't suspect I will be without pain the rest of my life. But when I look at my son, I know I won't give up," she said.

Not all of her pain, however, came from the accident itself. In 2004, Ripa won a medical malpractice lawsuit after botched foot surgery left her unable to take a job as her sister Kelly's assistant. According to The Battalion, Linda sued the surgeon who operated on her ankle days after the accident and apparently set the bones incorrectly. She offered to settle for $2.4 million to represent lost wages, but the doctor's lawyers took it to trial instead.

To everyone's surprise, the jury granted her a $15 million settlement. Hospital lawyer David Corujo said, "I'm going to hazard a guess that the plaintiff, and the plaintiff's lawyers, in their wildest dreams, did not anticipate this case bringing in $15 million."

After Linda Ripa's accident, she needed to find a new vocation. While bedbound and recovering, someone in her family remembered that Ripa used to like to draw when she was little. "My nickname as a little kid was Ladybug, so I drew some," she told The New York Times. Eventually, she found herself telling Michael, one of Kelly Ripa's kids, a story about a lonely ladybug. It went over well, and she jotted it down.

”I didn't think it was anything more than a story to tell Mikey and my son. I wrote and drew a few more," Linda recalled. However, her family pointed out that the stories and accompanying illustrations were good. "My father and my sister and my mother said: 'These are great. You should publish these,'" she said. Ripa decided to do just that, and she linked up with a publisher.

She took the resulting book, "The Ladybug Blues," out on a national book tour. She was so committed to her new job, in fact, that she wound up postponing some surgeries until after she was able to travel. She loved it, recounting, "It is so rewarding to go to a reading and have all these little faces light up when you read them a story." There's a lesson there, too. "You just have to adjust what you do," Linda said. "I can't say I love having been in this accident, but slowing down isn't so bad, either."

These days, Linda Ripa is mostly a private person, so it's unclear just how much her accident still affects her today. However, on her father Joe Ripa's Facebook page, we can see that Linda appears to be thriving. Her family also seems to have grown in the decades since she worried that her unborn baby was in a coma. "Thanks for our three wonderful grandkids," Joe wrote on Facebook in 2020.

The proud grandpa also shares regular updates about Sergio, now a grown man. He's a musician in a band called Mountain Waves, and Joe has shared multiple Facebook videos of his grandson's guitar-playing prowess. 

In September 2021, Kelly Ripa shared a photo on Instagram of her nephew, updating her fans decades after she had his mother on "Live With Regis and Kelly" to talk about the accident. In the birthday snap, Sergio poses with an open mouthed dog. "Lena is pretty psyched about it!" Kelly wrote. "She's already singing!"