Background: Screengrab from 2020 YouTube stunt that left Jeff Wittek injured (SO WHAT/YouTube). Inset: Jeff Wittek (Instagram).
YouTuber Jeff Wittek recently underwent eye surgery related to the injuries he suffered after a stunt gone wrong — and it cost him $90,000 out of pocket.
Wittek, a barber known for his YouTube channel Jeff’s Barbershop, took part in a wild stunt back in June 2020 with fellow YouTube personality David Dobrik. Dobrik was engineering an excavator in Utah Lake in Provo, Utah, that swung Wittek around, but he lost control of the machine and Wittek slammed into the arm of it, breaking several bones and shattering a part of his skull.
He also nearly lost one of his eyes. Wittek sued Dobrik for $10 million in damages in 2022, but he never saw any of the money.
On his Instagram account, Wittek shared images from before and after a procedure he had to address some of his eye issues, including some images of the surgery itself.
“Yesterday Dr. Leif Rogers and his team of avengers did a massive five-hour surgery to take out some metal plates and adjust my eye a few millimeters forward to hopefully fix my double vision,” he wrote to his followers. He added that he already felt “like I can run through a brick wall.”
The massive price tag was revealed in the comments section, when Wittek told a commenter, “I paid about 90k outta pocket for this one but it was worth every penny!”
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Footage from the original YouTube video, which has since been taken down, has continued to circulate online as Wittek’s allies take his side in the online rivalry that has developed between him and Dobrik. The lawsuit blamed Dobrik for the accident, stating that it was Dobrik’s idea to swing people around by the arm of the excavator without any safety equipment or harness after their original plan to use the arm to swing them around while they were on “various accessories, including wakeboards, etc.” failed to take off.
When Wittek took his turn to swing from the machine while holding a rope, Dobrik apparently started swinging the arm at “unsafe speeds,” then “intentionally, and noticeably slowed the excavator down too quickly.” Wittek collided with the excavator and sustained severe injuries including torn ligaments in his leg, a broken foot and hip, and nine skull fractures.
Wittek sued Dobrik and his business for general negligence and intentional tort, and he asked for $10 million. So far, Dobrik has not paid him anything, but the Daily Mail reported that Dobrik bragged about a $20,000 purchase on Snapchat around the same time as Wittek’s latest operation.
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