A bullet tore through Trace Adkins’ heart and both lungs in February 1994. He walked away from it, built a country music empire, and only now is explaining exactly how he survived.
The singer detailed the near-fatal shooting during a candid appearance on Theo Von’s podcast, “This Past Weekend.”
Von steered the conversation toward one of the most jarring chapters of Adkins’ life, a story that has circulated in country music circles for years but rarely with this level of detail.
Von raised the subject delicately. “I heard that one of your wives— I dont even know how to say this— they shot ya,” he said.
Adkins, unshaken by the question, replied with the dry wit that has defined his public persona for decades. “Yeah, that took it a little far, I thought,” he said.
Long before “Honkytonk Badonkadonk” made him a country radio fixture, Adkins was a young man battling addiction.
His second wife, Julie Curtis, confronted him about his drinking one night in early 1994. The confrontation escalated quickly.
Adkins does not dispute his own contribution to the chaos of that period.
He has spoken publicly for years about his struggles with alcohol and has never portrayed himself as an innocent party in the marriage’s collapse.
The gun, however, was where he drew the line. “totally uncalled for,” he told Von, describing Curtis reaching for a weapon mid-argument.
He said he had hoped for a far less violent resolution. “Just leave, you know. Let’s just call it quits. We dont have to go that far,” Adkins said.
Curtis armed herself with a .38-caliber pistol during the fight and raised it toward her husband. Adkins moved toward her in an attempt to wrestle the gun away. The weapon fired in the struggle.
The round entered beneath one of his arms and exited beneath the other, ripping through his chest. No charges were ever filed against Curtis.
Even now, more than 30 years removed from the shooting, Adkins extends his ex-wife a surprising degree of grace.
“I don’t think she knew what was about to happen when she pulled that trigger. She thought it was a toy,” he said.
What makes the story almost unbelievable is not just that Adkins survived, but how. The bullet passed directly through his heart and both lungs, a trajectory that would kill most people instantly.
Adkins explained that the close range of the shot actually saved him.
Fired at such close proximity, the round never expanded inside his body, sparing him the catastrophic internal damage a fully expanded bullet would have caused.
He has referred to it bluntly as a “kill shot” that inexplicably failed to kill.
Shock, not pain, defined his memory of those first moments. “I just remember getting off the floor and then taking a few steps and then going back down,” Adkins told Von.
Von couldn’t resist injecting some gallows humor into the exchange. “Thank God she shot you so close then,” he said.
For all the drama surrounding the gunshot itself, Adkins insists it was not the injury that hurt him most over the course of his life.
He made that point clear in a 2022 interview with People magazine, long before sitting down with Von.
“The physical pain— broken bones and surgeries and bullets and getting beat up and cut— has never really bothered me. I have a high tolerance for it. It’s the broken hearts that left the deepest scars,” Adkins said at the time.
He has also framed his survival as something close to fate. “It wasn’t my time to go,” Adkins said. The years that followed lent that statement some weight.
By 1996, just two years after nearly dying on his own living room floor, Adkins released “There’s a Girl in Texas,” his debut single and the first step toward superstardom.
His marriage to Curtis ended that same year, 1994. Adkins has since married two more times and is currently husband to Canadian actress Victoria Pratt.
Adkins couldn’t help but poke fun at his own wedding during the podcast, joking that its legitimacy is questionable given that fellow country star Blake Shelton officiated.
As for Curtis, Adkins confirmed she eventually apologized for the shooting, and that he has long since forgiven her. “I don’t think she meant to do it,” he said.
Few artists in country music can claim a backstory as improbable as Adkins’.
He survived a bullet through the heart, a battle with addiction, and a marriage that ended in gunfire, and still built one of the genre’s most enduring careers.
Three decades later, he can recount the entire ordeal to Theo Von with a laugh, treating what could have been a fatal tragedy as just another verse in an already unbelievable life story.
