Skip to Content

‘Orange Is the New Black’ creator Jenji Kohan says her late son was her ‘best work’

Jenji Kohan, creator of Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,” described herself as “broken” after her 20-year-old son was killed in a New Year’s Eve ski accident.

“He was my best work. A list of adjectives don’t do him justice. There is no justice,” Kohan wrote in an emotional Instagram post.

“I am the luckiest person who ever lived in that I got to spend so much time and help grow this brilliant, funny, truly kind and thoughtful person-man-boy. My baby. My golden child. My beautiful boy. I don’t understand what life is now without him in the world. I don’t understand where he’s gone. And I’m broken. How is this real?”

Her son, Charlie Noxon, was vacationing in Park City, Utah, with his father and two siblings. The accident occurred on an intermediate trail near Canyons Village, the Park City Mountain Resort said in a statement.

The Park City Mountain Ski Patrol responded to the scene, the resort said, and Noxon was pronounced dead “after further emergency care and evaluation.”

He was a junior at Columbia University, his father Christopher Noxon told CNN.

Noxon’s father described him as “brilliant, kind, funny, sensitive and loving,” in a statement to CNN on Wednesday.

“He was keenly interested in and deeply curious about the world around him from the time he was a small child. People describe people as brilliant — but Charlie was truly brilliant,” Christopher Noxon said.

His father also wrote a tribute to his son on Instagram.

“The cliches about moments like this are true, it turns out,” he wrote. “The one about life forever changing in a split second, about the fact that we are all bound up in a web of love and loss, about the primacy of community in times of unfathomable tragedy.”

Article Topic Follows: Entertainment

Jump to comments ↓

Author Profile Photo

CNN

BE PART OF THE CONVERSATION

KVIA ABC 7 is committed to providing a forum for civil and constructive conversation.

Please keep your comments respectful and relevant. You can review our Community Guidelines by clicking here

If you would like to share a story idea, please submit it here.

Skip to content