Photo: Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images
For a brief period in the mid-aughts, Hayden Panettiere was omnipresent. She was on billboards for Neutrogena and in the tabloids for partying at Les Deux. The mantra “save the cheerleader, save the world” from her show Heroes, one of the last great monocultural event shows of network TV, was emblazoned on everything from mugs to mousepads. Still, no one could save Panettiere from the world. The talented star suffered years of bad relationships, mental-health struggles, and addiction and is opening up about it all in her new memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning.
In the book, out now, Panettiere discusses her life as a child actor, and how it set the stage for an adulthood of trauma. “Directors, fans, and Mom praised me endlessly for my over-the-top dramatic responses. Subconsciously, I began to associate catastrophe with adoration; people loved me because make-believe bad things happened to me,” she writes. “I’ve voted wondered whether — unintentionally— I’ve brought on my traumas because I’m wired to think they’re good for me.” Panettiere’s biggest struggles came battling postpartum depression, a time in which she self-medicated with alcohol. She eventually gave up custody of her child in order to better pursue recovery. Here are the biggest revelations from Panettiere’s harrowing tell-all.
Panettiere began working in commercials and modeling at 8 months old. She says she can’t remember a time before acting. “I auditioned for a Playskool toy train commercial,” she writes. “My first memory is watching a miniature Playskool train circle its tracks over and over and over, but that could be because the Playskool ad ran for years.” Whenever she lost a tooth, her mother had a specialty set of “flippers” made — filler dentures — so she wouldn’t have any gaps in her résumé or her smile.
Panettiere’s career made her the focus of bullying at school, but she felt a little more at home after the family moved to Hudson Valley artists’ enclave Snedens Landing. Panettiere has childhood memories of meeting Bill Murray and Björk, not knowing who they were. The family had moved after Panettiere’s dad retired from firefighting in January 2001. Panettiere gave a photo of her firefighter dad pride of place in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by the other guys from his house. “A lot of those same faces would be gone forever on a sunny September morning a few years later.”
Panettiere says she started dating her Heroes co-star after a long press tour in Europe. He was 30 and she had just turned 18. “The press scrutiny around our age difference had been relentless, and Milo was such a private person that I knew it wore on him,” she writes. Ventimiglia was the one who alerted Panettiere of her parents’ domestic-violence incident in 2008 — one she still believes was a false call on her mother’s part rather than physical violence on the part of her father.
Later that year, Panettiere introduces “John,” an important NBC executive she describes as “one of my Big Bosses,” whom Ventimiglia never liked. “John” kissed Panettiere hello on the lips at a party. “I can’t say I’d ever been kissed on the lips by a television exec before,” she writes, “but I knew it was innocent.” Panettiere told Ventimiglia about it after on the drive home. She says he seemed to get angry but begged off, saying he wasn’t feeling well. “I couldn’t tell if he was upset about the silly kiss, genuinely sick, or something else entirely,” she writes. A few days later, he broke up with her. They eventually got back together.
For years, Hayden Panettiere and Diana Jenkins, a wealthy woman who frequented charity events, were constant fodder in the Crazy Days and Nights blind-item community, with readers thinking the former was a “yachting” sugar baby and the latter was her madame. Skeptics of their closeness pointed to the photo book Room 23 as an alleged catalogue of all the sex workers in Jenkins’ stable. Jenkins eventually sued CDAN and the anonymous gossipmonger known as “Enty Lawyer.” The two eventually settled, with Enty releasing this statement on his blog: “Diana is not, nor do I now believe she has ever been, involved in illegal or immoral activity. I regret contributing to this false narrative, and I apologize to Diana and her family for the harm my statements have caused.”
Panettiere discusses making Room 23, saying she’s only in the book because her friend/makeup artist was working on it that day and Panettiere needed her makeup done for a party that night.
Panettiere says her friendship with Jenkins — who was 30 years her senior — came shortly after she fired her momager. “I’m not sure what I needed at the time,” she writes, “a mother figure, a diversion from Heroes, or some excitement and friendship — but I fell completely under her spell.” Jenkins also helped her get over her breakup with Ventimiglia with a trip to New York on a private jet.
Panettiere does, however, describe another friend who tried to pass her around Hollywood. The Heroes actor says another friend, given the pseudonym Stella McAmis, put her in dangerous situations with older and more famous Hollywood men.
McAmis invited Panettiere to a “party,” which turned out to be two women and a handful of men in their 40s and 50s: “There were some musicians and some actors, all of whom counted themselves among the most exclusive people in Hollywood.” Deeply uncomfortable, Panettiere quickly left, though not before getting intercepted by an unnamed Academy Award–winning actor. “Well, have a good night. Just be careful when you leave because someone spit their gum out somewhere, and I got some stuck on my pants,” this man said. He then pointed to his crotch, where his exposed balls hung out of his unzipped fly.
At another party with McAmis, this one on a yacht in the French Riviera, Panettiere was brought to a bed where “a famous British singer-songwriter” was lying naked. “Stella leaned down and whispered in my ear. ‘I want you to get in bed with him. He has a huge dick,’” she writes. “She pulled back the covers on the unoccupied side of the bed, and I did as I was told. My thoughts were a blur, but I’d spent my life trusting that others had my best interests at heart. Being ‘managed’ was routine, to the point where I lost faith in my intuition.”
After McAmis left the room, Panettiere says she told the famous Brit that nothing was going to happen and ran out of the room.
While working on Scream 4, Panettiere and some of the younger cast took shrooms at a party. David Arquette showed up and made everyone watch his directorial debut, The Tripper, a violent slasher movie. “A few minutes in, the screen filled with graphic images of corpses, viscera, carnage, and war,” she writes. “I swear to God my eyeballs were about to spout blood. One friend curled up into a ball next to me, and another put his head between his legs. Finally, one of us stood up to turn the DVD off.”
At the release party for Room 23, Panettiere met Wladimir Klitschko. Klitschko and his brother Vitali are both heavyweight world-champion boxers and heroes in their native Ukraine. Vitali is the mayor of Kyiv, and both men fought to defend the city during the Russian invasion.
Panettiere discusses her relationship with Klitschko, with whom she shares a daughter, Kaya. Their long-distance relationship was strained by his work schedule and her issues with drinking. After a difficult pregnancy, Panettiere suffered from postpartum depression and anxiety, which she self-medicated with alcohol and prescription sleep aids. At one point near the end of the relationship, he said she had to choose to be happy. “You have to remember the good things like your daughter and your talent,” he allegedly told her. “You have to work hard to be happy. Your happiness is a choice.” Panettiere responded with outrage that he thought her depression was a choice and that she was choosing to put herself and her daughter through it.
While shooting Nashville and trying to recover from postpartum depression, Panettiere sought inpatient rehab. She says it was seeking treatment that got her fired from her longtime job as a Neutrogena spokesperson.
It was also during this period of recovery that Klitschko demanded she give up custody of Kaya. Panettiere describes the brutal emotional toll it took but also how much her daughter is thriving living full time in Europe. “Kaya needed to feel at rest, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. Could I fight Wlad? Sure. Did I want to? Yes. But should I? No. I couldn’t do it to my Kaya,” she writes. “I signed the papers and Wlad got our child.”
After giving up custody, and the end of Nashville, Panettiere met Brian Hickerson at L.A.’s Abbey bar. The two hit it off but eventually devolved into an abusive relationship fueled by drinking. “Seven years of mental illness, addiction, rage, abuse, and pain,” she writes. “Don’t get me wrong, there were also good times — almost too many to count. But good moments usually don’t leave scars like bad ones do.”
Throughout the abuse, Panettiere says she feared going to the police because she didn’t want the tabloids to have yet another thing to denigrate her for. Panettiere’s weight, relationships, and substance use were all major focuses of that toxic 2000s tabloid culture. She broke up with Hickerson, pressed charges against him, and became sober from alcohol shortly before the pandemic in 2020.
The last tragedy in Panettiere’s book comes at the very end. Her brother Jansen began using drugs at some point in his teens and died of an enlarged heart in 2023. Panettiere got the call from her dad while getting ready to promote Scream VI. She was the one who had to tell her mother.
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