Hayden Panettiere’s Memoir Covers It All — and Her Ex Agrees

Hayden Panettiere has never really let us all the way in — until now. With her memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning hitting shelves on May 19, the 36-year-old actress is laying bare decades of pain, survival, and hard-won clarity: the abuse, the addiction, the postpartum depression, the custody heartbreak, and the parts of herself she kept hidden for far too long.

And in a genuinely unexpected twist, the man who abused her is telling people to read it too.

Brian Hickerson — Panettiere’s on-and-off boyfriend from 2018 to 2022, who was arrested multiple times on domestic violence charges and eventually pleaded no contest to felony counts — spoke ahead of the book’s release about what it was like to see his worst moments in print. He asked Hayden to leave one particular passage out. She didn’t.

The scene he wanted cut describes a drunken incident in which he allegedly threatened to hurl a phone at her, telling her: “I’ll give you 10 seconds to run as fast as you can before I throw it at you.”

“Who wants to read something about themselves like that?” Hickerson said — then caught himself. “I did it. I did it.”

That admission, uncomfortable and unvarnished, is exactly the kind of moment Hickerson says people like him need to be confronted with. He pushed the conversation beyond survivors, arguing that people accused of abuse should be forced to sit with these stories — that domestic violence education comes too late, and that he was never taught what abuse actually looked like growing up. In his view, Panettiere’s memoir could function as a warning manual for the very kind of person he became.

After his no contest plea, Hickerson was sentenced to jail time, placed on probation, and hit with a five-year restraining order keeping him away from Panettiere.

The Revelations That Go Beyond the Abuse

The memoir isn’t only about Hickerson. Not by a long stretch.

One of the book’s most alarming disclosures involves an incident Panettiere says happened when she was 18 — a friend lured her into a room where a famous male actor was waiting for her, naked, in bed. She recounted the story on the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast, saying: “Even though I felt I could make healthy decisions, safe decisions, I wasn’t capable of being fully aware of what was going on around me. It wasn’t until I found myself in predicaments that I realized my perspective completely shifted and I realized I was in danger. By the time I realized I was in danger, I was quite literally out to sea.”

She also opens up about her long battle with alcoholism and opioid addiction — a spiral she’s described previously but now contextualizes more fully. “I was on top of the world and I ruined it,” she told People in an earlier interview. “I think I hit rock bottom, but then there’s that trap door that opens.” She voluntarily entered inpatient treatment and underwent trauma therapy, and says she put serious work into rebuilding herself.

In an almost eerie parallel, Panettiere says her real-life unraveling began to mirror the arc of Juliette Barnes, the troubled country singer she was playing on Nashville at the time — a woman defined by addiction and self-destruction. Life and fiction blurring in the worst possible way.

She also reflects on her postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter Kaya in December 2014 — and how she didn’t immediately recognize what was happening to her. “I wish I knew about postpartum depression. I wish I knew to look out for it,” she’s said, explaining that she turned to alcohol to cope, which only deepened the damage.

The Custody Decision She Calls a ‘Living Nightmare’

Perhaps the most emotionally raw thread running through the memoir and its press tour is Panettiere’s account of relinquishing full custody of Kaya to her ex-fiancé, boxing legend Wladimir Klitschko, who lives in Ukraine. She made the custody agreement official in 2018, and the public reaction was brutal.

On the On Purpose podcast, she was direct about why she did it. She was heading into treatment. She needed to get better before she could be the mother Kaya deserved. “It became this horrible cycle for years of battling depression, anxiety, alcoholism, and substance abuse and me just trying to find my way out of this darkness,” she explained.

To Us Weekly, she called the decision a “living nightmare” — but also the right one. Klitschko, she said, is an “incredible father,” and by the time she’d stabilized enough to reconsider the arrangement, disrupting Kaya’s established life felt “unfair and selfish.”

“Signing those papers, the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever, ever had to do in my life,” she said on Red Table Talk. “I was gonna go work on myself, I was gonna get better, and when I got better then things would change… but that didn’t happen.”

She describes herself as a “mother lion” and is clear-eyed about the gap between what she wanted and what she was able to give. Today, she says she has an “incredible” relationship with Kaya — FaceTime calls, visits when she can make them, and a daughter who speaks multiple languages, loves horseback riding, and, by her mother’s account, is “happy and healthy mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually” and “no way feels abandoned.”

Coming Out at 36

Ahead of the memoir’s publication, Panettiere also publicly came out as bisexual in an interview with Us Weekly — something she says she’d held back for years out of fear.

“It was always the fear of not being perfect, and what my team was going to think about it, what the public’s opinion was going to be about it,” she said. “It was just never the right time, and it was a very difficult topic to articulate properly… It’s sad that I had to wait till I was 36 years old to share that part of me, but better late than never, right?”

For someone who became a household name as a child — on Heroes, on Nashville, in the Scream franchise — the weight of public perception has clearly shaped every disclosure, every silence, every carefully timed admission. This memoir, it seems, is her way of finally deciding she’s done waiting for the right time.

This Is Me: A Reckoning is out May 19.