Hayden Panettiere’s Memoir Lays It All Bare

Hayden Panettiere isn’t softening a single edge. Her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, is out now, and in the weeks leading up to and since its release, the 36-year-old actress has been sharing some of the most painful, most private chapters of her life — the death of her brother, disturbing encounters with powerful men in Hollywood, a near-fatal childbirth, and a mother-daughter relationship that may be beyond repair. Taken together, it’s a portrait of a woman who has been through more than most people could imagine, and who is finally, on her own terms, telling the truth about all of it.

The Call That Changed Everything

The moment that cuts deepest in the memoir is the one Hayden has described as her brain going into autopilot. It was February 2023, and she was preparing for the Scream VI premiere when her phone rang. It was her dad. She let it go to voicemail. When he called again, she picked up.

He was hysterical, barely able to breathe. He told her that Jansen had missed a 9 AM appointment, that a friend had gone to check on him, and found him dead in a chair — a comforter pulled over him, like he’d simply fallen asleep. Then came the words Hayden wrote directly in the book: “Jansen’s dead. My boy is dead.”

She immediately started asking questions — was it suicide? A medical emergency? Foul play? Her mind raced through every possibility before the information began to settle. Then, still in that strange calm that can descend in moments of shock, she called her estranged mother, Lesley Vogel, who was at Venice Beach when she got the news.

The calm didn’t last. Hayden says she completely broke down afterward, crawling into bed and refusing to get out for the rest of the day. She has since shared that she developed agoraphobia in the wake of his death — and that she’s been “riddled with guilt” looking back at Jansen’s own struggles with substance abuse. “I, of all people, should have understood,” she told E! News. “But you can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to help themselves. It’s just a sad fact.”

Jansen Panettiere was 28 years old. He died from aortic valve complications and an undiagnosed enlarged heart. Hayden has said she credits her years in treatment for giving her the ability to function at all in those first hours after learning the news.

Hollywood’s Darker Side

The memoir doesn’t spare Hollywood either. Panettiere writes about two separate incidents involving powerful men that happened when she was still a teenager — experiences she has carried quietly for nearly two decades.

The first happened when she was 19, at a private party. She’d spent part of the evening talking with a group of men she described as being “in their forties and fifties,” and the atmosphere made her uncomfortable enough that she decided to leave. As she was putting on her coat, a man she describes as a “well-respected” Oscar-winning actor and director approached her with a strange claim — that he had a “big wad of gum on his pants.”

“I looked down and recoiled,” Panettiere wrote in an excerpt obtained by People. “This well-respected, award-winning actor’s testicles were hanging out from his unzipped fly.”

She left immediately — didn’t even stop to say goodbye to the friend she’d come with. She didn’t tell anyone what had happened, and at the time, she rationalized it away. “The gum on the pants, however, was a head-scratcher,” she wrote. “It hadn’t hurt me, and I was sure it was a drunken joke, but I’d never seen a grown man do something like that. I was shocked.” Her conclusion: “some older men had just grown up with no manners.”

She has since told The Hollywood Reporter that she chose not to name certain individuals in the book because many still work in the industry and naming them could create legal complications.

The second incident happened a year earlier, when she was 18. She was on a superyacht in the South of France — a celebrity-filled gathering — when a woman she considered a close, trusted friend led her down to a small room below deck. What came next still reads as a betrayal as much as it does a danger.

The friend, according to Panettiere’s account in the memoir, told her, “I want you to get in bed with him. He has a huge dick” — then left. The man in the bed was a “famous thirtysomething British singer-songwriter,” shirtless, propped up on pillows, the outline of his body visible beneath the sheets.

“‘Oh my God,’ I thought. ‘Is he naked under there?’” Hayden wrote.

Her survival instinct kicked in the second the door clicked shut. She turned to the man and told him directly: “Look… I don’t know what she said to you, but this is not going to happen.” She described the feeling of betrayal as being “kicked in the face” — the friend had “confided in me, pampered me and treated me like her best friend — then turned around and treated me like a call girl.”

On Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, Panettiere reflected on how the situation was made worse by the fact that there was no escape — she was, quite literally, out to sea. “There was no jumping off and swimming away,” she said. “And there was nobody who was going to be empathetic to my situation. I realized that this was nothing new to them.”

A Mother Who Slammed the Door

Through all of this, one of the most complicated threads running through Hayden’s press tour has been her relationship — or what’s left of it — with her mother, Lesley Vogel.

Vogel served as Hayden’s manager from the time she landed her first professional job as a baby. When Panettiere turned 19, she asked her mother to step back from that role. “I don’t want us to work together anymore,” she told her. “I just want you to be my mom.” According to Hayden, Vogel replied, “You owe me,” and walked out of her trailer on the set of Heroes. From that point, the business relationship was gone — and, Hayden realized, so was her mother’s interest in a relationship at all.

Vogel has responded to the memoir publicly, accusing her daughter of leaving her with “20 years of trauma” and suggesting the book was written for publicity rather than healing. She’s also claimed that Hayden’s decision to come out as bisexual while promoting the book was a calculated PR move.

Panettiere called those claims “false” and addressed them directly in a conversation with Entertainment Tonight, saying she has always left “that door cracked open in case” reconciliation was possible — but that Vogel has “slammed that door pretty hard in my face.” She added that her mother “has very clearly prioritized herself,” and that even though she’s not surprised, she still finds it hard to comprehend.

Hayden’s ex, Brian Hickerson — with whom she had a turbulent relationship that included multiple domestic violence incidents before they eventually rebuilt a friendship — has been more blunt. He told TMZ that Vogel is “by far one of the worst people I’ve ever met in my life.”

Kaya, Childbirth, and What Comes Next

The memoir doesn’t skip over the physical trauma either. Panettiere nearly died giving birth to her daughter Kaya — now 11 — via C-section in 2014. She required seven blood transfusions and battled a serious infection. “I was sitting there getting the C-section, and I knew that I was knocking on death’s doorstep,” she told E! News. “I just had the most motherly moment though, where I said, ‘God, please let me hear my daughter cry. I just want to know that she is OK and if it’s my time to go, I’m OK with that.’”

She survived. But the years that followed — the depression, the alcoholism, the substance abuse — eventually led her to sign over custody of Kaya to her ex-fiancé, boxer Wladimir Klitschko. “The idea that anybody would think that I would just give away my child and be OK with it is heartbreaking,” she said. “It couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Today, she describes her bond with Kaya as “intense” and “incredible.” She travels as much as she can to see her, and FaceTimes often. And now, there’s a new wrinkle: Kaya, at 11, has started expressing interest in acting. Panettiere told E! News the calls have been “a nail biter.” She wants to support her daughter — but she also wants her to wait, to try other things, to have a college experience. “She still has the ability to fly under the radar,” Hayden said, “and once you give that up, you don’t get that back. Once you’re out there and you’re famous and known, there’s no getting your privacy back.”

She was introduced to the entertainment industry at 12 months old. When asked whether she would have chosen this life for herself if given the choice, she paused. “I will never know,” she said.

This Is Me: A Reckoning is available now wherever books are sold.