Hayden Panettiere says the trouble that followed her for years began when she was 16, when false stories about her started to spread and a representative gave her non-prescribed happy pills from Mexico while she was doing press for Heroes. In a new memoir, the actress also says she used alcohol to numb undiagnosed postpartum depression, went to rehab twice for addiction issues and then had to rebuild her life around custody battles, abuse and loss.
Panettiere’s memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, is scheduled for release on May 19, and she says she decided to write it only after asking herself, “Am I ready to write a book about my life?” She was 8 months old when she signed with Wilhelmina Models and 11 months old when she booked her first commercial, a start that left her performing before she could remember choosing it. By her account, that early success made her a teenage people pleaser, and she now says, “I’ve always tried to be open and honest.”
The memoir, which she describes as brutally honest, reaches into some of the most personal parts of her life. Panettiere says Wladimir Klitschko demanded that she relinquish custody of their daughter, Kaya, after her rehab stints and made her leave Kaya in Europe. Kaya is now 11 years old. Panettiere also says Brian Hickerson subjected her to years of physical and emotional abuse, before she eventually landed in rehab a third time. Two years after emerging from treatment, she suffered what she calls an unimaginable loss.
Those details give the book its weight, but they also explain why Panettiere is publishing now. She has spoken publicly before about postpartum depression on Live With Kelly and Michael in 2015, yet she says this is the first time she has gone deep into the breakups, the addiction and the people around her who failed her. “I was terrified,” she says of opening up again, adding that there were “people creating stories that were false about me” and that she felt “a big target” was on her back. In her view, the memoir is a chance to answer those stories before they define the next chapter of her life.
She says the book is also for readers who are struggling now, not just fans looking back at celebrity headlines. “I hope that by sharing them in this book, that it helps people to overcome the obstacles they’re going through,” Panettiere says. The question after May 19 is not whether she has anything left to say; it is how many of the people who followed her story will finally hear it in her own voice.
