Hayden Panettiere, 36, laid bare her battle with postpartum depression and alcoholism in her memoir months before her death.
The “Heroes” alum gave birth to daughter Kaya in December 2014 with then-fiancé Wladimir Klitschko, the Ukrainian heavyweight champion. In “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” released in May, Panettiere detailed a harrowing delivery that included 14 hours of labor, a three-hour surgery following her C-section, and seven blood transfusions after her blood failed to clot. She developed a uterine infection and ran a fever throughout the ordeal.
“She seemed like someone else’s baby, not mine,” Panettiere wrote in the memoir. “I had always heard that mothers feel an instant rush of love the moment they lay their eyes on their baby, but I felt nothing.”
“Kaya was just there, and now I had to figure out how to bond with her. It felt like an insurmountable task, and I was only on the first day,” she added.
The “Nashville” star described how alcohol quickly became her coping mechanism. She would drink a bottle of wine at night, then finish a mini bottle of Fireball first thing in the morning.
“The first thing I’d thought of when I woke up was alcohol. Not my child, not my job, and not the rest of my life. I needed a drink to function — at 6 a.m.,” she wrote.
When Kaya was four months old, between seasons three and four of “Nashville,” Panettiere entered treatment for the first time, leaving the baby with Klitschko. She described the facility as “hugely expensive” and devoted to one-on-one care, but ultimately too removed from reality.
“Trust me, it’s easier to detox and recover when you’re being treated like a queen, but it was too far from the real world to give me perspective,” she wrote.
She left the facility clean and sober, yet found no relief from her postpartum depression. “I also went home in denial. The idea that a little liquid could take me down or rule my life seemed impossible for a tough girl like me,” she penned.
As filming began on season four of “Nashville” in 2015, Panettiere turned to prescription medication for her insomnia and anxiety. She described a vicious cycle with the powerful drugs prescribed during treatment.
“If I didn’t take them, I couldn’t sleep. If I did, I slept too much,” she wrote. “I’d walked into rehab addicted to one substance, and I’d walked out completely dependent on something else.”
The situation spiraled further. She collapsed in a makeup chair and woke up in a hospital after a colleague found her unresponsive on a sofa. “Nashville” producers temporarily wrote her out of the show, and Neutrogena canceled her long-standing contract.
“It was yet another blow in a year that had given almost nothing else,” she wrote.
Panettiere eventually entered an eight-month rehab stint in Europe. During this period, she and Klitschko ended their relationship in 2018, and she made the decision to let Kaya live with her father in Ukraine.
“There’s been a common misconception that I just gave up my child, when that couldn’t be farther from the truth,” Panettiere said on the “On Purpose With Jay Shetty” podcast in May. “By the time I finally got healthy, I felt it would have been unfair of me and selfish of me to try to pull her away from this life that she had created.”
In the viral moment that defined her final public chapter, Panettiere was found dead in a Greenville, South Carolina, home by a friend on August 16. She had flown from Los Angeles to the Palmetto State the day before with on-again, off-again boyfriend Brian Hickerson. Authorities said there were no signs of foul play, and a cause of death had not been revealed at the time of reporting. Her father, Skip Panettiere, released a statement calling her “an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her.”
Panettiere had promoted the memoir extensively in what became her final press tour, including an interview with Gayle King for “CBS Mornings” where she discussed her traumatic birth experience. “I had a really rough birth to the point where I almost didn’t make it through,” she told King. “And then the postpartum depression started.”
She is survived by her daughter Kaya, who had been living in Ukraine with Klitschko since 2018.