Hayden Panettiere has opened up about an incident from when she was 18, saying someone she believed she could rely on put her “in danger”.
Now 36, Panettiere has spent most of her life in the public eye. She began acting as a small child, appearing on ABC’s One Life to Live in 1994 when she was five years old.
As her career accelerated through her teens, she built an extensive résumé before even reaching adulthood, appearing across film and television in projects such as Racing Stripes, Ice Princess, Disney’s A Bug’s Life, Malcolm in the Middle — which has recently been revived for a four-part special — and Law & Order.
Reflecting on that early success, Panettiere said that when she turned 18 she felt far older than she actually was, describing the mindset in a new conversation with Jay Shetty on his On Purpose Podcast.
“The fact that I was 18, even though I’d lived such a huge life and I thought I was oh so mature at 18,” the Nashville star said. “Scientifically, your frontal lobes don’t develop until we’re what, 25, 26?”
She added that, despite feeling confident in her judgment at the time, she now recognizes she didn’t fully grasp the bigger picture in certain situations.
Panettiere further noted: “So, even though I felt like I could make healthy decisions, safe decisions, I wasn’t capable of being fully aware of what was going on around me.”
During the interview, she also described a moment that changed how she viewed her own safety, saying her perspective shifted after she found herself in what she believed was a dangerous situation.
“It wasn’t until I found myself in predicaments that I realized like it it my my perspective completely shifted and I realized that I was in danger,” she told Shetty. “But by the time I’d realized I was in danger, I was quite literally out to sea.”
Panettiere said the incident happened while she was on a boat, and involved someone she viewed as a “protector.” She recalled being led into a room and said the person “physically put me in the bed next to this this undressed man who was very famous.”
The actress did not identify the man, but described him as sitting there waiting, relaxed, with his hands positioned behind his head.
“My hair stood on end and I became ferocious,” Panettiere went on to say about what happened next. “I was like, this is not happening. But I had nowhere to hide.”
She said she ran from the room and eventually managed to find a place to conceal herself elsewhere on the boat.
The Heroes star continued: “There was no jumping off and swimming away. […] I realized that there was nobody who was going to be empathetic to my situation – that this was nothing new to them.”
Panettiere’s appearance on Shetty’s show comes as she prepares to publish her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which is due for release on May 19.