Brian Hickerson’s bid to reduce his felony domestic violence charges was denied by a judge just three days before Hayden Panettiere died.
Judge Olivia Rosales denied the motion last Thursday, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office confirmed Monday. Hickerson, who had pleaded no contest in April 2021 to two felony counts of injuring a spouse or girlfriend, sought to have the charges reduced to a misdemeanor and expunged from his record. The prosecution objected to both motions at an Aug. 13 hearing, and the court rejected them in documents obtained by Page Six. This marked the second time his request had been denied — he made an identical petition in July 2025 that also failed.
In his petition for dismissal, Hickerson noted that he had fulfilled the conditions of his probation. He was sentenced in 2021 to 45 days in county jail, four years of formal probation, 52 mandatory domestic violence classes and a five-year restraining order. He served 33 days in LA Men’s Central Jail after receiving credit for 12 days previously served.
Panettiere, 36, and Hickerson dated on and off starting in 2018. The relationship was tumultuous and marred by multiple domestic violence incidents and arrests. Panettiere candidly wrote about suffering physical abuse in her memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” published in May 2026. She later admitted she had a hard time cutting off contact with Hickerson.
“Getting an abusive person out of your life is like trying to rip a weed out that is so entangled into your life, and every time you pull it out another weed pops back up and you’re like, I thought I killed this,” she said in May.
She added, “They always manage to find a way to slither back in, even if you’re an incredibly strong-willed person. What happened in Wyoming helped push me in the right direction, but it still took me a long time. I still struggled to fully put a kibosh to it for a while.”
That same month, Hickerson admitted to one particularly harrowing incident he had asked Panettiere not to include in her book, though she included it anyway.
“There’s a story where I was drunk, right? Hayden was standing across the room and I had a phone in my hand and I said, ‘Hayden, I’ll give you 10 seconds to run as fast as you can before I throw it at you,'” he recalled in an interview with TMZ.
“Who wants to read something about themselves, right?” He admitted about reading her memoir. “But you gotta be vulnerable and I did it. I did it, so.”
He also recalled of their time together, “I went into such a dark place, man, drugs, alcohol. Good God, almighty, she’s five foot two on paper, four foot 11 in real life. I mean, come on.”
In the viral moment that first exposed the abuse, cops alleged Hickerson punched Panettiere “with a closed fist on the right side of her face” at a private residence in Jackson, Wyoming, on Valentine’s Day in 2020. The charges stemmed from a series of abusive incidents between May 2019 and January 2020. Hickerson was arrested multiple times during the course of the relationship. He was charged with felony domestic violence in 2019 in a case that was dismissed, then arrested again in 2020 after another domestic violence altercation against Panettiere.
Panettiere died after an apparent overdose, according to 911 dispatch audio obtained by Page Six. Emergency responders attempted to resuscitate her at an apartment complex in Greenville, South Carolina, with advanced cardiac life support and chest compressions, but she was pronounced dead at 2:32 p.m. On Sunday, Aug. 16. Narcan, a medicine typically used to reverse opioid overdoses, was found at the scene, reports said. The Greenville County Coroner’s Office completed an autopsy Monday and found no signs of trauma that would have contributed to her death. The cause and manner of death remain pending further investigation.
Hickerson deleted his Instagram account Monday after receiving backlash from fans commenting on his posts following Panettiere’s death.