Hayden Panettiere has detailed a shocking moment early in her career when she was allegedly coerced into a bed with an “undressed” and “very famous” man.
The Heroes actress opened up about the alleged encounter on the podcast, On Purpose with Jay Shetty, revealing she was just 18 years old at the time.
The 36-year-old first recalled the ordeal in her upcoming memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning, but host Jay Shetty asked her to share more details on the incident that left the star shaken.
“You write about a moment in your career where a friend of yours takes you onto a boat,” Shetty asked on the episode. “You’re led to a room which has an older man in it and then basically told to perform sexual acts.”
Struggling to hold back tears, Panettiere said she was on a night out with friends on a boat at the time and naively didn’t realise she had put herself in a dangerous and vulnerable situation.
“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 … scientifically, your frontal lobes don’t develop until we’re what, 25, 26?” she said.
“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.”
Panettiere claimed somebody she had “grown to trust” and who she saw as a “protector” then coaxed her down the stairs into a “very small” room.
“I mean that moment shook me and was shocking,” she began. “She physically put me in the bed next to this undressed man who was very famous.”
The Nashville star added that the man – whose identity she did not reveal – acted “like this was just an average day for him” as he lay on the bed with his arms folded behind his head.
With her vice shaky, Panettiere said she went into survival mode and tapped into “that lion in me, that fire in me”.
“My hair stood on end and I became ferocious,” she said. “I was like, ‘This is not happening.’”
“I mean that moment shook me and was shocking,” she began. “She physically put me in the bed next to this undressed man who was very famous.”
The Nashville star added that the man – whose identity she did not reveal – acted “like this was just an average day for him” as he lay on the bed with his arms folded behind his head.
With her vice shaky, Panettiere said she went into survival mode and tapped into “that lion in me, that fire in me”.
“My hair stood on end and I became ferocious,” she said. “I was like, ‘This is not happening.’”
At that point, the actress said they were “quite literally out to sea”, so there was no escaping.
“I had nowhere to hide. And I bolted and I hid wherever I could think of to hide on a boat,” she recalled.
“There was no jumping off and swimming away. And I realised that there was nobody who was going to be empathetic to my situation, that this was nothing new to them.”
Panettiere said it was a “horrifying event” to go through at 18, but the “betrayal” she felt from her so-called friend hurt more.
“[It’s] disappointing when somebody lets you down like that,” she said. “And I’d been let down so much before and that when you really find somebody that you trust, like you hold on to them for dear life and you feel so lucky. So to be betrayed like that is just an awful feeling.”
The podcast comes just days after Panettiere came out as bisexual in another interview promoting her forthcoming tell-all.
Speaking freely to Us Weekly, the actress said it has sadly taken her until now to feel comfortable to talk about her sexuality publicly. She admitted a “fear of not being perfect” had stopped her from coming out in the past, as well as concerns about backlash from the public and even her own team.
But she now was finally “comfortable to confidently say that, yes, I am bisexual. I said it!”
“It was just never the right time, and it was a very difficult topic to articulate properly … it’s sad that I had to wait till I was 36 years old to share that part of me, but better late than never, right?” she told the outlet.
Panettiere began dating her Heroes co-star Milo Ventimiglia in 2007, when she was 18 and he was 30. Two years later she entered into a relationship with boxing champ Wladimir Klitschko, but after an on-off relationship, they split for good in 2018.
The pair share a daughter together, Kaya, who is now 11.