Panettiere’s cause of death has not been revealed, but an autopsy confirmed trauma had not contributed. An investigation into the circumstances of the 36-year-old’s death is ongoing.
Hickerson served a jail sentence in 2020 after multiple domestic violence charges relating to his relationship with Panettiere.
His request to reduce the felonies to a misdemeanour was rejected last Thursday, Page Six reported.
Hayden Panettiere’s estranged mother has claimed boyfriend Brian Hickerson enabled her daughter. Photo / gotpap, Bauer-Griffin, GC Images
In her memoir This Is Me, released earlier this year, Panettiere wrote that she had wanted the 37-year-old to face enough jail time “to scare him”.
“I wanted Brian to be in jail just long enough to scare him, but not long enough where he’d become a worse person,” she said.
“I needed him to admit his wrongs and change because of them, but I didn’t want to traumatise him in an irreversible way.”
Panettiere was open about her struggles with postpartum depression and addiction in the book, as well as the pair’s troubled relationship.
Her mother Lesley Vogel spoke out against Hickerson after Panettiere’s death.
Vogel, who was estranged from Panettiere, told NBC News her daughter’s boyfriend had not been a positive influence.
“This person in her life that we have been trying to get rid of for quite some time was with her at her death, and that was Brian Hickerson.
“There is a lot of history in the past that Brian has enabled Hayden many times, and this is why her father and I had been concerned for a long time about him.”
Panettiere’s relationship with Vogel herself became strained when she was 18.
After being managed by her mother throughout her childhood in the spotlight, Panettiere told a podcast in May that she had become “everything but her child”.