Actress Hayden Panettiere was 18 when, while out on a boat with someone she trusted, she was placed in a bed with an undressed, “very famous man” and told to perform sexual acts.
She ran, but had no other recourse than to hide because “I was literally out at sea,” the 36-year-old Heroes star told Jay Shetty on Monday’s edition of his eponymous podcast, On Purpose. She was on air ahead of the May 19 release of her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning.
“I had been having a great time. There was no hint of anything like that happening,” Panettiere said of the moment the supposed friend marched her downstairs on the party boat to a “very small room” and “physically put me in the bed” next to the man, who was supine with his arms folded behind his head “like this was an average day for him.”
The betrayal “took me by surprise,” Panettiere said. “I was in shock.”
She now sees that she was much more vulnerable back then than she had realised. Panettiere had been in show business for virtually her entire childhood, but she still had a lot to learn.
“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,” said Panettiere, who recently came out as bisexual, “scientifically, your frontal lobes don’t develop until we’re what, 25, 26? 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.”
By the time her perception shifted, it was often once she was in too deep. That’s what happened on the boat.
“There was no jumping off and swimming away, and there was nobody who was going to be empathetic to my position,” Panettiere said. “I realised that this was nothing new to them.”
She went into self-protection mode, invoking “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.’ " – New York Daily News/Tribune News Service
