Three Months Before She Died, Hayden Panettiere Told the New York Times, “I Just Can’t Believe I Made It Through Alive.”
This quote is even more heartbreaking now.
The New York Times profile in May ended like this: “Before we said goodbye, I asked Panettiere how she feels today, having relived her past triumphs and traumas, and put them on paper for the world to witness. ‘I just can’t believe I made it through alive,’ she said. She was still pacing.”
She’d paced through the whole interview in a black hoodie, processing while moving. The book she was there to talk about, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” had just come out from Grand Central. She’d worked on it for roughly two years and narrated the audiobook herself.
It walked through a decade of postpartum depression after a near-fatal hemorrhage during her daughter Kaya’s birth, opioid and alcohol addiction, rehab stints (including an eight-month stay around 2020), the abusive relationship with Brian Hickerson that left her housebound with facial injuries, and signing over custody of Kaya, now 12, to Wladimir Klitschko around 2018. It also covered her younger brother Jansen, who died in February 2023 at 28 from an enlarged heart. She said that grief didn’t heal, it evolved.
Around the same promotional stretch she told Jay Shetty and others she’d finally shaken “all of this darkness and this negativity” and had “a lot more life left to live.” She called herself a “brave lioness” and rattled off a laundry list of things she still wanted to do: producing, directing, a jewelry line, skincare.
She was found unresponsive around 1:50 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 16, at an apartment complex in Greenville, South Carolina, after an acquaintance called 911. Dispatch audio referenced by outlets discussed possible overdose and cardiac arrest; paramedics administered CPR and advanced cardiac life support (breathing tubes, heart rhythm tracking, medicines) unsuccessfully. She was pronounced dead at the scene at 2:32 p.m., five days short of her 37th birthday. Police said there were no signs of foul play. The Greenville County Coroner’s Office is co-leading the investigation, and an autopsy is pending.
Her father, Skip Panettiere, confirmed her death through her publicist. “She was an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her,” he said.
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