Hayden Panettiere’s Memoir “This Is Me: A Reckoning” Claims Her Abuser “Had a Big Heart Full of Pain, Just Like Mine”
She still found room to forgive.
Hayden Panettiere was found unresponsive Sunday afternoon in Greenville, South Carolina, and pronounced dead at the scene. Her father, Skip Panettiere, confirmed the death and asked for privacy. Police say the preliminary investigation shows no signs of foul play, and the cause remains under investigation by the Greenville Police Department and coroner’s office.
Three months earlier, in her May memoir “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” she had publicly worked through one of the most painful chapters of her adult life: her relationship with Brian Hickerson, who pleaded no contest in 2021 to two felony counts of injuring her and served jail time.
In the book she describes the physical violence in stark detail, a face bashed so badly she stayed inside for weeks, threats, remote controls thrown, her head slammed into walls, while admitting she stayed longer than outsiders could understand because the loneliness felt worse than the abuse.
She writes that the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous finally allowed her to forgive him. “He also had a big heart full of pain, just like mine, and I had love for him despite what he’d done to me,” she writes, calling those feelings something she’d “probably spend my whole life working through.”
Asked by TMZ about her account after the book came out, Hickerson didn’t dispute it, saying, “It speaks for itself.”
The memoir also covers the decade that near
ly destroyed her: severe postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter Kaya, addiction to alcohol and Klonopin, losing custody, an eight-month stay in rehab that finally brought sobriety, and the 2023 death of her younger brother Jansen at 28.
She died five days before her 37th birthday.
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