Hayden Panettiere recalls a distressing moment when she was 18 years old in her new memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which was released on Tuesday, May 19. In the book, the Scream VI actress, now 36, recalled being on a celebrity-filled “super yacht,” when a female friend told her to “get in bed” with an older, famous man. The revelation prompted fans to wonder who Hayden was talking about.
“My body no longer felt like my own,” Hayden recalled in one excerpt from her book, which also delves into her past with addiction, struggles living in the spotlight, her relationships and family. “‘Oh my God,’ I thought. ‘Is he naked under there?’” she wrote, claiming that her trusted friend whispered to her, “I want you to get in bed with him,” before leaving the room.
Hayden only referred to the man as a “famous thirty-something British singer-songwriter.” She complied with her friend’s demand by getting into bed.
“As soon as the door clicked close, my survival instinct kicked in,” the Heroes alum wrote in the book, before revealing what she told the unnamed man. “Look … I don’t know what she said to you, but this is not going to happen.”
Upon leaving the room, Hayden began to pack up her things to leave the yacht.
“I felt like I’d been kicked in the face,” she wrote, referring to the betrayal she felt by the unnamed female friend. “She’d confided in me, pampered me and treated me like her best friend — then turned around and treated me like a call girl.”
The release of Hayden’s book comes one week after she appeared on Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” podcast to discuss the memoir and, particularly, the yacht incident.
“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?” Hayden pointed out in the May 11 episode. “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.”
She added that the bedroom demand from the woman “took [her] by surprise.”
