Actress Hayden Panettiere has opened up for the first time about how a “well-respected” actor cornered her when she was a teenager at a Hollywood party and exposed himself.
In the book This Is Me: A Reckoning out Tuesday, Panettiere writes that she was 19 years old when she attending the party with a friend. As she was putting on her coat and preparing to leave, a man she described as an “Oscar-winning actor and director” approached her and said he’d had “gum” stuck to his pants, she writes. “I looked down and recoiled,” she adds.
“This well-respected, award-winning actor’s testicles were hanging out from his unzipped fly,” she wrote, according to People.
She also describes her confusion, followed by “shock,” in the aftermath. “The gum on the pants, however, was a head-scratcher,” she writes. “It hadn’t hurt me, and I was sure it was a drunken joke, but I’d never seen a grown man do something like that.”
Panettiere, who rose to fame as a child for her performances in soap operas, including ABC’s One Life to Live and CBS’ Guiding Light, is also known for her childhood roles in Remember the Titans, Tiger Cruise, and Ice Princess. Later, she starred in teen films Bring It On: All or Nothing and Scream 4, before landing her breakout role in NBC’s Heroes and starring as country music star Juliette Barnes in ABC’s Nashville.
The actress doesn’t name the actor who made the offense, nor does she name the other “very famous” men who pressured her sexually as a teen in other anecdotes in the book. She let The Hollywood Reporter in on her reasoning behind the choice on Thursday. “They’re people I could run into again,” she said. “I didn’t want to put myself in that position. Things happened a long time ago, but it was to protect me and my company from being sued by some very pissed-off famous people.”
Elsewhere in the book, the Heroes star recalls being lured into a room on a boat, occupied by a different celebrity man, and being instructed by a “friend” to perform sexual acts when she was 18. “She physically put me in the bed next to this undressed man who was very famous,” Panettiere said, recounting the incident on the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast. The man, she said, reacted to her presence “like this was just an average day for him.”
Ultimately, she escaped—“I was like, ‘This is not happening,’” she recalled—but she reflected on how there was no one on the boat to turn to for help. “I had nowhere to hide. I bolted. I hid wherever I could think to hide on a boat. There was no jumping off and swimming away,” she said.
The actress added that she thought she was mature enough to handle the experiences thrown at her at the time, but her perspective has since shifted. “Even though I felt I could make healthy decisions, safe decisions [at that age], I wasn’t capable of being fully aware of what was going on around me,” she said.
“It wasn’t until I found myself in predicaments that I realized, my perspective completely shifted, and I realized I was in danger. By the time I realized I was in danger, I was quite literally out to sea.”
