Lesley Vogel broke down in tears in her first TV appearance since her daughter Hayden Panettiere’s death.
Panettiere’s estranged mother appeared on Good Morning America for a sit-down interview just days after her TV star daughter died suddenly at age 36 on August 16. Vogel denounced her critics, like CBS Mornings anchor Gayle King, who have questioned her reaction to her daughter’s death.
“I would say to the haters out there, you don’t have a right to tell me how I mourn the loss of my second child. That’s my domain,” she said, adding that she feels “numb.”
Vogel previously said in a statement that Panettiere was an “amazingly talented person” who had “sadly” gone down the “wrong path.”
Panettiere’s sudden death comes a few years after her younger brother, Jansen Panettiere, died at age 28 from an undiagnosed enlarged heart.
“I just couldn’t feel anything,” Vogel, 70, said of her daughter’s death. “I still am not grasping this is real. It doesn’t feel real. My mind tells me it’s not all the time. It’s gonna be a process,” she continued, stepping away as she broke down in tears. “I need a minute, guys,” she told the show.
Vogel also spoke out against Panettiere’s ex-boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, who previously faced charges of physically abusing the Heroes star. Hickerson was with Panettiere at an Airbnb in South Carolina when she died.
Vogel said that Panettiere “couldn’t keep those demons away” after she relinquished custody of her daughter to her ex-partner Wladimir Klitschko in 2018. “I think she struggled and... Brian came into her life,” she said, adding that her daughter was “vulnerable” at the time.
“She knew that Brian was toxic. She knew she had to get him out of her life,” Vogel said.
Panettiere and Hickerson have had an on-again-off-again relationship for years. Vogel claims that Hickerson “reeled” her daughter back in, and that Panettiere called her mother last year to say, “I’m going to be with the person I love.”
“I just lost it. I lost it,” she added. “I could not believe that she had gone that far back, that he had been successful in reeling her back in with all of the things he had done to her.”
Panettiere and her estranged mother have had a complicated past. In her final months, the pair were no longer speaking.
As a child star, Vogel managed Panettiere, a former daytime television soap opera actress. They parted ways once Panettiere joined Heroes as a main cast member. In her memoir, Panettiere described a painful interaction when she had to fire her manager, and Vogel replied, “You owe me.”
Vogel denied this story in her interview. “I remember being in her trailer and literally saying nothing. I was I knew that day would come. It’s not that I didn’t expect it, but it was very short, very brief conversation and then she turned and went to set.”
Ultimately, Panettiere’s mother said she wants “Hayden to be remembered for the talented, beautiful, outgoing, intelligent woman she really was.”
“But I also want people to understand that it is my belief that she was suffering,” she said. “Now, that doesn’t make sense. Because when you look at a beautiful career who’s got an incredible career, even though it had its ups and downs, but you look at that big picture and you go, ‘Why would you be suffering?’ People don’t understand that you can have all of this, but that doesn’t mean that’s what’s going on [inside] matches.”
