Hayden Panettiere’s estranged mother is laying blame on the star’s abusive boyfriend Brian Hickerson for her sudden death at 36.
Lesley Vogel, herself an actress who once managed her daughter’s career until they parted ways during Panettiere’s tenure on Heroes, released a statement on Tuesday slamming Hickerson, 37, for “enabling” her daughter.
“This person in her life that we have been trying to get rid of for quite some time was with her at her death, and that was Brian Hickerson,” Vogel, 70, told NBC News. Panettiere documented years of physical and emotional abuse in her book This Is Me: A Reckoning, which Hickerson has not denied.
The actress, who suffered from substance abuse, traveled with Hickerson to his home state of South Carolina last week, just a day before she was found dead at a luxury loft complex. The cause of her death has not been released, although dispatch could be heard discussing a “cardiac arrest” and “overdose” according to 911 audio obtained by People.
“There is a lot of history in the past that Brian has enabled Hayden many times, and this is why her father and I had been concerned for a long time about him,” Vogel added of Hickerson.
The actress also revealed in her book that she was regularly handed “happy pills” by her “team” ahead of red carpet events, which she said was a “gateway drug” to harder drugs. Physical injuries from her childhood performances and emotional scars from life in the spotlight made them harder to shake, she explained—as did abuse at the hands of Hickerson, who was arrested several times for battering her. His request to have his felony convictions removed for the abuse was denied just days before the actress died in his company.
“I think Hayden was an amazingly talented person in so many departments, and I think young people who grow up in the entertainment industry,” Vogel said on Tuesday. “It is a struggle, and it’s a very challenging industry, and it’s not unusual for them to sadly find the wrong path.”
Her mother’s comments come after Panettiere accused her of treating the young actress like a meal ticket during her rapid rise to fame, and her declaration that her mother “didn’t care to have a relationship with me.”
She said on the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast that it was a “tough pill to swallow,” and added, “Everything was business…I became the confidant and the assistant and the therapist and the shoulder to cry on and everything but her child.”
When the actress fired her mother as her manager, she said her mother told her, “You owe me.”
She also discussed guilt she felt following her mother’s comments before the death of her younger brother Jansen Panettiere, at age 28 in 2023. He died from heart valve complications. “You’re the reason why I’m missing my son growing up,” the actress recalled Vogel telling her. “That was a punch in the gut.”
Panettiere was first romantically linked to Hickerson in 2018, after which he was arrested in 2019 and 2020 for domestic violence against her. Panettiere filed for a restraining order in 2020, and Hickerson pleaded no contest to the charges against him the following year. He was sentenced to 45 days in county jail and four years of formal probation.
In 2022, Panettiere told People she had welcomed Hickerson back into her life, saying, “He’s gone to treatment and done his time. And I’m trying to live in a place of forgiveness.”
