The news of Hayden Panettiere’s passing came with a cruel irony to fans, who genuinely believed she was doing better in the last few months.
“I feel like I have a lot more life to live,” she said on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast in May.
Now, the devastating details of her final months are emerging. She “was reliving” all the traumas of her life, including the pressures of early fame, dependence on illicit substances, the breaking apart of her family, being physically harmed by her boyfriend, and giving up custody of her own daughter.
The news of Hayden Panettiere’s passing came with a cruel irony to fans, who genuinely believed she was doing better in the last few months
Trigger warning: this article contains graphic details that may be distressing to some.
Hayden Panettiere was found unresponsive by an “acquaintance” on Sunday at a South Carolina address, believed to be an Airbnb.
She had flown from LA with her on-and-off boyfriend Brian Hickerson over the weekend, a day before she lost her life at the age of 36.
Paramedics pronounced her lifeless just about 40 minutes after the acquaintance called 911, saying she was in “cardiac arrest” after a suspected overdose.
The actress, who would have turned 37 on Friday, seemed like she wanted to put her past behind her.
She bared her heart and soul in her memoir. She began appearing for interviews. And her last Instagram post captured her smiling away with friends.
“I finally feel like I have shaken off all this darkness and this negativity and that means that I’ve closed one door and another door is open, and I can feel it open, and I can feel all the exciting possibilities,” she told Jay Shetty on his podcast. “I feel like I have a lot more life to live.”
The actress seemed to have put the past behind her, but people who knew her said she was “struggling” and “really lonely”
The 911 Dispatch Call for Hayden Panettiere indicates an overdose caused cardiac arrest. pic.twitter.com/L2clVWpnVD
— SULLY (@SULLY10X) August 17, 2026
But insiders claimed she was still grappling with being shunned by Hollywood and was still troubled by her past struggles.
She was “struggling” and “really lonely,” said Justin Chatwin, who starred alongside her in her last movie Sleepwalker, released earlier this year.
Panettiere was only 11 months old when she first appeared in a commercial and became a lovable child actress with roles in One Life to Live, Guiding Light, and Malcolm in the Middle.
She was propelled to fame by her performance in the show Heroes, which led to another hit, Nashville, where she was cast as country singer Juliette Barnes.
In parallel to her early fame, the actress struggled with being hooked on substances, saying she took “happy pills” to seem more “peppy” in interviews.
“Hayden had mental health struggles and ad**ction issues going on, and they played a part in why her career didn’t take off again after Nashville,” an industry insider told the Daily Mail in the wake of her passing.
“When she was filming the show she had problems on the set, with execs and with her co-stars,” they added. “She sometimes came to work looking like she’d been out partying. She’d often have to spend extra time in make-up to get her looking camera-ready. She’d also sometimes be late for her call time.”
The former child star recalled hiding under her bed from her mother after an audition didn’t go well
Walt Disney Television Photo Archives/Walt Disney Television via Getty Images
After Nashville was wrapped up, “she was desperate” to land another show, but Hollywood saw her as “a bit of a problem,” the insider said.
Even though she was “considered a TV star,” she still struggled to get through auditions and was “on a downward swing recently due to lack of decent roles.”
While Hollywood began closing doors to Panettiere, another door was closing in her personal life between her and her mother, Lesley Vogel, an actress herself and the woman who managed her career from childhood.
Panettiere wrote in her memoir This is Me: A Reckoning, released in May, about a childhood experience where she froze and couldn’t perform during an audition for a Kodak advertisement at the age of four.
“[My mother] was so angry that my best option was to hide under my bed, her lower jaw migrated a few centimeters forward,” the actress wrote.
After years of pressure from her mother and feeling the burden of financially sustaining her family, Panettiere decided it was time to have another manager at the age of 19.
“You owe me,” her mother allegedly said to her at the time.
Vogel, who once described her daughter as someone who “does not want to be saved,” cut all communication with Panettiere last year, claiming their relationship “had broken down altogether.”
“After 20 years of trauma, chaos, addictions, accusations, I felt I had no other option but to choose no contact,” Vogel told the Daily Mail in May. “…There will forever be a lingering hope that she will find her own path to inner peace.”
For Panettiere, the estrangement from her mother was “worse than anyone knows,” another source said at the time.
When Panettiere became a mother herself, she struggled with postpartum depression and alcoholism following the birth of her daughter Kaya, now 11.
She gave up custody of her daughter to the child’s father and her ex-fiancé, Wladimir Klitschko, a Ukrainian heavyweight champion.
“Hayden’s been racked with guilt about not being the mother she wanted for her child and allowing her ex-fiancé to bring up Kaya,” one insider told the outlet following her passing. “She didn’t believe she was in the right mental state to be a good mother at the time. It bothered her greatly.”
“Hayden’s been racked with guilt about not being the mother she wanted for her child,” one insider said
Panettiere admitted in her memoir that she “felt nothing” in the labor room when she first laid eyes on her newborn baby. And four months after the grueling labor, she began drinking heavily,
“The first thing I’d thought of when I woke up was alcohol. Not my child, not my job, and not the rest of my life. I needed a drink to function — at 6 a.m.,” she wrote.
She eventually got help and hoped Kaya wouldn’t feel “abandoned” when she gave up custody.
“No mother could forget a single thing about the day she signed her child away,” she wrote. “Not being under the same roof with her every day has been the most gut-wrenching experience of my life, and it’s hard to describe the layers of emotion – including sadness, resentment, and anger – I’ve felt because of it.”
Hayden Panettiere in May of this year talking about Neutrogena ending her endorsement deal after she talked about her struggles with postpartum depression in 2015 pic.twitter.com/WOPWHX79RT
— Lunar Surfer (@TheLunarSurfer) August 17, 2026
Panettiere was also the victim of an ab*sive relationship with Brian Hickerson, another experience she was “reliving” in the last few months while promoting her memoir this year.
“A few months ago, she was reliving a lot of the bad stuff over and over again in interviews,” the insider said.
“It probably wasn’t healthy for her, and it’s doubtful it put her in a good place,” they added.
Hickerson had moved from South Carolina to LA to work in real estate and become an actor, and he began dating Panettiere in 2018.
He was reportedly involved in several physical altercations with the actress and served jail time for attacking her in 2021.
Panettiere had been “reliving” traumatic instances from her past, including being attacked by Brian Hickerson
In her memoir, the Ice Princess actress wrote about his violent behavior, including one occasion where he slammed her head into a wall. On another occasion, he “busts up my face so badly I don’t leave the house for weeks,” she wrote.
Even Hickerson has spoken about the incidents and recalled one occasion where he “was drunk.”
“Hayden was standing across the room, and I had a phone in my hand, and I said, ‘Uh, Hayden,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you 10 seconds to run as fast as you can before I throw it at you,’” he told TMZ in May.
The actress said she was always afraid of calling 911 because “then the public” would find out about the violence. Instead, she would stay in her car, sitting alone with a book and some water until her boyfriend calmed down.
In May 2026, Hayden Panettiere was photographed at an airport with Brian Hickerson, her on-again, off-again boyfriend.
She was using crutches for “nerve pain”.
Hickerson flew with Panettiere to South Carolina the day before she died. pic.twitter.com/eNcp1OUv6o
— Scott M (@EODWX5) August 17, 2026
Another relationship in Panettiere’s life that gave her much grief was her relationship with her brother, Jansen, also a child actor who, in 2023, unexpectedly lost his life at the age of 28.
Jansen also struggled with dependence on illicit substances and lost his life due to an enlarged heart, known as cardiomegaly, and aortic valve complications.
One insider said Panettiere felt immense guilt for the way Jansen’s life unraveled.
“She was still tortured by it. Hayden and Jansen were very close. When he had a problem, she’d be the first person he’d turn to,” the source told the outlet.
The Heroes star felt immense guilt for the way her brother Jansen’s life unraveled
Insiders said they weren’t aware of Panettiere getting tested for heart conditions after Jansen’s passing, but she was complaining of back pain the last year and “had nerve issues that caused trauma in her leg.”
“But that was a while ago,” and “not something you die from,” one said.
Panettiere had been photographed walking on crutches in recent months and, according to music video director Chris Applebaum, appeared to be in “debilitating” pain while attending a party at Paris Hilton’s house in LA a few months back.
“I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years, and she still had the crutches,” he told the outlet.
“I was surprised because she didn’t have a lot of mobility, and I really wanted to talk to her and catch up,” he added. “She said she was struggling with it.”
Justin Chatwin, who co-starred with Panettiere in the 2026 horror film Sleepwalker, spoke about the actress’s state of mind while filming what turned out to be her last project.
She played the role of a mother struggling with her daughter’s passing whilst also reeling from domestic violence.
“We hit it off great and it was an awesome shoot, but it was about domestic ab*se and it was subject matter that may have hit close to home, because she did mention it. She opened up to me about a lot of things,” he told People about their time filming in winter 2025.
Chatwin said he first met her in the “early years” but found her to be very different when they filmed Sleepwalker.
“I could tell she was struggling, and I was like, ‘I don’t think it’s this movie,’” he told the outlet. “There’s a handful of women that I’ve worked with that I really liked, and I really loved working with her, but I also know that she was really lonely.”
“This one really broke me,” one commented online in the wake of Panettiere’s passing
