Hayden Panettiere Reveals Why the Brian Hickerson Domestic Violence Incident Embarrassed Her

Hayden Panettiere is finally saying the quiet part out loud about her past with ex Brian Hickerson. It is raw, it is uncomfortable, and she knows exactly how strange that sounds coming from someone who has spent years playing tough, unflappable characters on screen.

What she is saying now

In a new cover story tied to her upcoming memoir, the 36-year-old 'Heroes' alum calls the relationship an embarrassing chapter she never thought she would live through, let alone talk about. She says even the people who know her best were stunned that it happened at all.

How it unfolded

• 2018: Panettiere starts dating Brian Hickerson, now 37.
• 2019: He is arrested after an alleged domestic violence incident involving Panettiere. He is charged with felony domestic violence and ordered to stay away from her.
• Later, those 2019 charges are dropped.
• 2020: Hickerson is arrested again after another domestic violence incident with Panettiere. He serves 33 days in jail, gets four years of probation, and is fined $500.
• After that second arrest, Panettiere ends the relationship for good — though she admits it was not a clean break and took time to fully stick.

Why she kept it quiet

She says she tried to carry most of it alone. Not because she wanted to, but because she did not want to pull her family — including her parents and her brother Jansen, who died in 2023 — into something that would wreck them emotionally. The whole thing felt humiliating. She wanted as few people as possible to know, even though she is someone who usually needs a crowd around her to stay grounded. Without a solid circle, she says she feels lost, struggles to function, and depression starts to take over.

'Getting an abusive person out of your life is like trying to rip out a weed that has tangled itself into everything. You think you have killed it, and then it finds a way to slither back in — even if you are stubbornly strong-willed.'

Writing it down hurt, but helped

Panettiere digs into all of this in her memoir, 'This Is Me: A Reckoning.' She calls the process brutal, traumatic, and emotional — and says she obsessed over getting the wording right because it mattered that much. One turning point came when she reread a journal entry she wrote during the worst of it; that helped her finally explain the experience in a way that felt true, and getting it out felt powerful.

The book

'This Is Me: A Reckoning' is set to be released Tuesday, May 19.

If you need help

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for confidential support.