Hayden Panettiere was offered up to Hollywood’s crushing machine by the very people who should have protected her
For all the sequels and remakes pumped out by Hollywood, the most overplayed storyline is the death or downfall of a once luminous child star — usually at the hands of addiction or mental illness.
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Hayden Panettiere is now sadly one of them. The troubled actress passed away over the weekend from an apparent overdose. She was only 36, just five days short of her next birthday.
In May, Panettiere released her heartbreaking memoir, “This is Me: A Reckoning,” where she laid bare her harrowing battles with addiction, domestic abuse and the postpartum depression that led her to give up custody of her daughter, Kaya, to her former partner, Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko.
The revelatory book was her story. But it was also an indictment of the industry that turned her into a household name.
Remember, Tinseltown is a place where its brightest stars not only make movies — they also export their values and morality and lecture us every chance they get.
But consider the source.
Over at Variety, writer Marlow Stern argued that it was Hollywood that “failed Panettiere.”
Indeed, the actress provided ample evidence to support this theory, writing that someone on her team gave her “happy pills” at the tender age of 15.
“They were to make me peppy during interviews,” Panettiere said. “I had no idea that this was not an appropriate thing, or what door that would open for me when it came to my addiction.”
She detailed the disgusting story of an older female friend hand-delivering her, a beautiful 18-year-old starlet, to a “very famous” older man lying in bed — presumably waiting for the next meal to be dropped into his lair.
Ever dutiful, Panettiere never named names.
The showbiz blob — with all its cretins and creatures, and its culture that treats child stars as commodities — is dangerous for impressionable young people.
But we must be honest. No sane person should allow their child to be raised by — or in — the industry.
The first line of defense against such predatory forces should be parents or primary care givers. They should also be the second and third line. Parents should be an impenetrable fortress for their children, no matter how precocious and strong-willed those offspring are.
In fact, that means they need parental guardrails even more.
But, over and over, many moms and dads abdicate their most meaningful role of protector.
Panettiere, a petite blonde with the million-dollar smile, was only 11 months old when she started earning a paycheck for work in commercials. She went on to act in a soap opera, movies like “Remember The Titans” and big network hits like “Heroes” and “Nashville.”
Super exciting right? Except that, by the age of 12, she said, spending her formative years inhabiting different characters led to an identity crisis.
“But who the heck was I? Like, just without this, who would I be without this?” she told podcaster Jay Shetty back in May.
She was sure of one thing. Her mother, Lesley Vogel, was her manager.
“She was my boss. That’s how I saw her,” Panettiere said, calling it a “tough pill to swallow.”
In that same interview, a fragile-sounding Panettiere detailed her estrangement from her mother.
At 19, she decided to end their professional relationship, hoping to forge a more normal one between mother and daughter.
Instead, her mother, according to Panettiere, walked away — informing her child, “You owe me.”
Maybe there’s another side to this story. But Hollywood has a habit of seducing parents with money and proximity to fame.
I think back to a 2023 interview with Corey Feldman, who is a walking billboard for screwed-up childhood actors. In it, he admired the nurturing family unit around his “Goonies” co-star Ke Huy Quan.
“He had a very sheltered childhood, he had great parents, a great family — they never let him out of their sight,” Feldman told Page Six. “If you went into his dressing room, there would be his mom, dad and grandma, the whole family, making wontons and cooking. There was always something cooking!”
It stood out to Feldman because such a scene was an anomaly in that town.
To me, Panettiere will always be the gridiron-loving tomboy in the iconic movie “Remember the Titans.”
She was only 10 years old, but she stole the show and held her own next to the great Denzel Washington.
The movie was made just before she began to struggle with her identity. It was the pinnacle of her happiness.
“You have no idea how many times in my life I have wished and prayed — if I had wished to go back to any time in my life, it would be going back to ‘Remember the Titans,’” she told Entertainment Tonight back in 2013.
It’s worth noting that she portrayed a daddy’s girl from a tight-knit family in a tight-knit community.
If only her life imitated art.
