Hayden Panettiere Breaks Silence on Domestic Violence: Why She Hid the Truth

When you’ve built an entire identity around resilience and strength, admitting vulnerability feels like a betrayal of yourself. That’s the raw reality actress Hayden Panettiere, 36, is grappling with as she prepares to release her memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning on Tuesday, May 19. In an exclusive interview with Us Weekly, she opens up about her past relationship with Brian Hickerson, 37, and why she kept the domestic violence incidents hidden from nearly everyone who mattered most to her.

Panettiere first got involved with Hickerson in 2018. By 2019, he was arrested following an alleged domestic violence incident, charged with felony domestic violence, and ordered to stay away from her. But the relationship didn’t end there—it continued until 2020, when a second domestic violence altercation led to another arrest. This time, Hickerson served 33 days in prison, was placed on four years probation, and ordered to pay a $500 fine. The charges from the first incident were dropped.

What makes her story particularly compelling isn’t just what happened, but her reasoning for keeping it quiet. Panettiere describes the situation as humiliating and embarrassing—so much so that she didn’t want to burden her loved ones with the emotional weight of it. I’m a pack animal. I need to be surrounded by people, she tells Us, yet paradoxically, she isolated herself rather than reach out. The fear of judgment, or perhaps of being pitied for something that contradicted her self-perception, made silence feel safer than confession. It’s a painful irony that many survivors recognize: the very support system we need becomes the audience we most dread.

In her memoir, Panettiere describes the experience of breaking free as like trying to rip a weed out that is so entangled into your life. Every time you think you’ve pulled it out, another weed pops back up. Getting an abusive person out of your life isn’t a one-and-done affair—it’s messy, nonlinear, and can happen to anyone, even incredibly strong-willed people. She struggled to fully put a kibosh on the relationship for a long time, which speaks to a truth that domestic violence experts have long emphasized: leaving an abusive situation is one of the most dangerous times for a victim, and the psychological grip can extend far beyond the physical relationship.

Writing about the trauma in her upcoming memoir proved cathartic for Panettiere. Rereading a journal entry from the time of the alleged incident, she found that she’d finally located the words to describe it properly. That kind of clarity—moving from confusion and shame to articulation—can be transformative, not just for the person sharing the story, but for readers who may be struggling with similar circumstances and don’t yet have the language to name what’s happening to them.

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