Days after Hayden Panettiere’s shed light on a traumatic encounter with a “very famous” and “undressed” man on a celebrity-filled yacht in the South of France when she was just 18, the actress has now hinted at a name.
The 36-year-old, currently promoting her new memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning, first spoke about the incident on Jay Shetty’s podcast On Purpose with Jay Shetty earlier this month. On Tuesday, May 18, Hayden detailed the incident, and in her newly released memoir, there are additional insights into what happened.
Panettiere described that the horrifying experience occurred during a trip to the South of France. She was invited onto a “super yacht” filled with several celebrities while travelling with a close friend, whom she refers to only with the pseudonym Stella McAmis.
Toward the end of the trip, the actress claims her friend approached her during dinner and asked her to come downstairs to meet someone. She led her through a narrow hallway into a private cabin where a “famous thirty-something British singer-songwriter” was lying shirtless in bed beneath the sheets.
“‘Oh my God,’ I thought. ‘Is he naked under there?’” she writes, claiming her trusted friend whispered to her, “I want you to get in bed with him. He has a huge d**k,” before leaving them alone in the room.
The actress writes that although her heart was “pounding” with fear, her “thoughts were a blur,” she followed the friend’s instructions out of habit from years of being “managed” by others as a child star.
However, once she was alone with the man, she realized she couldn’t let the situation go any further and she quickly decided to leave the situation.
“Look, I don’t know what she said to you, but this is not going to happen,” Panettiere recalled telling the singer before exiting the cabin and arranging to leave the yacht as soon as possible.
The Nashville and Heroes actress said the betrayal by her friend left her devastated.
“I wasn’t scared, but I felt like I’d been kicked in the face,” she writes in the memoir. “She’d confided in me, pampered me, and treated me like her best friend — then turned around and treated me like a call girl. I deserved better than that, by a lot.”
Was Diana Jenkins That Friend?
The “Heroes” alum kept her friend’s true identity a secret, which initially led fans to speculate it was the former “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Diana Jenkins.
But Diana shut down the rumors with a statement through a spokesperson on May 13.
“Diana has had to deal with false online rumors before, and sadly, this is just another example of that,” Jenkins’ spokesperson told TMZ. “So let me be 100 percent clear about this: It most certainly is not Diana, and anyone who claims it is her will be sued.”
Hayden Panettiere On Revealing the Musician’s Identity
Panettiere, meanwhile, has refused to publicly identify the musician involved because she feared legal repercussions and professional fallout.
“It was a bad look for them and [the people I didn’t name] were generally people within my industry. They’re people I could run into again. I didn’t want to put myself in that position. Things happened a long time ago, but it was to protect me and my company from being sued by some very pissed-off famous people,” she recently told The Hollywood Reporter.
