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Hayden Panettiere recalls a distressing moment when she was 18 years old in her recent memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which was released on Tuesday, May 19. Within the book, the Scream VI actress, now 36, recalled being on a celebrity-filled “super yacht,” when a girlfriend told her to “get in bed” with an older, famous man. The revelation prompted fans to wonder who Hayden was talking about.
“My body now not felt like my very own,” Hayden recalled in a single excerpt from her book, which also delves into her past with addiction, struggles living within the highlight, her relationships and family. “‘Oh my God,’ I believed. ‘Is he naked under there?’” she wrote, claiming that her trusted friend whispered to her, “I need you to get in bed with him,” before leaving the room.
Hayden only referred to the person as a “famous thirty-something British singer-songwriter.” She complied together with her friend’s demand by moving into bed.
“As soon because the door clicked close, my survival instinct kicked in,” the Heroes alum wrote within the book, before revealing what she told the unnamed man. “Look … I don’t know what she said to you, but this just isn’t going to occur.”
Upon leaving the room, Hayden began to pack up her things to depart the yacht.
“I felt like I’d been kicked within the face,” she wrote, referring to the betrayal she felt by the unnamed girlfriend. “She’d confided in me, pampered me and treated me like her best friend — then turned around and treated me like a call girl.”
The discharge of Hayden’s book comes one week after she appeared on Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” podcast to debate the memoir and, particularly, the yacht incident.
“The incontrovertible fact that I used to be 18, despite the fact that I’d lived such an enormous life and I believed I used to be oh so mature at 18 … scientifically, your frontal lobes don’t develop until we’re what, 25, 26?” Hayden identified within the May 11 episode. “So, despite the fact that I felt like I could make healthy decisions, protected decisions, I wasn’t able to being fully aware of what was occurring around me.”
She added that the bedroom demand from the girl “took [her] by surprise.”