Hayden Panettiere opens up about the darker side of growing up in Hollywood and her rise to fame in her candid new tell-all book.
In the memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, the Heroes actor recalled a particularly uncomfortable encounter with an unnamed actor at a Los Angeles party she attended when she was 19.
Panettiere, now 36, wrote that although the aforementioned party was at the apartment of her then-friend, she became uncomfortable when she realized she was surrounded by mostly men who were in their forties and fifties.
“I did my best to be friendly, but I was deeply uneasy,” she wrote. “These men seemed to be a little too comfortable together, like they knew something I didn’t. As a woman in a room dominated by men, it was also hard not to feel like I was being watched.”
Panettiere said that she decided to trust her gut instinct and leave, but was then approached by “an Oscar-winning actor.”
“‘Well, have a good night,’” she recalled the actor telling her. “Just be careful when you leave because someone spit their gum out somewhere, and I got some on my pants.”
She claims the star then told her: “‘Look here... ‘There’s a big wad of gum on my pants.’”
“I looked down and recoiled. This well-respected, award-winning actor’s testicles were hanging out from his unzipped fly,” she wrote.
Panettiere said that she quickly left the gathering and never spoke about the incident to anyone, including her friend who brought her to the party.
“Up to that moment, men in Hollywood had always been kind and respectful around me,” the Nashville star wrote in the book. “There may have been a peck on the lips here and an inappropriate comment there, but nothing had crossed a line.”
She continued: “ The gum on the pants, however, was a head-scratcher. It hadn’t hurt me and I was sure it was a drunken joke, but I’d never seen a grown man do something like that. I was shocked.”
In a similar instance mentioned later in her book, Panettiere recalled a disturbing situation on a boat with the same friend who had invited her to another party. She wrote that after inviting Panettiere on a yacht trip in France, her friend forced her to get into bed with a naked famous man.
This Is Me: A Reckoning is out now in bookstores.
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