In her new memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, Hayden Panettiere opens up about her romance with Milo Ventimiglia—how their age gap was handled during the Heroes press tour, what happened days before their breakup, and how she felt after he ended things.
Hayden Panettiere didn’t wait long to revisit Milo Ventimiglia—she did it in her new memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, out now, and with details that answer questions fans have had for years.
Panettiere wrote about her ex boyfriend, Milo Ventimiglia, including how their relationship began when she was 18 and he was 30 while they were working together on Heroes. She also directly addressed the age-gap scrutiny that followed them.
“The press scrutiny around our age difference had been relentless, and Milo was such a private person that I knew it wore on him,” she wrote.
In her account, she described what that attention looked like from the inside. “Milo was 30, and I had just turned 18,” Panettiere said, adding that something shifted during the Heroes press tour in Europe. “Maybe it was the sights or the food or the fact that everyone fell all over us. but I felt dizzy with joy. and it seemed so did Milo.” Over the course of the world tour. she wrote that their friendship turned into something flirtier—“just like that. we became a thing.”.
She said there “wasn’t much wrong with our dynamic” in her eyes.
The memoir also goes into what happened just days before their breakup. About a week before they ended things, Panettiere described a fight that began after an executive at NBC gave her a kiss at a party. Milo wanted to confront the unnamed individual, while Panettiere did not want him to do so.
She says he ended the relationship a week later, but that he quickly took it back after seeing how emotional she was.
After the split, Panettiere described how shaken she felt. “I wasn’t really in love with Milo. but our relationship was something stable in my life. and now he’d pulled the rug out from under me. ” she wrote. She added that in her “nineteen years. ” no one had broken up with her—“especially not after a silly misunderstanding like this (or whatever had happened the other day).”.
Eventually, they did end things for good. Even so, she noted there wasn’t bad blood on the set of their show afterward.
Panettiere also revealed there was a “point of contention” in their romance, though she didn’t detail it in the excerpt provided here.
Hayden Panettiere Milo Ventimiglia This Is Me: A Reckoning Heroes NBC executive kiss memoir celebrity news