In her new memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, Hayden Panettiere recalls a yacht incident at 18 involving a “famous thirty-something British singer-songwriter,” leaving fans searching for who she meant.
Hayden Panettiere was 18 when she found herself on a celebrity-filled “super yacht” — and says the moment still makes her stomach turn.
In her new memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, released Tuesday, May 19, the Scream VI actress, now 36, describes a female friend urging her to “get in bed” with an older, famous man. Panettiere says she complied, even as she tried to make sense of what was happening.
“‘Oh my God,’ I thought. ‘Is he naked under there?’” she wrote in one excerpt. She says her trusted friend then whispered, “I want you to get in bed with him,” before leaving the room.
Panettiere says the betrayal hit as soon as the door clicked shut. “As soon as the door clicked close, my survival instinct kicked in,” she wrote, adding that she told the unnamed man: “Look … I don’t know what she said to you, but this is not going to happen.”
She also described the physical and emotional shock of the encounter. writing. “My body no longer felt like my own.” After leaving the room. she says she began packing to get off the yacht. describing what she felt as. “I felt like I’d been kicked in the face.” In her telling. the friend had “confided in me. pampered me and treated me like her best friend — then turned around and treated me like a call girl.”.
Panettiere never identified the man by name. Instead, she refers to him only as a “famous thirty-something British singer-songwriter.” That single detail has been enough to set fans wondering who she was describing.
The memoir’s release lands just one week after Panettiere appeared on Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” podcast to discuss the book and. specifically. the yacht incident. In the May 11 episode. Panettiere pointed to her age at the time. saying: “The fact that I was 18. even though I’d lived such a huge life and I thought I was oh so mature at 18 … scientifically. your frontal lobes don’t develop until we’re what. 25. 26?” She added that even if she felt she could make “healthy” and “safe” decisions. “I wasn’t capable of being fully aware of what was going on around me.”.
She also said the bedroom demand “took [her] by surprise.”
At the center of it all is the same unanswered question readers can’t shake: a “famous thirty-something British singer-songwriter,” left unnamed, yet described in a way that feels impossible to forget.
Hayden Panettiere This Is Me: A Reckoning Scream VI memoir super yacht British singer-songwriter Jay Shetty On Purpose podcast May 19 release