Hayden Panettiere Comes Out as Bisexual at 36: 'This Is the First Time I Got to Say It Out Loud'
Hayden Panettiere has spent most of her life performing — on screen, on magazine covers, and for a public that has watched her since before she could walk. On May 6, 2026, she chose to stop performing one particular role: the straight woman. In an exclusive interview with Us Weekly timed to the promotional launch of her memoir, the 36-year-old actress publicly came out as bisexual for the first time, saying she has dated women throughout her life but never felt safe enough — or free enough — to say so.
The disclosure is part of a sweeping personal reckoning documented in her upcoming book, This Is Me: A Reckoning by Hayden Panettiere, due out May 19, 2026. It covers decades of material — child stardom, addiction, an allegedly abusive relationship, postpartum depression, a custody battle — and her sexuality is one of the last pieces of a very complicated puzzle she's finally placing on the table.
According to Page Six, Panettiere described the experience of dating women as "scary" in a culture that scrutinizes celebrities' personal lives — particularly women who had been marketed as wholesome, girl-next-door figures. But at 36, after three stints in rehab and a relationship she described as "traumatic" and "brutal," she appears to have concluded that partial honesty is no longer an option.
What She Said — and Why It Took 36 Years
The quote that set social media alight was characteristically direct: "I am bisexual. I said it! This is the first time I got to say it out loud." But the backstory is more layered than a simple revelation. Panettiere told Us Weekly she was "much more into women even as a child than men," suggesting this isn't a recent discovery but a truth she has carried — and concealed — for decades.
Why the delay? Two reasons stand out. First, she feared being dismissed as following a "fad" — a real and well-documented phenomenon where bisexual women, particularly in entertainment, are accused of performing queerness for attention or cultural cachet rather than being genuinely bisexual. Second, she described the pressure to appear "perfect," a pressure that began not in adulthood but in infancy.
Panettiere was signed with Wilhelmina Models at eight months old. She booked her first commercial at eleven months. From before she could form memories, her image was a product being managed by adults. The expectation of perfection didn't emerge from Hollywood — it preceded her conscious participation in it. Coming out as bisexual, even in an era far more accepting than the one in which she rose to fame, still carried professional and personal risks she wasn't willing to absorb until now.
As MSN reports, she described it as "something about me I was never able to share with the world" — language that suggests not shame, but constraint. The world she inhabited didn't create the space.
The Memoir: A Reckoning With a Career That Started Before She Could Walk
The timing of this disclosure isn't accidental. This Is Me: A Reckoning is, by its own title, a formal accounting — an act of public truth-telling structured around all the things Panettiere was never allowed (or never allowed herself) to say during her years in the spotlight.
Most people know her from one of two roles: Claire Bennet, the cheerleader on NBC's Heroes, or Juliette Barnes, the country star on ABC's Nashville. Both roles cast her as a character navigating extraordinary pressure while maintaining a polished exterior. The parallels to her actual life are difficult to miss.
The memoir, according to the Us Magazine exclusive, covers the full arc: the manufactured perfection of child stardom, the moment at age 16 when a representative supplied her with non-prescribed "happy pills" from Mexico during Heroes press (a detail that speaks to how the industry treated teenage performers as commercial assets rather than developing humans), her relationship with Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko, the birth of their daughter Kaya, and the postpartum depression that followed — depression she reportedly managed with alcohol because it went undiagnosed.
She attended rehab three times. After the third stint, she suffered an unspecified major personal loss. The memoir appears to cover all of it.
The Hickerson Relationship and What 'Brutal' Actually Means
From 2018 to 2022, Panettiere was in a relationship with Brian Hickerson that she has described as "traumatic" and "brutal." She was open about this to a degree at the time — Hickerson was arrested multiple times on domestic violence charges — but the memoir appears to go significantly further in documenting her experience.
The context matters. Panettiere entered that relationship in the aftermath of real instability: a split from Klitschko, a custody situation involving Kaya, and her struggles with postpartum depression and alcohol. Hickerson's abuse, by her account, compounded trauma that was already layered and severe. Coming out on the other side of that relationship — and three rehab stints — and choosing to write a book called A Reckoning is a deliberate act of reclaiming narrative authority.
WJLA reports that Panettiere spoke extensively about this period in her life as part of the memoir's promotional rollout, framing the Hickerson years as one piece of a larger pattern of circumstances where other people held control over her story, her body, or her safety.
Kaya, Klitschko, and the Custody Battle She Didn't Expect
Panettiere shares daughter Kaya, now 11, with Wladimir Klitschko, with whom she was engaged. The split was complicated not just emotionally but geographically and legally: Klitschko reportedly demanded she relinquish custody of Kaya and leave her daughter in Europe. For a mother already contending with undiagnosed postpartum depression and substance use, that demand — and the broader custody dynamic — represented another arena in which her agency was being stripped away.
The postpartum depression piece is particularly significant. Panettiere became one of the more visible public figures to discuss PPD when she sought treatment in 2015, before it was widely discussed in mainstream coverage. At the time, many fans and media outlets treated it as a celebrity health story rather than a systemic issue in women's healthcare. In retrospect, her openness then was a preview of the larger reckoning underway now.
What Panettiere's Coming Out Means — and Why It's Different From the Celebrity Norm
Celebrity coming-out stories have become more common in recent years, and some have been criticized as carefully managed PR moves timed to album releases or film premieres. Panettiere's disclosure, while timed to her memoir, doesn't fit that mold neatly — because the memoir itself isn't a standard celebrity brand exercise. It's a book that contains admissions about prescription pill abuse at 16, multiple rehabs, domestic violence, and custody loss. No PR team would design this rollout as a profile-builder. It reads, instead, like someone who decided the truth was worth more than the image.
Her specific reasoning for the delay also sets this apart. She didn't cite fear of industry discrimination as a primary factor. She cited the pressure to seem "perfect" and the fear of being dismissed as following a "fad" — concerns specific to bisexual women, who face distinct forms of erasure and skepticism that gay men and lesbians often don't encounter in the same way. Bisexual people are frequently told their identity isn't real, isn't stable, or is performed for an audience. Panettiere naming that phenomenon explicitly is more sophisticated than most celebrity coming-out statements.
As MSN notes, she framed the revelation with the phrase "better late than never" — acknowledging the delay without apologizing for it. That's a measured, self-aware stance from someone who has clearly done the internal work before going public.
The Bigger Picture: Child Stardom and Its Long Receipts
Panettiere's story belongs to a well-documented tradition of child performers who absorb industry pressures before they have the psychological tools to process them. The detail about being given non-prescribed pills at 16 by a representative is, by any reasonable standard, abuse — an adult in a position of trust supplying a minor with mood-altering substances to keep her functional during press obligations. The fact that this apparently went unremarked upon at the time says something about the era and the industry.
She is not the first to describe this experience, and she won't be the last. But writing a memoir that names it directly — naming the pills, naming the relationship, naming the sexuality, naming the custody battle — is a contribution to a growing body of testimony from former child performers that the industry has structural problems, not just individual bad actors.
For readers interested in the entertainment industry's accountability reckoning more broadly, the kinds of systemic dynamics Panettiere describes aren't limited to any one story — they show up across the industry in ways that continue to generate headlines.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Hayden Panettiere come out as bisexual?
Panettiere publicly came out as bisexual on May 6, 2026, in an exclusive interview with Us Weekly tied to the promotional launch of her upcoming memoir. She stated it was "the first time I got to say it out loud," indicating she had not previously disclosed her bisexuality publicly.
What is Hayden Panettiere's memoir about?
This Is Me: A Reckoning releases May 19, 2026, and covers the full scope of her life: modeling and acting work that began before her first birthday, being given non-prescribed pills at age 16 by a representative, her relationship with Wladimir Klitschko and their daughter Kaya, her struggle with postpartum depression and alcohol, three rehab stints, an allegedly abusive relationship with Brian Hickerson from 2018 to 2022, a major personal loss, and her bisexuality.
Does Hayden Panettiere have children?
Yes. She has one daughter, Kaya, now 11 years old, with former fiancé Wladimir Klitschko. The custody arrangement following their split was contentious — Klitschko reportedly demanded she leave Kaya in Europe — and figures into the memoir's account of her most difficult years.
Why did Hayden Panettiere wait so long to come out?
She has cited two main reasons: fear of being seen as following a "fad" (a form of bisexual erasure where women's same-sex attraction is dismissed as performative or trendy), and the pervasive industry pressure to appear "perfect" that she internalized from her earliest years in entertainment. These are genuine and specific concerns, not vague deflections.
Who is Brian Hickerson?
Brian Hickerson is a man Panettiere dated from 2018 to 2022. He was arrested multiple times on domestic violence charges during that period. Panettiere has described the relationship as "traumatic" and "brutal" and addresses it in her memoir as part of a broader account of circumstances where she lacked control over her own safety and story.
What Comes Next
The memoir drops May 19, 2026, and it will almost certainly generate another wave of coverage — particularly around the specifics she's held back from the promotional interviews. Coming-out disclosures ahead of memoir releases often function as the most digestible headline from a book full of more complicated material. In Panettiere's case, the bisexuality revelation is significant on its own terms, but it exists alongside accounts of childhood exploitation, addiction, domestic violence, and custody loss that are, if anything, harder to process.
What Panettiere appears to be doing — deliberately and at some personal cost — is refusing to let any single piece of her story be extracted and consumed in isolation. By releasing everything at once, she's forcing a more complete picture of who she is and what she's survived. Whether the media ecosystem is capable of engaging with that complexity, rather than reducing her to a single headline, remains to be seen.
At 36, after a lifetime of being other people's product, Hayden Panettiere is finally authoring herself. This Is Me: A Reckoning is the formal record. The rest, she seems to be saying, is no one's business but hers.
