In her new memoir, Hayden Panettiere wrote about powerful, famous men who were total creeps to her as she grew up on screen.
(She began acting at an extremely young age, and made a name for herself as a teenage actress.)
This is Me: A Reckoning is out now, was already making waves and getting public denials before it hit the shelves.
One horror story in her book tells the tale of when an Oscar-winner exposed his balls to her when she was a teen.
She does not name the ‘well-respected’ Oscar winner
In her new book, This Is Me: A Reckoning, Hayden writes about yet another harrowing brush with a powerful man.
Just as in her narrow escape from an A-list actor on a yacht at 18, she does not name the man in question.
This time, she says, she was 19.
Hayden writes that she had been at a gathering, but was leaving — after growing uncomfortable after speaking to a group of men.
This is when, she says, a “well-respected” Oscar winning actor approached her.
Hayden was putting on a coat at the time.
In her book, she writes, the man complained about “gum” that was stuck to his pants.
When Hayden’s eyes looked to where he indicated, she did not see a piece of gum stuck to the fabric.
What she saw was worse.
Hayden’s gaze fell upon the actor’s scrotum, which he had apparently freed from the fly of his pants as some sort of appalling practical joke.
Actress Hayden Panettiere opens up to Jay Shetty about a TRAUMATIC experience where an industry “friend” set her up at 18 to end up alone in bed with a NAKED “very famous” man while stuck on a boat 😳👀
— Killa 🌺 (@KillaKreww) May 11, 2026
"She physically put me in the bed next to this undressed man who was very… pic.twitter.com/TbIscQg653
‘I was shocked’
She wasn’t laughing. She was repulsed.
Sexual misconduct, such as exposing your genitals to a teenager without consent, doesn’t have a “but your honor, I’m just a silly little guy, it was a prank” exception.
Upon refection, Hayden called the moment a “head-scratcher” for her.
“It hadn’t hurt me and I was sure it was a drunken joke,” Hayden writes.
“But,” she continues, “I’d never seen a grown man do something like that. I was shocked.”
At the time, Hayden opted to not describe the balls-baring “prank” to her friends.
She explains that “the moment had passed.” She also chalked it up to some people just not having good manners.
Sometimes, sexual misconduct like this is genuinely that — people who don’t know how to behave. Other times, it’s someone’s effort to test the waters to see how much they can get away with before escalating.
We won’t try to tell Hayden what she “should” have done, whether it was tell someone or tell the guy to eff off. She was in that situation. Reporting something like that, or even sharing what happened, is not always safe.
Hayden deserves to share her story. And though actual consequences for famous, powerful men are exceptionally rare, it sounds like there are some prominent faces in the entertainment industry who should thank their lucky stars that she didn’t name names in this book.