Actress Hayden Panettiere is opening up about a deeply personal part of her life and why it took until now to share it. In her upcoming memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, out May 19, the Nashville star reveals she is bisexual and explains why she waited until age 36 to come out.
Timing Finally Felt Right
In an interview with Us Weekly, Panettiere said the timing finally felt right after years of holding back. “It was never just the right time,” she stated. “It was either I was too young, and I was being forced to be perfect at all times. I was not encouraged to just be myself… then it came, the period of time, where it felt like people coming out, especially women coming out, and saying they were bisexual, or liked girls, was a fad. I was afraid that if I was honest it was going to be like me jumping on the bandwagon. It was a very difficult topic to articulate properly.”
Looking back, she admits the delay wasn’t easy. “It is sad I had to wait till I was 36 years old to share that part of me, but better late than never, right?!”
Past Relationships and Exploration
Panettiere also shares that she has dated women before, but never felt fully able to embrace those relationships. “I have explored it, but because I hadn’t shared this with anybody, I didn’t really have the courage to throw myself fully emotionally into it. Because then if I did fall in love that wasn’t something that I wanted to ever have to hide.” Now, with her book on the way, she says she’s ready to be open: “I’m comfortable to confidently say that yes, I am bisexual. I said it! This is the first time I got to say it out loud.”
The revelation adds new context to moments from her past, including a 2009 interview tied to her role on Heroes, where her character Claire Bennet had a same-sex storyline. At the time, she described scenes like that as “very exciting”, noting, “When you are young, you experiment and you have fun.”
High-Profile Relationships
According to People, Panettiere was engaged to boxer Wladimir Klitschko, with whom she shares an 11-year-old daughter, and previously dated Scotty McKnight, Heroes co-star Milo Ventimiglia, and Stephen Colletti. Her longest relationship was with Klitschko, lasting on and off for nearly a decade. After that split, she entered what she later described as an abusive relationship with Brian Hickerson from 2018 to 2022, as reported by Page Six. Reflecting on it, Panettiere called the experience “traumatic” and “brutal,” comparing it to “trying to rip a weed out that is so entangled into your life… every time you pull it out, another weed pops back up.”
