Megyn Reacts to Hayden Panettiere’s Tragic Death: ‘There Were So Many People Who Did Not Serve This Woman Well’

Actress Hayden Panettiere is dead at the age of 36. She began appearing in commercials at just 11 months old and became a household name in her teens as one of the stars of the show Heroes, where she played a cheerleader with special powers.

Panettiere also hit it big while in her twenties playing a country music star in the show Nashville. More recently, she was open about her mental health struggles. In her memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning published earlier this year, she revealed she suffered from depression, substance abuse, and lost custody of her daughter. 

I didn’t know much about Hayden before today, to be honest. I didn’t watch Heroes or Nashville, but I have now spent the morning reading her story. While it is new to me because I don’t know her, it is not new to me because I’m in news and, for 25 years now, I have been covering stories of child actors whose lives end just like this.

The Pitfalls of Childhood Fame

Do not put your child into any industry that will make them a star as a minor. Don’t do it. No matter how badly you need the money, no matter how badly your child tells you it is her dream or his dream. The answer is no, if you love them. It could be as a singer like Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez; could be as an actress like Hayden or Amanda Bynes. It doesn’t tend to end well. Look what is happening to Ariana Grande right now. She made her start on Nickelodeon, a disgusting cesspool of child abuse.

And separate and apart from whether you happen to drop them into a cesspool of toxicity and abuse, like Nickelodeon was, you are just setting them up for massive life failures unless that kid has got the strongest emotional resolve of all children out there. That doesn’t tend to be the case. 

For every Jodie Foster, there are far more River Phoenixes. Gen-Xers will remember Phoenix as the brother of Joaquin Phoenix who died of a drug overdose out front in front of a club when he was very young and had been a child star in movies like Stand By Me. It is just so rare that they grow up and have well-adjusted lives.

One of the main reasons is: Have you ever had something great in your life? Were you ever the high school track star, football star, or prom queen? Were you at the top of your college class and got recruited for grad school? Did you make it big at your first job and get the biggest boat or whatever it was? Was there ever that time in your life?

Well, if that big moment is never matched in its bigness by another event in your life, you may look back at that event and think it was your peak. A lot of people do. A lot of people look at their lives that way, as opposed to just like a river that runs and has turns, and tribulations, and smooth times. Some people look at it more as a mountain with a peak and then a descent, and they think they are failures if they never recapture that peak. I disagree with this, but that is how a lot of people look at their lives.

And if your child has her peak at age 11 or 17, it is going to be very hard for her to feel like she is a success after that. And the problem is, child actors don’t tend to make it in Hollywood. They may make it as children, but then what? Look at Macaulay Culkin, one of the top three child stars ever in our country. What’s he doing now? Do you know? I don’t know. He got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame a couple years ago. I am not ripping on him at all – the opposite, actually – but he did not make it as an adult actor, not in any meaningful way, at least. 

This industry that builds them up, then rejects them and they can’t ever reclaim that top of the mountain moment. They feel like a failure. You are setting your child up to fail. And even if they don’t get kicked out of the industry, like Justin Bieber, how do you think he is doing? How does he look to you? Totally well adjusted, comfortable in his own skin, the picture of happiness? No, not to me either. And he was never kicked out. He made it as a star, and he maintained his stardom to this moment.

The industry can keep you afloat and a star and rich, and you can marry a supermodel, etc. But those demons that came into your life when you were 15 and too young to handle the things your parents allowed you to be subjected to. They can ruin you in a different way. 

So, I am not surprised to read the news about Hayden Panettiere at all. I am sad. I lament the loss of this young woman, but I don’t think it is a pattern we are ever going to correct for because there will always be parents who shove their child into the entertainment industry at too young and too precarious an age and don’t have the skills or the desire to rescue them from the fallout that inevitably comes.

Panettiere’s Death

According to authorities in South Carolina, the Greenville Police Department and emergency personnel responded to a report of an unresponsive female at an apartment complex just before 2pm Sunday. Just that term “unresponsive female” – she was responsive for 36 years. She responded to everything. 

She wrote in her memoir that she was given amphetamines as a teenager before she went out on the red carpet, so she would be peppy. Who gave her those? She did the person the courtesy of not outing them by name or title, but was it an agent? Was it somebody that the Hollywood machine put around her to make sure she wouldn’t forget to sparkle while on the red carpet? She was a responsive female. They made damn sure of it until she couldn’t do that anymore. 

They found Panettiere and administered emergency aid, but she was tragically pronounced dead at the scene. A statement from the Greenville Police said the initial findings had “not indicated any signs of foul play or suspicious circumstances,” but that the investigation is ongoing. According to new reporting from The Daily Mail, Panettiere died after going into cardiac arrest following a suspected overdose in the apartment. 

Panettiere arrived in South Carolina from Los Angeles just a day prior with her on-again-off-again real estate agent boyfriend Brian Hickerson who is from South Carolina. Hickerson was once arrested for punching Panettiere in the face and was accused of abusing her multiple times over. 

There had been a five-year restraining order from 2021 based on his abuse of her, which would have just expired. She wrote about some of it in her memoir and had said publicly she would do what she could to make sure he didn’t hurt anyone else. She thought it was important to speak about the abuse to protect other young women. Then, she was back with him the day before she died. I think we all would like to know more about what went on in the time they were together prior to her death.

Parenting Problems

There were so many people who did not serve this woman well in her life. She dies at 36 years old, which is the same age as Marilyn Monroe who had a similar story. Marilyn had a very damaged mother and had a childhood where she wasn’t a child actress but was passed from home to home. She never really had anybody to love her, and she wound up modeling and then becoming an actress. She never dealt with her childhood trauma, and she wound up allegedly taking a massive overdose and dying at age 36. 

I remember looking into her story and thinking: The shock around Marilyn Monroe is not that she died at age 36; it’s that she made it to 36. As I read more about Hayden’s story, I’m starting to feel the same. It was depression. It was sexual abuse. It was physical abuse. It was child exploitation. It was an absence of love from her primary caregivers. It was nonstop conflict with her mother. Her mother, who made her feel like a piece of meat, like a commodity to be sold. 

The primary relationship with the mother being that messed up does not necessarily set one up for success. Now, there are exceptions to this rule. There are very strong women like Dr. Laura Schlesinger, who follows me on SiriusXM, who is incredible and one of our MVP Americans, if I do say so. She has some very strong feelings about how one should deal with that. 

Melissa Francis, my dear friend, wrote a whole memoir called Diary of a Stage Mother’s Daughter. She starred as the new Ingalls Daughter in Little House on the Prairie, once the original cast had aged out. She has written very openly about the damage that her mother and that relationship did to her. 

The absence of a strong, healthy relationship with one’s mother can be extremely damaging, and it certainly seems to have been for Hayden.

You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 1,380 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.