Hayden Panettiere Details Sexual Misconduct in New Memoir

Actress Hayden Panettiere has described multiple disturbing incidents from her youth in a new memoir, including an encounter where an unnamed, Oscar-winning actor and director exposed himself to her at a party when she was 19. The account is detailed in her book, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which was released this week.

According to Panettiere, the incident occurred at a private apartment gathering in Los Feliz, California. After feeling increasingly uncomfortable while mingling with a small group of men, she decided to leave. As she was putting on her coat, the man approached her, indicated he had chewing gum stuck to his trousers, and directed her to look. She wrote that she looked down and recoiled, seeing that his testicles were hanging out of his unzipped fly. Panettiere characterized the act as a drunken joke that left her shocked, though she said it did not physically harm her. She did not tell her friend, who was also at the party, about what happened at the time.

In a separate account from the memoir, Panettiere recounts a traumatic experience from when she was 18. She says a friend she considered a protector led her into a small cabin on a yacht in the south of France,...