A few months before her death on Aug 16, Hayden Panettiere was making the rounds to promote her new memoir, where she wrote about the traumas she had faced in her life, including efforts to disentangle herself from a toxic and abusive boyfriend.
Panettiere, 36, described herself as finally free of him.
“Abusers – they weave themselves like weeds into your life,” she said on a podcast in May.
That boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, made his own media appearance the next day to express his regret for the abuse.
Very little is publicly known about the circumstances of Panettiere’s death, which a person with knowledge of the events said was caused by an apparent drug overdose that led to cardiac arrest. What is clear is that one of the last people to see her alive was Hickerson, 37, with whom she had reconnected.
A heavily redacted report released on Aug 18 by the police in Greenville, South Carolina, where Panettiere died, said that it was Hickerson and his brother Zach who had called 911.
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When the paramedics failed to revive her, Hickerson became emotional, the police said.
In an apartment complex in Greenville, Hickerson spoke to the police about Panettiere and shared with officers a bag containing her medications, though many details are redacted in the report.
She had spoken openly about struggling with addiction to pharmaceutical drugs, which started when a former representative gave her, as a teenage actress, what she thought was an amphetamine.
Hickerson has not been accused of being involved in Panettiere’s death.
The Greenville Police Department has said a preliminary investigation did not produce evidence of “foul play or suspicious circumstances”, and the Greenville County Coroner’s Office has said that “no signs of trauma were discovered that would have contributed to the death”.
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Hickerson, his brother and other family members, and a lawyer who has represented him did not respond to requests for comment.
Turbulent relationship
The revelation that Hickerson was with Panettiere in her final hours has prompted a re-examination of their turbulent relationship, which Panettiere said her family and friends had tried to extricate her from for years.
The person with knowledge of the events said that in March, Panettiere hired private security to help ensure that Hickerson stayed away.
“This person in her life that we have been trying to get rid of for quite some time was with her at her death, and that was Brian Hickerson,” Lesley Vogel, Panettiere’s mother, told NBC News on Aug 18.
Vogel did not respond to requests for comment from The New York Times. In an interview with TMZ in May, Hickerson called Vogel, from whom Panettiere was often estranged, “one of the worst people I’ve ever met in my life”.
Court documents and Panettiere’s memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, detail instances of domestic violence by Hickerson. In one case, he was sentenced to 45 days in prison after pleading no contest to two felony counts of injuring Panettiere.
Despite recent efforts to distance herself, there were also times throughout their relationship that Panettiere returned to him, walling herself off from concerned friends and family members.
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“What I never told them was that the abuse I’d endured didn’t feel as bad as the thought of being alone,” she wrote in her memoir.
In the interview with TMZ, which took place around the time that Panettiere released her memoir, Hickerson said the stories within it were true and that he had gone into a “dark place” that included “drugs, alcohol, abuse”.
“Terrible thing I did to her,” he said.
He noted that he had spoken to her the previous day about the release of her book and described them as “good buddies”.
“I think that Hayden is one of the most talented people I’ve ever met in my life,” he said in the interview, “and I would be an idiot not to walk away from her and let her flourish in her career.”
When the abuse began
Panettiere and Hickerson met eight years ago at a popular West Hollywood watering hole. The relationship “moved at lightning speed”, she wrote in her memoir.
They danced in her living room, played board games and watched Netflix, all hidden from prying cameras and even her family members.
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“Two best friends living together under one roof,” she wrote.
But then, Hickerson began to abuse her.
“The slaps become hits,” she wrote. One night, she recalled, he “busts up my face so badly I don’t leave the house for weeks”.
In her memoir, Panettiere recounted a Valentine’s Day trip to Wyoming in 2020, where a night of drinking turned violent once she and Hickerson returned to their rental house.
She wrote that their banter grew hostile and that he pushed her into a wall and slapped her. After the police responded to a call about a disturbance, he was taken away in handcuffs and spent the night in jail.
“I had a lot to drink, and I got physical with her,” he said in the TMZ interview.
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According to court documents, Hickerson was also arrested in connection with an encounter in Los Angeles on May 2, 2019. Although the case file does not include a narrative of what transpired, documents identify a person or witness involved in the case as “Hayden P”.
In her memoir, Panettiere said a neighbour called 911 after a brawl with Hickerson in which he pinned her down and punched her repeatedly.
Charged with seven felony counts
Hickerson was initially charged with seven felony counts, including assault, injuring a girlfriend and dissuading a witness from prosecuting a crime, as well as misdemeanour battery. He eventually pleaded no contest to two felony counts of injuring Panettiere.
When Hickerson was serving his sentence, Panettiere, who also struggled with alcoholism, was in a facility trying to get sober. Records show that after his release, Hickerson violated his probation in 2022 and was ordered not to drink alcohol or enter the Sunset Marquis, a hotel in West Hollywood, California.
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On Aug 1, 2022, Hickerson was sentenced to several years of formal probation. As part of that probation, he was required to complete a year-long domestic violence treatment programme, attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and complete dozens of anger-management sessions, according to court records.
He has said that he is part of an Alcoholics Anonymous group led by actor Shia LaBeouf.
The records also show that Hickerson has twice tried to get a judge to reduce his felony convictions to misdemeanours.
During the first attempt, in 2025, prosecutors told a judge that there were “numerous incidents of domestic violence”, according to the court records, and reminded the judge that Hickerson had previously been charged with trying to dissuade a witness.
The second attempt occurred last week, according to court papers. A judge denied the request. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
