Hayden Panettiere is recalling an incident in which an Oscar winner once exposed himself to her at a party when she was 19 years old.
The actress, now 36, opened up about the encounter in her new memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, saying she had attended a party at a private apartment with a friend, but later grew increasingly uncomfortable after chatting with a group of men at the gathering.
As she was getting ready to leave, she claimed a “well-respected” and “Oscar-winning actor and director,” whom she doesn’t name in her memoir, approached her when she was putting on her coat. It was his next actions that left her “shocked.”
Panettiere said in her book that the man pointed to his pants, claiming he had chewing gum stuck to them. “I looked down and recoiled,” she wrote. “This well-respected, award-winning actor’s testicles were hanging out from his unzipped fly.”
The Scream star said she wasn’t physically harmed by the interaction, but was definitely left startled. “The gum on the pants, however, was a head-scratcher,” she wrote. “It hadn’t hurt me and I was sure it was a drunken joke, but I’d never seen a grown man do something like that. I was shocked.”
Panettiere admitted that she didn’t tell her friend who she attended the party with about the incident as she felt “the moment had passed,” adding that she came to the conclusion “some older men had just grown up with no manners.”
In This Is Me: A Reckoning, which hit bookstands on May 19, the Nashville actress gets candid about her past trauma, the realities of child stardom, substance abuse and her path to recovery, among other personal and professional struggles.
Ahead of its release, Panettiere spoke with The Hollywood Reporter, sharing why she chose to name some celebrities in her memoir, but keep others anonymous, such as the Oscar winner.
“It was a bad look for them and [the people I didn’t name] were generally people within my industry,” she said. “They’re people I could run into again. I didn’t want to put myself in that position. Things happened a long time ago, but it was to protect me and my company from being sued by some very pissed-off famous people.”
