Years after he and Hayden Panettiere called it quits, Brian Hickerson reveals one violent incident he hopes the Heroes alum didn’t write about in her new memoir.
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While speaking to TMZ about Panettiere’s book This Is Me: A Reckoning, Hickerson admitted he was abusive towards the actress.
“There’s a story where I was drunk, right? Hayden was standing across the room, and I had a phone in my hand,” Hickerson recalled. “And I said, ‘Hayden, I’ll give you 10 seconds to run as fast as you can before I throw it at you.'”
He then said, “Who wants to read something about themselves, right? But you gotta be vulnerable, and I did it. I did it, so.”
Although their relationship was riddled with abuse and toxicity, Hickerson said he misses “Panettiere “every day” and “of course” thought about getting back together with her.
“I went into such a dark place, man, drugs, alcohol,” he continued. “Good God, almighty, she’s five foot two on paper, four foot 11 in real life. I mean, come on.”
The Former Couple Experienced Multiple Domestic Violent Incidents During Their 4 Year Relationship
Hickerson and Panettiere were first romantically linked in 2018 following the actress’s split from her ex-fiancé Wladimir Klitschko.
In 2021, Hickerson was sentenced to 45 days in jail after he pleaded no contest to two felony counts of injuring a spouse or girlfriend. He was also sentenced to four years of probation and ordered to undergo 52 hours of domestic violence classes. A judge also granted Panettiere a five-year restraining order against Hickerson.
Although they reconciled following the incident, the duo officially ended their relationship in 2022.
Panettiere recently spoke about her relationship with Hickerson, describing it as “brutal, traumatic, and emotional.”
“It was important to me to word that experience properly,” she told Us Weekly about writing about her relationship with Hickerson. “It’s a very embarrassing subject. I’ve always seen myself as such a resilient and strong woman. The idea that I could allow something like this to happen to me blew my mind. It blew the minds of the people that knew me best.”
Speaking about Hickerson no longer being in her life, Panettiere added, “Getting an abusive person out of your life is like trying to rip a weed out that is so entangled into your life, and every time you pull it out another weed pops back up and you’re like, I thought I killed this. They always manage to find a way to slither back in, even if you’re an incredibly strong-willed person. What happened in Wyoming helped push me in the right direction, but it still took me a long time. I still struggled to fully put a kibosh to it for a while.”