Hayden Panettiere's Memoir Details PPD, Addiction, Custody Battle

Hayden Panettiere, the "Nashville" actress who wrote openly about postpartum depression, addiction, and handing custody of her daughter to former fiancé Wladimir Klitschko, died Aug. 16 at 36. She is survived by their 11-year-old daughter, Kaya Evdokia Klitschko. Klitschko has full custody.

Panettiere’s May 2026 memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” and her appearance on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast detailed what she called “the most gut-wrenching experience of my life.” The book described a childbirth that required a three-hour C-section after her blood would not clot, followed by a uterine infection. She wrote that she felt no rush of love when she held Kaya. Instead, she experienced an emotional numbness she later learned was postpartum depression, diagnosed when Kaya was 4 months old.

“I’d always heard that mothers feel an instant rush of love the moment they lay their eyes on their baby, but I felt nothing,” Panettiere wrote in the memoir.

She turned to alcohol to cope, eventually pouring drinks so full they “almost overflowed.” She needed alcohol to get out of bed and go to work on the Nashville set. “It’s 6 a.m., and I’m trying to get drunk,” she recalled thinking. She entered rehab dependent on one substance, she wrote, and left dependent on something else.

Klitschko eventually presented custody papers because he worried about Kaya while in her mother’s care, Panettiere wrote. She initially defended herself – “amazing nannies and surrounded by people who love her” – then decided not to fight. “Every f---ing second,” she wrote of signing the custody papers. “No mother could forget a single thing about the day she signed her child away.” She had the financial means for a battle, she said, fighting while still in recovery would have destroyed her.

Panettiere intentionally kept many details of Kaya’s life out of her memoir. “She didn’t ask to be born into the limelight or my chaos,” she wrote. She praised Klitschko as “one of the most courageous people I’ve ever met and a true hero.”