“It was just never the right time,” she told the magazine. “It was either I was too young, and I was being forced to be perfect at all times. I was not encouraged to just be myself.”
She also said she worried about how her sexuality would be received during a period when women coming out as bisexual were sometimes dismissed as following a trend.
“Then came the period where it felt like people coming out, especially women, saying that they were bisexual or liked girls, was a fad,” Panettiere said. “I was afraid that if I was honest, it was going to be like me jumping on the bandwagon.”
For Panettiere, that made the subject difficult to explain in a way that felt true to her experience.
“It was a very difficult topic to articulate properly,” she said. “It’s sad I had to wait until I was 36 years old to share that part of me, but better late than never, right?”
Dating, privacy and life under cameras
Panettiere also said she has dated women privately, but that her fame made those relationships harder to navigate. The issue was not simply whether she understood her sexuality. It was whether she could live it without turning someone else’s private life into tabloid material.
“It was scary,” she said, “because there were paparazzi always waiting for me outside, to follow me everywhere. I had very little privacy. I have dated women. I was much more into women even as a child than I was men.”
The actor said that lack of privacy affected how emotionally open she felt able to be in relationships with women.
“I have explored it, but because I hadn’t shared this with anybody, I didn’t really have the courage to throw myself fully emotionally into it,” she said. “Because then if I did fall in love, that wasn’t something that I wanted to ever have to hide.”
Panettiere is also a mother. She shares 11-year-old daughter Kaya Evdokia Klitschko with her ex, former professional boxer Wladimir Klitschko.
The memoir goes beyond one revelation
This Is Me: A Reckoning arrives after Panettiere has already spoken publicly about painful chapters in her life, including addiction and her sobriety journey. Still, she said turning her life into a memoir was not an easy yes.
“I was terrified,” she told Us Weekly. “The first thought that went through my head is, ‘Am I ready to write a book about my life?’ Then I started thinking through my life and going, ‘Gosh, truth is stranger than fiction. I have so many stories already to share.’”
That realization, she said, helped push her toward writing the book.
“I hope that by sharing them in this book,” Panettiere said, “that it helps people to overcome the obstacles they’re going through.”
For fans who have followed Panettiere from network television fame to film franchise returns and her more recent public candor, the interview is not being framed as a reinvention. It reads more like a correction to the record, one she says she was not ready, or allowed, to make earlier.
