Hayden Panettiere put Diana Jenkins back at the center of a memoir that reads less like nostalgia than a reckoning. In Diana Jenkins Hayden Panettiere, she described a “weird friendship” that began when she was 19 and said the story resurfaced after the May release of her book.
Panettiere wrote that Jenkins was almost 50 when they first met, almost thirty years older than her. She said that gap shaped the relationship from the start, and that she later found herself in a situation she described as frightening enough to make her run.
Room 23 and the old rumor
2009 is part of why this story never fully disappeared. Jenkins published Room 23 that year, and the project featured provocative pictures of Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes, George Clooney and Hayden Panettiere. Panettiere was 20 years old when she appeared in it, which helped keep the two names linked long before the memoir brought them back together in public view.
After the memoir’s release in May, Jenkins denied rumors that she was the friend who put Panettiere into bed with an undressed man who was very famous. Her rep told TMZ, “It most certainly is not Diana, and anyone who claims it is her will be sued.”
What Panettiere wrote
Panettiere said she was led down a set of stairs and into a small room by somebody she had grown to trust and see as a protector. She wrote, “She physically put me in the bed next to this undressed man who was very famous.” In the memoir, she added, “I had nowhere to hide. I bolted, and I hid wherever I could think of to hide on a boat.”
That account raises the part the public still cannot fill in: the identity of the “very famous man.” Panettiere did not name him, and in a separate explanation she said, “It was a bad look for them and [the people I didn’t name] were generally people within my industry. 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.”
Diana Jenkins on RHOBH
Jenkins has addressed the broader cloud around her before. In a confessional on RHOBH, she said claims that her book was “a catalogue of clients and call girls” had been “an offense of my character,” and she sued the blogger who falsely claimed she was a “sex trafficker.”
Panettiere’s memoir turns that old dispute into current business again. The denial keeps the issue alive, but the missing name is the real pressure point, because the book stops short of the one detail that would settle the dispute in full. Until that changes, the story sits where Panettiere left it: a private memory made public, then immediately contested.
