What to Know
On Sunday, Hayden Panettiere unexpectedly died at the age of 36 after she was found unresponsive in Greenville, South Carolina. Fans are still reeling from the news of the actress’ death just months after she published a revealing memoir about how difficult her life was growing up as a child star.
And now, they’re pointing the finger at Hayden’s mother, Lesley Vogel, who she was estranged from when she died.
One of Hayden’s former neighbors is speaking out against her mother.
A journalist named Erin Elizabeth who claims she lived down the street from Hayden, Lesley, and their family in the 2000s took to X to share exactly what she thinks about the former soap opera actress, who she said “desperately wanted her children to be stars.”
“Lesley stepped away from her own on-camera career to act as her children’s manager, placing Hayden into baby modeling at just eight months old and applying the exact same playbook to her younger son, Jansen, getting him into the acting industry at just months old as well,” Erin wrote. “Both siblings were raised like little soldiers who could never say no to an audition or a job, completely stripping them of a normal childhood and fueling a deeply dysfunctional family dynamic behind closed doors.”
Lesley and Hayden’s dad, Skip, ultimately ended up divorcing, and Hayden remained close with her father in the years after. The couple’s son, Hayden’s brother Jansen, died at the age of 28 in 2023.
Critics have been all over Lesley’s Instagram comments.
Lesley hasn’t shared a post on the platform in more than a year, but that hasn’t stopped people from sharing exactly what they think about her in the comments.
On one post, one of Hayden’s fans wrote, “You won. Happy you destroyed your kids successfully???”
Another commented, “Unfortunately not all women deserve to be Mothers, and you are a great example of this.”
Clearly, people are not holding back.
In May 2026, Hayden confirmed that she and her mother were still estranged.
As Hayden promoted her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning earlier this year, she looked back on her relationship with her mother in an interview with The Independent, saying that Lesley told her that she “owed” her the job of being her manager when Hayden decided to end their working relationship when she was 19 years old.
“Having a normal relationship [with me] wasn’t something that interested her. And it was also maybe something she wasn’t even capable of,” Hayden said.
At the time, her mother called Hayden “entitled” in a statement to Page Six.
“[Hayden’s] personality style does not accept responsibility for life choices and therefore feels they have no need to alter their behavior,” Lesley said at the time. “After 20 years of trauma, I took the advice of professionals and chose the no-contact route.”
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