Holly Robinson Peete is clarifying her previous comments about Hayden Panettiere’s mom, Lesley Vogel.
“Today would have been Hayden Panettiere’s 37th birthday,” Peete, 61, wrote via her Substack blog on Friday, August 21. “I recently gave my unsolicited emotional opinion about Hayden Panettiere’s mother and was surprised to see my thoughts go viral. I was speaking from the gut, in shock, watching a statement that felt so inappropriately cold I couldn’t stay quiet. But since it traveled further than I ever intended … I feel like I owe people the fuller story — not just what I said, but why it hit me the way it did.”
Peete then recalled Vogel’s statement after her daughter’s death, in which Vogel reflected on the “struggle” that child stars often experience growing up in the entertainment industry and noted that Panettiere “lost her way.”
“In her first public words after her daughter’s death, Lesley Vogel talked about how hard this industry is on young people, about talent and struggle and lost paths,” Peete wrote. “What struck me most was what wasn’t there. Not once did I hear her call Hayden her daughter. No warmth, no softness, nothing that sounded like a mother grieving a child … just the language of someone assessing a career.”
Peete then pointed out Vogel’s role in Panettiere’s career at a young age.
“When she said Hayden ‘had talent in so many departments,’ it landed like a casting director’s notes, not a mother’s heartbreak. And I kept thinking: ma’am, at eleven months old, Hayden did not drive herself to auditions,” she continued.
Reflecting on her own childhood with mom Dolores Robinson, who “managed [Peete’s] career for 30 years,” the actress said she “relates” to Panettiere. (Peete made her acting debut on Sesame Street at age 4. Her breakout role later came when she was 21 and starring as Officer Judy Hoffs in 21 Jump Street in 1987.)
“When a parent starts managing you as a baby, and that’s the only relationship you’ve ever known with them, the whole thing can curdle into something purely transactional and every conversation shadowed by business, every piece of advice hard to separate from a client note. I believe that’s what happened with Hayden,” she wrote, adding that she “understands” how “genuinely hard it is to separate a parent from a manager, especially when they’ve been the same person your whole life, like in Hayden’s case.”
Peete then slammed Vogel, 70, for choosing “the language of an industry professional instead of a mother.”
“Instead, it felt like she used the platform to shift blame elsewhere, and Hayden, an adult who publicly bore responsibility for her own struggles, got talked about like a project that hadn’t panned out,” the singer wrote.
Peete’s blog post came two days after she wrote of Vogel, “We know this young lady clearly had so many issues, but if you’re not gonna take accountability for the fact that you put her in the business that eventually messed her up, then nothing you say has any integrity.”
Peete added, “She didn’t even say, ‘I will miss my daughter’ or ‘I loved my daughter the best way I could.’ Has she even mentioned the word daughter?”
Hayden died after an apparent overdose in Greenville, South Carolina, on Sunday, August 16. She was 36. A cause of death has not yet been revealed.
Three months before her death, while promoting her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, Hayden exclusively told Us that she and her mother were estranged.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a relationship right now,” the Ice Princess star said in May. “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t leave the door open for the opportunity to present itself one day. It’s hard for me to say, but I’ve chosen to be brutally honest. So that’s the honest truth of it.”
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