The late Hayden Panettiere’s mother, Lesley Vogel, responded to accusations that she pressured her daughter to become a full-time actress from a young age.
“I was strong, definitely, but I was not abusive by any stretch of the imagination,” Vogel, 70, told The Daily Mail in an interview published on Saturday, August 22.
Vogel signed Panettiere up with the famed Wilhelmina modeling agency at 8 months old and the future Heroes star shot her first commercial three months later. At 5 years old, Panettiere was cast in her first recurring TV role as Sarah Roberts on One Life to Live. (Panettiere worked on the daytime soap from 1994 to 1997. Vogel was her daughter’s first talent manager.)
“She started with Wilhelmina at eight months old because she’s a beautiful baby. I mean, really beautiful baby,” Vogel recalled. “My thought then was, let her do some stuff, we’ll put it in her college fund, and she’ll go to college and she’ll have this. I never expected her to be a professional actor, never.”
During a May 2026 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Panettiere insisted that she’d been “groomed” to work for as long as she could remember.
“I was like a little soldier and I always have been. ‘No’ was never an option,” Panettiere alleged. “It was just, ‘Here are your scenes, here’s your dialogue, memorize it, hit the marks, do what your director tells you to do.’ I took my marching orders.”
In her latest interview, Vogel denied that she was responsible for any pressure that her daughter may have felt around her career.
“I think that Hayden put a pressure on herself,” Vogel said. “I know that she has mentioned, you know, [that she] ‘always had to please Mom,’ or make sure it was, you know, I succeeded or whatever. I didn’t put that on her. I think she put that on herself.”
Vogel also rejected the idea that Panettiere was unhappy in the earliest days of her child stardom.
“Try making a 2-to 5-year-old child do something they don’t want to do,” she declared. “Are you going to be successful? No, you’re not. Probably 99 percent of the time.”
Panettiere was found dead at age 36 in South Carolina on August 16 by her ex-boyfriend Brian Hickerson and his brother, Zach Hickerson. Emergency service workers performed “advanced cardiac life support measures” but Panettiere was ultimately pronounced dead of a suspected overdose that afternoon. (Authorities reportedly found Narcan — a life-saving over-the-counter medication that can reverse the effects of a drug overdose — at the scene.)
An autopsy found “no signs of trauma that would have contributed” to Panettiere’s death at the scene but deferred determining a cause of death “pending further investigation and the completion of additional studies,” per the coroner’s office.
Vogel initially broke her silence about her daughter’s death with a public statement that proved to be extremely controversial.
“I think Hayden was an amazingly talented person in so many departments, and I think young people who grow up in the entertainment industry — it is a struggle and it’s a very challenging industry and it’s not unusual for them to sadly find the wrong path,” she said on Tuesday, August 18.
Those comments were widely condemned by a wide range of entertainment figures, from TV hosts Gayle King and Megyn Kelly to actress Holly Robinson Peete.
Vogel delivered a scathing response in her Daily Mail interview, saying. “I was very, very hurt and deeply disappointed in the lack of professionalism, the lack of compassion in slamming someone who’s lost two children, without even a modicum of consideration. No one reached out to me before. It’s shameful. It’s unconscionable to me.”
Prior to Hayden’s death, Vogel lost son Jansen Panettiere at age 28 due to an undiagnosed heart condition in February 2023.
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