Hayden Panettiere Opened Up About Her Brother Jansen Years After His Sudden Loss — and the Guilt She Carried

“It’s all the time. It just evolves, especially with a sibling and being the older sibling. You’re just riddled with guilt that you didn’t do your job.”

In her memoir and related interviews, she revealed that Jansen had struggled with serious substance abuse, including crack and heroin. Hayden said learning how severe his addiction had become left her shocked and made her question whether she could have done more.

She had tried to help him, including getting him into treatment and maintaining contact with his therapist. But Jansen did not experience treatment in the same way Hayden had. The Remember the Titans explained that she had found peace in treatment, while Jansen felt “caged” by it.

The difference left her wrestling with an agonizing question: whether she had actually known how to help him.

Hayden’s Guilt Went Back Years

“I, of all people, should have understood,” she told E!, before acknowledging the painful reality that there are limits to what one person can do for another. “You can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to help themselves. It’s just a sad fact.”

In a Jay Shetty Podcast interview promoting her memoir, Hayden went even deeper into that feeling of failure. Speaking about Jansen, she described him as the person who understood her better than almost anyone else because they had grown up experiencing the same unusual world together.

She recalled feeling that she had failed to keep him safe and said she had tried to warn the people around her that his addiction was serious. She also remembered trying to intervene before he was even an adult, “I mean, I remember before he was eighteen, begging my parents to send him to military school, before he was capable of making decisions for himself, that he needed to; they needed to do this for his safety, and he needed to be disciplined.”

Even amid that guilt, Hayden spoke lovingly about what Jansen left behind.

She Found a Way to Keep Him Close

His paintings became particularly precious to her because they gave her something tangible that still felt connected to him.

“He was an incredible artist,” she told E!. “My favorite thing that I have is his paintings. I feel like he’s so alive in those paintings, like that part of him is immortalized because of the part of himself that he put into his art.”

Jansen’s death came after years in which Hayden had already been confronting her own struggles with addiction, anxiety, postpartum depression and mental health.

Hayden Was Also Trying to Rebuild Her Own Life

In her with Jay Shetty, she pushed back against the idea that she had simply been forced into treatment.

“The misconception is that I have been in the past forced into treatment when, in fact, I have been the one who sought it out, saying, ‘I desperately need help. I don’t, you know, I know this is going to look terrible, but I cannot live like this anymore.'”

Hayden also addressed persistent claims about her relationship with her daughter, Kaya Klitschko, explaining that the decision for Kaya to live in Europe was made while Hayden was struggling with her mental health and had not yet recovered.

Hayden Explained Why Her Daughter Lived in Europe

“I was struggling with mental health and anxiety and the postpartum and having to act my way through it and just feeling like I completely lost myself,” she said.

When Kaya was about 2½ years old, Hayden said her father, Wladimir Klitschko, decided it would be best for her to live in Europe. Hayden admitted she initially had a very difficult reaction to the decision.

“When that first happened, I did not have a good reaction to it. I went like [a] mother lion. I would have burnt the world down for my child,” she said.

But as Hayden recovered, she said she began looking at the situation differently. Kaya had already spent years traveling between the United States and Europe, where she had family, friends, extracurricular activities and a life she was comfortable with.

“So by the time I finally got healthy, I felt like it would have been unfair of me and selfish of me to try to pull her away from this life that she had been created,” Hayden explained.

She said Kaya was “living an incredible life” and described her as a happy child who knew she had two parents who loved her. “I know in my heart that she feels supported. I have an incredible relationship with her. I go, I travel as much as I can. I see her. I do spend a lot of time on FaceTime with her,” Hayden said.

She also emphasized the depth of their relationship, saying, “We talk about really deep things. We have a really intense, incredible bond and I’m very grateful for that.”

Hayden added, “I know that she knows that she has two parents who would do anything in the world to make sure that she is happy and healthy mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually.”

She was particularly firm about the suggestion that Kaya felt abandoned. “She in no way feels abandoned — and that’s something that I’ve made sure to stay on top of and be very aware of.”

Hayden also pushed back against the broader narrative surrounding her decision as a mother. “The idea that anybody would think that I would just give away my child and be okay with it is heartbreaking.”

She said the idea that she had simply given up her daughter “could not be farther from the truth” and hoped sharing her side of the story would make the circumstances clearer.

After she had publicly revisited some of the most painful chapters of her life, Hayden died suddenly on August 16, 2026.