What 20 years Covering Hollywood Deaths Taught Me About Hayden Panettiere

We start today’s newsletter with the piece I found hardest to write: what covering Anna Nicole Smith’s death two decades ago taught me about the pattern now circling Hayden Panettiere, and why naming that pattern matters even before anyone has answers. Then a lighter gear change, my read on which Dancing With the Stars season 35 rumors actually hold up against the show’s own casting history, category by category. And we close with something sharper: trying to make sense of Meghan Markle’s turn to acting and how Guy Ritchie and Meghan Markle are both, this week, running the exact same playbook, borrowing someone else’s headline to sell their own.

I was news director at In Touch in February 2007, and I watched a woman die in real time from about a thousand miles away, through phone calls, reporting files, and a newsroom trying to out-report every network in America. Twenty years on, I watched it happen again with a similar story, with the same warning signs just fewer reporters left in newsrooms to notice.

Let me take you back, because I don't think people understand how this actually works from the inside. Five months before Anna Nicole Smith died, her son Daniel died in the Bahamas, three days after she'd given birth to her daughter, Dannielynn. That week, we were dealing directly with Howard K. Stern, her lawyer, her partner, the man who controlled access to her. And in the middle of that grief, he sold our photo desk pictures of Daniel meeting his newborn sister for the first time, taken in the same hospital room where Daniel would die, hours later, of an accidental overdose of methadone and antidepressants, for $350,000, on behalf of Anna. I remember thinking, even then, that's not how a person behaves when they're trying to protect someone. That's how a person behaves when they've already worked out what she's worth to him as a story.

Five months later, on February 8th, she was dead too, found unresponsive at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. The days that followed are still a blur I think about regularly. Waiting on autopsy results. Waiting on toxicology. Every network sending crews to Florida, TV producers calling us directly trying to pool resources to share exclusives, all of us circling the same hotel, the same small handful of facts, trying to be first without being wrong. Eventually, California's Attorney General's office called Stern exactly what he was. Their words, not mine: "principal enabler." Two doctors, psychiatrist Khristine Eroshevich and physician Sandeep Kapoor, were charged alongside him for furnishing her with controlled substances under false names, specifically so nothing would trace back to her.

I bring all that up now because of Hayden Panettiere, and I want to be careful here, because we don't know her cause of death yet. Nobody does. The DEA has joined Greenville Police in investigating, but that tells us drugs are somewhere in the picture, not what the picture actually is. So I'm not going to tell you what killed her. But I am going to tell you what the pattern looks like.

Hayden's boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, pleaded no contest to injuring her in 2021. She once sought a restraining order against him. And according to a police report, he didn't become visibly emotional until EMS pronounced her dead, but he did show officers a bag of her medication. His attorney's statement afterward was careful and lawyerly, almost nothing in it beyond a request to "allow that investigation to proceed." Statements like that are often exactly what they should be, cautious, correct, boring on purpose. But it's also, almost word for word, the shape of every statement that came out of Howard Stern's camp twenty years ago which were controlled and minimal.

I want to be precise about what that resemblance does and doesn't tell you. It isn't evidence that Hickerson did anything wrong. It took two years and a criminal investigation before anyone could call Stern an enabler and make it stick. What the resemblance tells you is something else: that fame trains everyone standing near it, guilty or innocent, to talk exactly this way the moment things go wrong. It's the opacity of the system working as designed. From the outside, you cannot tell a careful statement from someone with nothing to hide apart from a careful statement from someone with everything to hide.

Then on Friday, Brian's brother, Zach, broke that pattern in the opposite direction. He told TMZ he arrived to find both of them unconscious, that Brian gave her Narcan, and that they did CPR together until EMS took over. He asked, in his own words, for the "speculation and sensationalism" to stop. That's a different kind of statement than the lawyer's, more detail. Narcan is for opioids. Someone at that scene believed, in the moment, that opioids were plausible enough to act on. That doesn't tell us what killed her. It tells us what the people closest to her were afraid it might be.

Her ex-partner, Wladimir Klitschko, put it better than I could in his own tribute. He said she built her career "through immense talent, while also facing the darker sides of a very demanding industry."

Here's the part that actually matters. We had dozens of reporters on the ground for Anna Nicole, in real time, pooling resources, chasing every lead we had, and she died anyway.

What's constant isn't the drug and it isn't the coverage, it's the structure fame builds around a person. Fame doesn't just come with pressure, it comes with a machine that insulates you from anyone telling you no. Money removes the friction that stops most people; access removes the friction of a doctor's scruples, the friction of a pharmacist who'd flag a name he recognized, the friction of a partner willing to lose the relationship rather than enable it. Everyone standing that close to a famous person is either paid by them, dependent on them, or afraid of them, and all three of those things make "no" very hard to say. It's why Michael Jackson's own physician, paid $150,000 a month to be exclusively on call, was the one who gave him the propofol that killed him. It's why five separate people, an assistant and two doctors among them, ended up convicted over Matthew Perry's ketamine, every one of them someone he paid, or who profited from having him as a client. That's true whether the drug of the moment is methadone and antidepressants in 2006, propofol in 2009, ketamine in 2023, or whatever shows up in Hayden's toxicology report now. The chemical changes. The structure that makes it possible doesn't.

I want to be honest about what a bigger newsroom actually buys you, because it isn't a verdict. Nobody gets to call anyone an enabler in real time. That word only became fair to use about Stern after two years of investigators doing work no newsroom could do. What a fuller newsroom buys you is something more modest: enough people, with enough time, to describe the shape of what's happening while it's happening, money, access, isolation, a circle that's stopped being able to say no, without needing to know yet who, if anyone, is to blame. A public that's seen this shape before watches more carefully the next time it shows up, whoever it's showing up around. It doesn't stop fame from doing what fame does. Nobody I've covered in twenty years has found a way to do that. But naming the pattern while someone's still alive to hear it is the only version of this job that was ever actually available to us, and most days now, we don't have the people left to do even that.

The warning signs were there for Anna Nicole. They're probably there right now for someone else, sitting inside the same machine fame always builds. I don't know if Hayden's story turns out to belong to that machine. Nobody does yet, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise just because the it looks familiar. What I do know is same story keeps showing up, decade after decade, star after star, and the only thing any of us have ever managed to do about it is notice out loud, before the obituary does the noticing for us.

Click Here To Watch My Thoughts On A Beauty Company’s Apology To Hayden