Hayden Panettiere’s Mother Breaks Silence in an ABC Interview, Confessing She Still Can’t Accept Her Daughter Is Really Gone at 36

24 Aug 2026, 13:56 · Thought Catalog

Wenn / Mega

Updated 3 minutes ago, August 24, 2026

Lesley Vogel says the news of her daughter‘s death left her “numb” snd she still can’t make herself believe it happened. “My mind tells me it’s not at times,” she told ABC News.

Hayden Panettiere died on August 16 after she was found unresponsive and in cardiac arrest at a home in Greenville, South Carolina. First responders tried to revive her, but she was pronounced dead at the scene at 36.

Lesley Vogel walks through the seating area on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol during rehearsals for the Annual 4th of July Concert in Washington, D.C., on July 3, 2007. Photo by Carrie Devorah / WENN / Mega.

“I still am not grasping this is real. It just doesn’t, it doesn’t feel real,” her mother Lesley Vogel told ABC News. “My mind tells me it’s not at times. You know, it’s going to be a process.”

Vogel and Hayden were estranged in the actress‘s final months. About a year ago, Vogel says, she went to stay with her daughter, who told her she wanted out of her on-again, off-again relationship with Brian Hickerson. After roughly six weeks Vogel felt her pulling away and returned to Florida, and Hayden later called to say she was “going to be with the person I love.”

Vogel gave her an ultimatum: she couldn’t be in her life if Hickerson was too. She expected the distance to be a “pocket of time,” not the last of it. “I didn’t by any stretch of the imagination think that this was going to happen to Hayden,” she said. “Maybe I didn’t want to.”

Lesley Vogel poses alongside her daughter at the Los Angeles premiere of ‘Ratatouille’ at the Kodak Theatre on June 22, 2007. Photo by Nikki Nelson / WENN.

The family has already lost one child. Vogel and Skip Panettiere’s son, Jansen, died in 2023 from an enlarged heart.

Vogel says she has no patience for anyone judging how she grieves, calling them “haters” who “don’t have a right to tell me how to mourn the loss of my second child.” What she wants people to hold onto is the “talented, beautiful, outgoing, intelligent woman” Hayden was, and one thing more.

“I also want people to understand that it is my belief that she was suffering,” she said. “You look at a beautiful girl who’s got an incredible career, and you go, why would you be suffering? People don’t understand that you can have on the exterior all of this. But that doesn’t mean that what’s going on in here matches.”

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