Hayden Panettiere has publicly revealed that she identifies as bisexual.
The actress shared the detail about her personal life in a new interview with Us Weekly that was published on Wednesday. In the interview, Panettiere said it was her experience writing about her life for her new memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, that helped her decide to share this part of herself.
“Now that I know that this book is coming out, and that I’ve chosen to share it with the world, I’m comfortable to confidently say that yes, I am bisexual. I said it! This is the first time I got to say it out loud,” Panettiere said.
The actress said she didn’t always know what she would be comfortable sharing about herself in the two years it took her to write the memoir. This did come up, and she decided, “Why not?”
“I’ve chosen to be completely brutally honest about this, and that’s something about me that I was never able to share with the world, because it was just never the right time,” Panettiere said.
The actress continued, detailing her attraction to women but also that she felt “afraid” to come out at first.
“I was not encouraged to just be myself,” she said. “Then it came, the period where it felt like people coming out, especially women coming out, and saying that they were bisexual or liked girls, was a fad.”
Panettiere didn’t want to be simply “jumping on the bandwagon,” as she put it, rather, she “wanted to make sure that I really sat down and chose my words carefully and was able to tell my story in an honest way, that people understood. On one hand, it’s sad that I had to wait till I was 36 years old to share that part of me, but better late than never, right?”
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