Hayden Panettiere reflected on her struggles with alcoholism, which led to her losing custody of her daughter, Kaya.

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This post deals with sensitive topics like child abuse, sexual assault, suicidal ideation, eating disorders, and substance abuse. Read with caution and take care of yourself ❤️. 

She wrote about her first stint in rehab, recalling she didn't have any of the traditional care like group therapy or a 12-Step program. "I left clean and sober," she said. "But there seemed to be no solution to my postpartum depression. I also went home in denial. The idea that a little liquid could take me down or rule my life seemed impossible for a tough girl like me." 

She tried to return to her series, Nashville, but quickly fell back into her old patterns that even the crew noticed. "Every day after that was a juggling act. I gave up the meds, and I went to work bloated, exhausted, and jittery. Every day I ran home, desperate for a drink. I’d switched to vodka, thinking no one could smell it on my breath, but I was fooling myself. Vodka smells like vodka. I’m sure everyone knew what was going on, but no one said anything." 

She shared that even her character started to face the same struggles she had in real life. "It became more apparent around season four of Nashville that my personal problems seemed to be mirroring the script," she wrote. "Juliette Barnes had postpartum depression, an alcohol and pill problem, and a divorce on the horizon. She was erratic, an absentee mother, and fought with everyone — including her fans. Every time I read the day’s script, it was like I was looking in a fun-house mirror, seeing a distorted reflection of myself. I can’t tell you how lost this made me feel. ... I dove headfirst into my own hell."

"A partial list of expenses could include a $3,000-$12,000 monthly retainer for a publicist; a $6,000-$10,000 monthly retainer for a fashion stylist and glam team (unfortunately mandatory for the quantity and high-profile nature of events); $2,000 in monthly voice lessons; $500 in monthly dance training; $500 for updated headshots; $75 per audition for acting coaching (and I went on an average of three to four auditions per week); and so on,” they wrote, also explaining that their team “took approximately 35 percent in commissions” and “another 35 percent” went to taxes."

Cher added that she'd been at this place about "five or six times," but each time she thought about her child, family, and fans. She worried that the "people who look up to me" might think suicide was "a viable solution" and she didn't want that. 

"Then one morning everything changed," she wrote. "That night between shows I went out on the balcony again and this time I thought, I don’t have to jump off, I can just leave him."

She added that it took her years to even come to terms with the fact that he was a child predator. "Casting him in the role of child molester meant casting myself in the role of victim, and I just couldn't go there," she wrote.

After swallowing a lethal amount of pills, she regretted the decision immediately and called her husband for help. "I couldn’t let myself go under. I had to believe things could get better. I couldn’t do it to my girls, my family, or all those people who actually believed in me," she wrote. "I looked in the mirror and said, ‘No.’ Suicide was not the answer. I had to make my life count. I had to get to a hospital, I had to get those pills out of my stomach before anything happened."

"Of all the memories from all those hours, it is the one that still floors me... it’s like a knife through my heart... It was the saddest moment of my life," she recalled. "It will always live with me. All I ever want is for her to know how sorry I am, how lost I was and how I will never, ever abandon her again.”

Then, after waking up in the hospital, she recalled Ike in her face saying, "You should die." She added, "When I took those pills, I chose death, and I chose it honestly. I was unhappy when I woke up."

She continued saying, "I had to have emergency surgery and stop filming the show for two weeks. I don't know why I lied to everyone on set and said that my appendix had ruptured, really. Maybe because I was lying to myself. If I faced losing my baby, then I didn't know if two weeks would be enough emotional healing time. In the end, it was barely enough healing time for me physically before I was right back to work on set."

"I had lost so much weight after the surgery, and my body was so frail. I still had to walk red carpets during that time, and when I look back at pictures, I can see how skinny I was. Too skinny. And too much in denial. But it's like I've said before, sometimes I did whatever it took to show up and get the job done ... even if it was to my own detriment.

For years, I never grieved losing my first baby. I didn't know how to, but I eventually learned. I had to speak to that baby and acknowledge their existence. I had to forgive myself and know that what had happened wasn't my fault, that I deserved to be a mother, and that I was ready to bring a baby into this world down here.

She even goes on to call that point in her life, "a toxic cycle of self-abuse that utilized the tools of starvation, binge eating, body obsession, and compulsive exercise."

"Kerry in college was a hot mess... and bit of a wild child," she added. "But it's halfway through college that I started asking for help. In some ways I'm really grateful for Kerry in college because hitting bottom the way that she did, she opened the door for a lot more healing for me."

"I still have that messaging in my brain at times, that I'm not enough or that I should look better," she wrote. "But I also can choose other thought patterns now."

“I just wanted financial freedom," she continued. “What if something happens to my mother? What if she doesn't come home one night? Either overdosed, arrested, whatever. And so, I decided to sell drugs. I decided to sell crack cocaine.”

She added, “Drugs were going to touch you, period. You could use them, you could sell them, but there was no being in an environment like that and drugs not touch you. And I'm not saying that it's right, of course, now being in a whole different mindset. But when you're living in a war zone and you just thinking about survival, I wasn't trying to use drugs. I surely wasn't going to be a drug dealer's girlfriend. But I wanted money so that I could be independent. I wanted to take care of myself.”

Lisa Marie wrote that the sexual abuse continued. She wrote, "Eventually, it became that he would touch me and spank me, telling me not to look — 'Don't look at me,' he'd say, 'Don't turn your head.' I assume he was jerking off."

Priscilla Presley and Michael Edwards dated for about six years and Lisa Marie described him as "an actor and a model, a dramatic guy with a horrible temper."

In a statement to Us Weekly, Edwards denies any sexual abuse claims made by Lisa Marie. "I never molested Lisa Marie and am shocked at the suggestion that I did," he said. 

In a separate interview with People, she reflected on the experience, saying, “People don’t really think about child-on-child molestation, but it’s something that exists. I felt weird and violated, but I didn’t really know how to place it. I just knew I had all these weird feelings and thoughts, and I felt a little bit out of control and overwhelmed.”

She wrote that her wake-up call was the time she accidentally scared a housekeeper, who found Whoopi on the floor of a hotel closet with cocaine all over her face. “I was letting something else run my life and take me over,” she wrote.

She wrote about how she tried to make their marriage work, even saying she attended therapy and set boundaries for them. She wrote, "'Start with something simple,' [Joy's therapist] advised. 'Violence, for example. Physical violence around you is not acceptable. Ever.' After that session, I told him this: 'If you throw something across the room again, I’m going to immediately remove myself and Rosie from that situation and we can try talking again the next day.'" When she told her husband this, he responded, saying, "I don't agree to that." 

Michael Galeotti, Lenz's former father-in-law, has refuted these allegations. Michael Jr., Lenz's ex-husband, has said he does not know what to make of the memoir and the claims made in it, but he does not want to cause any problems for their daughter.

While on the set of The Brothers Grimsby, Rebel claimed that Sacha asked her to film naked, but she doesn't do nudity. She added, “SBC summons me via a production assistant saying that I’m needed to film an additional scene. ‘Okay, well, we’re gonna film this extra scene,’ SBC says. Then he pulls his pants down ... SBC says very matter-of-factly: ‘Okay, now I want you to stick your finger up my ass.’ And I’m like, ‘What?? ... No!!’ ...”

She continued, “I was now scared. I wanted to get out of there, so I finally compromised: I slapped him on the ass and improvised a few lines as the character.”

After the allegation became public, Sacha's rep released a statement saying, "While we appreciate the importance of speaking out, these demonstrably false claims are directly contradicted by extensive detailed evidence, including contemporaneous documents, film footage and eyewitness accounts from those present before, during and after the production of The Brothers Grimsby.”

"I'm telling this story because I'm a strong-ass woman," she added, "not someone most people picture when they think 'abused woman.' But it can happen to anyone…I found my way out and will never be back there again. I got out. Get out."

"In 1977, at age 10, I was cast on the TV sitcom Good Times. My character was Penny, an abused child in desperate need of love," she wrote. "I really didn’t want to do the show. I didn’t want to be away from my family. And being on television only added to my negative feelings about my body."

She continued: "Before production began, I was told two things: I was fat and needed to slim down, and because I was beginning to develop, I needed to bind my breasts. In both cases the message was devastating — my body was wrong. The message was also clear — to be successful, I had to change the way I looked."

"'It means we need to tie down your breasts so you appear flat-chested,' the wardrobe woman explained," she wrote. "So, each day of shooting, I went through the ordeal of having wide strips of gauze tied across my chest to hide the natural shape of my breasts. It was uncomfortable and humiliating."

She added, "The one time I was offered coke, which happened to be by Paris Hilton, I turned it down." She even tells a story about the "third or fourth time" she dropped ecstasy and she ended up partying at the Playboy Mansion in LA and showed up hungover to a Maxim photoshoot the next morning.

Paris Hilton has never confirmed this story. 

She was only four years old when the crash happened. Molly, her sister Mary, and her father, who drove the car then, were the only survivors. 

"The car was mangled badly on impact," she wrote. "A man passing the scene stopped. My mother was lying on the ground beside our car and she asked him, 'Where are my girls?... She wanted to gather her three little girls and she couldn't. Her heart must have broken in that moment. And those were her final words...My baby sister, Katie, and cousin Fran were killed instantly. Since Mary and I were in the very back of the station wagon, we just had a concussion and a broken arm, respectively. Katie was buried in the wreckage."

He shared that he "hated" taking his shirt off for the 2008 movie Wieners. 

She said she spent several years denying to herself that it ever happened, and wrote that "hearing rape survivors’ stories didn’t seem to trigger me…it pissed me off in a way that I thought was activism." More than a decade later, Constance said she finally came to terms with what happened while on the plane coming back from filming Crazy Rich Asians in Singapore. "I was angry at myself for forgetting, angrier than I was at him for raping me," she wrote.

She said, "When I was ten and a half I was sitting in the back seat of a car driven by a friend’s mother. She started smoking pot. I’d wanted to try marijuana for a long time, but I was afraid that if I asked, she’d say, 'No way, Drew. You’re too young.' However, she offered me some and I said, 'Sure, I’ll try it.'"

She also wrote that alcohol put her in a dark place, and caused her to attempt suicide several times. After one attempt, she began attending Alcoholics Anonymous sessions. "With the introduction of AA, I felt hope for the first time in my life," she wrote.

Selma also shared that she's been sober since 2016. 

She shared that she'd had "eight or nine" miscarriages due to her adenomyosis. "To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience, the experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily while I was unable to, left my soul not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind," she wrote.

She and Dwyane welcomed their child Kaavia in 2018 via surrogate. 

Nia also wrote of several instances where Abby allegedly made rude comments about Nia's body. "She would say, ‘Well, you know your people have flat feet,'" Nia wrote. "This struck me as ignorant; I know plenty of Black dancers with perfectly arched feet! Yet, despite the fact that she actually believed this ridiculous generalization was true, she’d threaten punishment for my perceived shortcoming. ‘If you don’t point that foot,’ she’d warn, ‘I’m gonna come out there and break it.’”

"Comments came directly from Abby and trickled down to some of the girls and their moms, criticizing my thighs, my butt, and even my muscular legs," she added. 

"At one point in Season 6, Abby talked about the size of my thighs in the dressing room," she continued. "She implied that I was fat because I was not working hard enough. This was just one of many comments Abby made to create an illusion that I was lazy or just not strong as a dancer. Viewers and some of my castmates ate that up without question."

She wrote, "I was pulling off the deceit. It was hard for people to believe I was doing that much drugs. I look at photos from that event, and I didn't even look strung out!"

Then, speaking about the wedding she added, "I probably had two bottles of wine, and I was only 14. That first drink gave me the self-confidence I had been searching for my whole life. But that set the pattern of the kind of drinking that I would do."

He told the story, adding that he met "three kings" who helped him out that night. One was a gas station attendant who offered Tom water and $20. Two, an Uber driver who brought him back to Hollywood. And three, the bartender at his usual bar who gave Tom a place to stay and a shoulder to cry on. 

“All of a sudden, the frustration burst out of me,” he wrote. “I was, I realize now, completely sober for the first time in ages and I had an overwhelming sense of clarity and anger. I started screaming at God, at the sky, at everyone and no one, full of fury for what had happened to me, for the situation in which I found myself. I yelled, full-lung, at the sky and the ocean. I yelled until I’d let it all out, and I couldn’t yell anymore.”

Tom also shared heartbreaking words his lawyer told him. “My lawyer, whom I’d barely ever met face to face, spoke with quiet honesty,” he wrote. “‘Tom,’ he said, ‘I don’t know you very well, but you seem like a nice guy. All I want to tell you is that this is the seventeenth intervention I’ve been to in my career. Eleven of them are now dead. Don’t be the twelfth.'”

It was also around this time that JoJo began self-medicating with Adderall and alcohol. 

"I’d appreciated it when Oprah told me on her show that my sexuality was no one else’s business," she wrote. "And when it came to virginity, 'You don’t need a world announcement if you change your mind.'"

She added, “I’d become such a master at leaving my body when things were uncomfortable.” When Minka began gaining fame for her Friday Night Lights role, Rudy allegedly tried to sell the video to the tabloids. Minka had to pay $50,000 to buy it back.

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE, which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here. 

If you are concerned that a child is experiencing or may be in danger of abuse, you can call or text the National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453(4.A.CHILD); service can be provided in over 140 languages.

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, you can call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) and find more resources here.