James Blunt Wants His Name Cleared in Hayden Panettiere Yacht Story

Following the shocking death of Hayden Panettiere, all eyes naturally turned to her recent memoir where she detailed numerous ways in which her family, so-called friends, and the industry at large failed her as it’s tragically done to so many child stars before.

Nestled in This Is Me: A Reckoning is an incident that allegedly took place on a luxury yacht when Panettiere was reportedly 18 years old. According to the Heroes star, a friend named “Stella” led Panettiere to a room where “a famous thirtysomething British singer-songwriter was lying in a bed.” Things went quickly south.

Via Entertainment Weekly:

“He was shirtless and propped up on a few pillows with his arms positioned behind his head. From the waist down, he was covered by bedsheets, and I could see the outline of his body underneath.”

Panettiere says Stella pulled up the sheets and told the Nashville actress, “I want you to get in bed with him. He has a huge d***.” Panettiere slipped under the covers, not thinking to say no to whom she thought was a close friend.

“My thoughts were a blur, but I’d spent my life trusting that others had my best interests at heart. Being ‘managed’ was routine, to the point where I lost faith in my intuition,” she writes. “I could feel my heart pounding, as I settled in underneath the sheets, I disassociated. My body no longer felt like my own. The shock was so great it didn’t even occur to me to say no.”

Stella then left the musician and actress together, but Panettiere didn’t let things go any further. “Look,” she recalled saying, “I don’t know what she said to you, but this is not going to happen.” Panettiere left the room, ran to her cabin, and made arrangements for her to leave the yacht as soon as possible.

Panettiere would further elaborate on the situation, telling the On Purpose podcast, “I had nowhere to hide. I bolted and I hid wherever I could think of to hide on a boat. There was no jumping off and swimming away… and I realized that there was nobody who was going to be empathetic to my situation — that this was nothing new to them.”

Obviously, the internet went to work trying to deduce the name of the singer, and that put James Blunt in the crosshairs. He would like people to stop doing that. On Monday, Blunt tweeted out a Substack article that seemingly clears his name.

Via WTF with Dean Piper:

Guys, it only takes the smallest of AI searches to find out that in May 2009, when the pictures of Blunt and Panettiere were taken, she was 19, almost 20. So, if the incident happened when she was 18, Blunt’s not your guy to start with.

And as she says she hadn’t met the man before the incident, and that she fled the boat immediately after, it takes nothing to work out that the cabin incident was the first and last time she met the man. So, pictures of Blunt and Panettiere at the amfAR charity event (above) and together on the boat again the next day (below) mean only one thing - he’s really not your man. You can find more pictures from that boat day HERE.

Piper does make a compelling argument. For starters, Panettiere never specifies that the yacht incident happened at Cannes, which she only attended once, and the timing with her age doesn’t completely add up. Two, I actually remember the photos of her hanging out with Blunt, and yes, they looked very friendly.

That said, Blunt could still have been the dude. Not to minimize what was clearly a shocking event, whoever the naked Brit was, he didn’t seem to press the matter when Panettiere says this isn’t happening and bolts. If this is presented to her as normal and everyone chalks it up as an innocent faux pas — which, again, it obviously was not — hanging around with Blunt after the fact isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Nor is taking stock of the incident years later while writing your memoir and realizing, “No, wait, that was messed up.”

So is Blunt fully exonerated? We’ll never truly know now.