Hayden Panettiere's Ongoing Relationship With One-Time Abuser and Why Women STAY After Abuse

When I was at NBC, I interviewed many women who were survivors of domestic violence, and we actually made a point of reaching out to women who were sophisticated, who were accomplished, who were wealthy to see if they had stories to tell. In particular, we were hitting on the tech industry. I mean, the women in tech are very badass. I'm sorry, I've met a lot of them. It's like women on Wall Street. That's what they remind me of. They're tough. They are in a very male-dominated industry, just like the women on Wall Street, and they have got to learn to have thick skin and to get along with the bros. Otherwise, you're not going to make it. That's just the reality. That is the reality, and they do. They do learn how to have a thick skin and how to brush things off and how to not make everything a federal case. Trust me, these are not thin-skinned women. They work in tech. They're brilliant. Many of them have multiple advanced degrees from MIT and so on. They're brilliant and very well-accomplished in their own right. These are the women I was talking to who allowed themselves to get punched in the face. Now, why did they do that? It's a very complicated list of reasons. If you are a strong woman listening to this and you think there is zero chance after the first hit that I would stick around, I urge you to reconsider. I should be up front. This never happened to me. I feel like I'm talking to somebody to whom it's happened. Thank God that has not happened to me, but I know people to whom it's happened. It's not true that you would necessarily walk out after the first hit. There's a reason Hayden Panettiere was very damaged, but she was very feisty. There's a reason she stayed, and there's a reason my one guest on NBC that I'm thinking of today, Neha Rastogi, stayed. Neha worked at Apple. She helped invent Siri and FaceTime. This woman is very, very bright. She married an Indian man. She's Indian. She married an Indian American. She married an Indian man via an arranged marriage chosen by her parents when she was age 24. It's one of those things where things are great until they're not great. Everything's wonderful. In fact, usually an abuser is a love bomber who sweeps you off your feet until that first punch across the face. Then your whole worldview has been completely rattled. Then the bargaining begins for a lot of these women. It's not real. It's not really happening to me. He's sorry. He was drunk. He didn't mean it. A lot of self-blame. I heard this from all of them. It was me. I provoked him like you heard Hayden in that write-up. I told him to do it. I said, give it your best shot. I guess she's just telling a story, but the truth is none of that is relevant. I could say to Doug in our most fierce argument ever, give it your best shot. Do it. Punch me in the face. He would never, never, never. Some men are built differently. Unfortunately for Hayden and for Neha, they found themselves in that situation. Let me just play something of Neha in my interview with her describing the abuse. He has hit me in my head, pulled my hair, pushed me, slapped me, punched me. Just months after her dream wedding, Neha says the nightmare began. She says Abhishek was angry because a movie they'd gone to see was sold out. And then he kept getting angrier and angrier in the car. And then she says when they got home, he slapped me and he pushed me. I fell down. He even kicked me in the belly. And I was in such utter, complete shock. Neha says she spent the night on the floor where her husband had beaten her. There were no apologies the next day. You know that there are millions of women out there who are saying that would have been it. The first hit, I would have been out of there. No, it doesn't work that way. Thoughts that came to me were fear, what this man is capable of, a lot of regret. Like, what did I walk into? Is this how it's going to be? And then my family. I've never known divorce. When the baby was just three months old, a mail carrier witnessed Abhishek hitting Neha outside their home. The mailman called the police. Abhishek was arrested and charged with spousal battery. But then he called me from jail. He sounded so broken. You had empathy for him? Yes. She had empathy for him. In this next soundbite, you're going to hear that how he behaved when he got out of jail and also the audio that Neha took of her husband. And you will hear, and this is very rare for an abuse victim to actually get any of it on camera. This is audio. She used the iPhone, parts of which she helped create to tape the abuse, because she understood full well that it was going to be a he said, she said. Listen here. Watch. Neha not only bailed him out of jail, she hired an attorney to defend him. I can't leave him in the state. I will get him out of this mess. And maybe then we can talk about it. Abhishek pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of disturbing the peace. He was sentenced to two years of probation and domestic violence class. How much longer after that 2013 huge incident did he lay hands on you in anger again? I would say pretty quickly after the 52 week class was done. By 2016, Neha got bolder. She took out the tool she had once worked on so hard and used it to record Abhishek's behavior. What is above? Come on. What's above? In this recording, Neha says Abhishek was grilling her on her computer know-how and it became physical. Neha, I'm using recipes app. Listen carefully. Those thudding sounds? What would you do? I would fix it. Neha says that's the sound of her husband slapping her. Tell me, keep that link or remove it? Remove it. On another day, she captured this threat. Yeah, I would like to see you murder. I actually imagine I can now relate to doing that to you. It got so bad, Neha said, she started planning for her own death. Incredibly dark. 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So many times these domestic violence victims will not testify against their abuser because they're afraid and also they're just almost brainwashed into being part of it. I don't press charges. He's going to change. It's not all coercion, like I'm afraid he's going to beat me if I testify against him. That is a piece of it. But it's also they believe in these guys. They've been abused so much that they fall into a pattern of you know, I brought it on myself. I'm to blame for this. I've got to help get him out of this. It's not fair to him. He's misunderstood all of the excuses. So when I read the Hayden Penetier story with respect to this guy, it does make some sense to me. And now there is new information about Brian. NBC is citing a report saying that he was there when she was found, that he did not become visibly emotional until she was declared dead at the scene. His brother, Zach, was reportedly very emotional while emergency medical service professionals were working on Hayden. So there you have it. Brian was there, unemotional until she was dead. Boy, that's on brand. And the brother was emotional, understanding what had happened. They met for the Daily Mail the summer of 2018. She was newly single, recently out of rehab and hoping to make a fresh start. Her ex-fiance, Ukrainian boxer, Vladimir Kitschko, had obtained in 2018 full custody of their three-year-old daughter, Kaya, thanks to Penetier's postpartum depression and alcoholism. So her brother, Penetier's brother, Jason, who also died a few years ago of a congenital heart defect but also was said to have been struggling with substance abuse, he's five years younger than her, he suggested they go out in West Hollywood and have a good time. There she met at some wildly popular gay bar called The Abbey, Brian Hickerson. Hickerson, an aspiring actor, reports the Daily Mail, and a real estate agent from South Carolina, she died in Greenville, swept Penetier off her feet at lightning speed, she writes in her memoir. Within several weeks, they were living together at her Los Angeles home, dancing in her living room, redecorating, playing board games and watching practically every Netflix series ever made. I finally began to feel beautiful again, she wrote, praising his smile and his sense of humor. I also started to feel safe, loved and cherished. It was like Brian and I were two best friends living together under one roof. This is so, you know, didn't we just talk about this with Maureen on Thursday? We just talked about Shanann Watts, the widow of, sorry, the decedent, the victim of Chris Watts, and how she had just gotten out of a bad relationship when she met Chris, and was like, he's great, this is a much better choice, this is going to be life-changing, so much so that she married him. And here's Hayden Penetier, not out of a bad relationship, though. I mean, they didn't get, she didn't stay together with the Ukrainian boxer who was the father of her child, so I'm going to guess it wasn't, you know, all rainbows and unicorns, they got engaged and then it fell apart, but I'm not impugning him. I'm just saying she had just gotten out of a relationship, but more importantly to me, she had just gotten out of rehab. So this is a woman, unsteady, who's made some very poor choices. It's not great to lose your daughter thanks to your alcoholism and your substance abuse, and now your engagement to the daughter's father has fallen apart, and then you go to a gay bar, which is not a great place to meet your future husband either, and here is Bryan Hickerson, an aspiring actor, great, and a real estate agent, so it's not going well. And then it sounds like he loved-bombed her, and again, a terrible decision, she moved in with him. She moved in with him, she writes in the memoir, within weeks at her home, he moved in with her. He appears to have been the freeloader, that's how it looks to me, and you don't have somebody move in with you within weeks. Don't live with somebody before marriage. I've done it. I speak from experience here. I lived with my first husband before we got married. I did not live with Doug before we got married, and I have to say, it does change things. It's not the only thing that changed things, obviously, but it does change things. The marriage is elevated in its feeling of specialness, its feeling of uniqueness, of importance, when you haven't been practicing, faking it for months and months and months, playing husband and wife when you're not. And you certainly don't move in with somebody after a few weeks. When you're just out of rehab, you're struggling with your alcoholism, your drug addiction, the trauma of losing your child to the daughter's father, you participated in this whole thing. It's not that she died, it's that she willingly let the father have custody given her own issues. This is no time. Ladies, we call these things home to us. We call these bad experiences or bad actors home to us, and the answer in every case is to examine ourselves. We can cast the blame on these bad actors all we want, and there's no question they deserve plenty of it, but why are we bringing these patterns to ourselves? Only you can answer that, and honestly, it requires work. I know there's a big pushback on therapy in today's day and age. I don't agree with it. If you find yourself the right therapist, they can be a game changer. You may not always agree, but we are always going to talk about it and respect. No BS, no agenda, no fear.