Hayden was only 19 years old and for a long time she tried to convince herself that it had simply been a “joke”. In her memoir, the actress recalled that she was at a small Hollywood party when a renowned Oscar-winning actor and director approached her to warn her that she supposedly had gum stuck to her pants. When she looked down, she discovered that the man had his fly open and was showing her his private parts.
“I had never seen an adult man do something like that”, Hayden recalled. She said she was shocked, stepped back, and did not even tell the friend who was with her at the time. She was very young and ended up trying to justify what had happened by thinking that perhaps alcohol had influenced his behavior.
Many years later, she decided to publicly recount that episode, but she never revealed who the Oscar winner was. The reason? Hayden explained that she feared the legal consequences of identifying some of the powerful Hollywood figures she wrote about and acknowledged that she did not have the financial resources to face them in court.
So she told what happened to her, but protected the name of the person who, according to her account, did it. After her passing, the identity of that Oscar winner is a secret Hayden took with her.