Anna Paquin was 11 years old when she won an Oscar. Today, with Hayden Panettiere’s death still fresh, she decided to say something she had kept quiet for years.
She wrote that it is no coincidence that so many former child stars, especially girls who were sexualized from a very young age, end up with lives marked by sadness and premature deaths. Panettiere had shared in her memoirs that when she was 16, someone from her own team gave her a “happy pill” so that she would appear cheerful in interviews. She did not know that this was not normal. It was, in her words, the gateway to her addiction.
That same year, Michelle Trachtenberg, Daveigh Chase, and Hayden herself died. Melissa Gilbert summed it up with a question that Paquin now repeats: where is the union, where are the regulations that should have protected these girls from their very first contract?