The FaceTime line was about her own daughter, Kaya, who has lived in Europe with her father since 2018. Panettiere gave up full custody in 2018 while fighting addiction, and she called signing those papers the hardest thing she ever did.
Panettiere shared Kaya, now 11, with former fiancé Wladimir Klitschko, the retired heavyweight champion. Kaya was born in Hawaii on December 9, 2014, after a delivery so dangerous that doctors called a “code crimson” and Panettiere needed a 3-hour surgery when her blood wouldn’t clot.
She was diagnosed with postpartum depression and first entered treatment when Kaya was 4 months old. In her May 2026 memoir “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” she wrote about the emotional numbness that followed the birth: “I’d always heard that mothers feel an instant rush of love the moment they lay their eyes on their baby, but I felt nothing.”
Klitschko sought full custody in 2018, and Panettiere, still in recovery, decided not to fight him. “No mother could forget a single thing about the day she signed her child away,” she wrote.
She kept the relationship going through visits, travel and FaceTime, and pushed back on the perception that she’d walked away. “The idea that anybody would think that I would just give away my child and be okay with it is heartbreaking,” she said on Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” podcast in May. “Couldn’t be farther from the truth.”
Three months later, on Sunday, August 16, she died at 36.
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