Hallmark Channel favorite Holly Robinson Peete offered a blunt assessment of comments made by Leslie Vogel, estranged mother of Hayden Panettiere, after her daughter’s passing.
Writing on social media, Robinson Peete made some observations about what what Vogel had — and hadn’t — said about her late daughter.
“We know this young lady clearly had so many issues, but if you’re not gonna take accountability for the fact that you put her in the business that eventually messed her up then nothing you say has any integrity,” Robinson Peete wrote via X.
“She didn’t even say ‘I will miss my daughter’ or ‘I loved my daughter the best way I could.’ Has she even mentioned the word daughter?” she added.
‘Speaking From the Gut’
Robinson Peete’s brief comment quickly went viral, making headlines along the way.
On Friday, August 21, Robinson Peete wrote a lengthy essay via Substack, in which she offered insight into her earlier comments about Vogel.
“Today would have been Hayden Panettiere’s 37th birthday,” Peete wrote.
“I recently gave my unsolicited emotional opinion about Hayden Panettiere’s mother and was surprised to see my thoughts go viral,” she continued.
“I was speaking from the gut, in shock, watching a statement that felt so inappropriately cold I couldn’t stay quiet,” she added. “But since it traveled further than I ever intended … I feel like I owe people the fuller story — not just what I said, but why it hit me the way it did.”
A Fellow Child Star
In her essay, Robin Peete reminded readers that she’d experienced a similar career trajectory to the one that Panettiere had, having both been child stars (Peete made her screen debut on “Sesame Street” at age four alongside her father, Matt Robinson, who portrayed Gordon on the show).
“In her first public words after her daughter’s death, Lesley Vogel talked about how hard this industry is on young people, about talent and struggle and lost paths,” Peete wrote.
“What struck me most was what wasn’t there. Not once did I hear her call Hayden her daughter. No warmth, no softness, nothing that sounded like a mother grieving a child … just the language of someone assessing a career,” she continued.
“When she said Hayden ‘had talent in so many departments,’ it landed like a casting director’s notes, not a mother’s heartbreak,” Robinson Peete observed. “And I kept thinking: ma’am, at eleven months old, Hayden did not drive herself to auditions.”
A Complicated Mother-Daughter Relationship
GettyShe then reflected on her own career, pointing out that her mother, Dolores Robinson, “managed my career for 30 years.”
However, she also pointed to a key difference between her situation and that of the late “Heroes” star.
Her mother, she wrote, “wasn’t a parent who backed into the job because her cute camera-ready kid kept landing auditions. I was not her only client as she was already a well-established talent manager, for more than a decade before I ever got ’21 Jump Street,’ the role that put me on the map. And granted I was in my 20s and a college graduate when my break came. Not a child.”
She continued by explaining how lines can become blurred when a parent becomes their child’s manager.
“When a parent starts managing you as a baby, and that’s the only relationship you’ve ever known with them, the whole thing can curdle into something purely transactional and every conversation shadowed by business, every piece of advice hard to separate from a client note,” she mused. “I believe that’s what happened with Hayden,” she wrote, adding that she “understands” how “genuinely hard it is to separate a parent from a manager, especially when they’ve been the same person your whole life, like in Hayden’s case.”
