Hayden Panettiere Blames Media, Not Publicist, For Romantic Woes

Leave it to Poor Man's Hilary Duff herself, Hayden Panettiere, to ask the hard-hitting question, "Is luv a game?" And to her we say, yes. But the star of the overlooked cheerleader polemic Bring It On: All or Nothing doth protest too much. She complains about the destructive, anti-Erosian tendency of the media, adding, "People have no idea what they do to people’s relationships. They destroy them." But fails to consider how, despite the lurking tendencies of the paparazzi, there's probably someone on the inside who's leaking all the juicy tidbits to gossip doyennes the world over. A mysterious figure in the shadows. She might wear a mink stole, smoke cigarettes and have a husky voice, like Kathleen Turner after a pack of Marlboro Reds and a few shots of absinthe. But she knows how to keep an otherwise uninteresting celebrity's name glowing in the headlines.

Sadly, Panettiere, in all her child-like wonder hasn’t quite connected the dots. She continues whining about maintaining a relationship in the public eye—which is why even one of her contemporaries, like Emma Watson, has learned quickly to keep the parts of her life most ripe for tabloid picking buried away. At this point, we can imagine her publicist chuckling hysterically in her dimly lit office while pouring more absinthe from her carafe.

But Panettiere continues. “The paparazzi and the public. The public wants to read about your personal life, and the paparazzi give it to them by nosing into your personal life and saying things that are just not true and horrible.” Perhaps when she’s closing in on 27 and unable to get roles other than “older sister” and “aunt”—the filmic equivalent to the kiss of death—she’ll furiously dial her publicist. At this point, Panettiere willingly dispense details of her sex life for her to work some of her media magic. And her publicist, who was born 50 and will never age past that half-century, will snicker into the phone, make some oblique asides about Candace Cameron Buré, and say, “Oh honey, you’re done. Goodbye.”