James Blunt has stepped in to dismiss the rumors that he was the unnamed, unclothed, and widely recognized man Hayden Panettiere allegedly shared a bed with on a yacht when she was eighteen.
In her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, Panettiere described the man as a “famous thirty-something British singer-songwriter”, to whom she was “delivered”.
Earlier this week, the You’re Beautiful hitmaker posted on X a link to a Substack article by journalist Dean Piper that aims to challenge the claim that Blunt is the mysterious man in question.
The essay, titled Hayden Panettiere and James Blunt, An Internet Lynching, argues that the chronology does not add up.
“It only takes the smallest of AI searches to find out that in May 2009, when pictures of Blunt and Panettiere were taken, she was 19, almost 20. So, if the incident happened when she was 18, Blunt’s not your guy.”
Piper also contends that Panettiere’s account of the unsettling encounter, in which she allegedly fled the room and hid somewhere else on the boat, does not align with the fact that she and Blunt were photographed together on multiple occasions after the event.
“It takes nothing to work out that the cabin incident was the first and last time she met the man,” he wrote. “So, pictures of Blunt and Panettiere together again mean only one thing: he’s really not your man.”
Panettiere died last Sunday of an apparent overdose. She was 36 years old.
