Diana Jenkins is making it clear she was not the friend who pushed Hayden Panettiere into bed with a famous man on a boat when she was 18 years old.
“Diana has had to deal with false online rumors before, and sadly this is just another example of that,” the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum’s spokesperson said in a Wednesday, May 13, statement to TMZ. “So let me be 100 percent clear about this: It most certainly is not Diana, and anyone who claims it is her will be sued.”
The spokesperson also told the outlet that Jenkins, 53, previously sued others for making similar false allegations against her — and was successful in her legal efforts.
Us Weekly has reached out to Jenkins’ spokesperson for comment.
Earlier this week, Panettiere, 36, revealed that a trusted friend once told her to “perform” sexual acts with a famous older man nearly two decades ago. While Panettiere did not share the identity of her friend, social media speculated it could have been Jenkins as Panettiere previously appeared in the former reality star’s 2008 photography book Room 23.
“The fact that I was 18, even though I’d lived such a huge life and I thought I was oh so mature at 18 … scientifically, your frontal lobes don’t develop until we’re what, 25, 26?” she said of the alleged incident, which she also wrote about in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, during the Monday, May 11, episode of the “On Purpose with Jay Shetty” podcast. “So even though I felt like I could make healthy decisions, safe decisions, I wasn’t capable of being fully aware of what was going on around me.”
Panettiere claimed that she was in “very small room” on a boat with a man while they were “literally out to sea.”
“She physically put me in the bed next to this undressed man who was very famous,” she recalled, adding that the man acted “like this was just an average day for him.”
Panettiere shared that she was instantly on alert of her surroundings in the situation.
“That lion in me, that fire in me … my hair stood on end and I became ferocious. I was like, ‘This is not happening.’”
Panettiere didn’t see a place to hide so she ended up “bolting” away.
“There was no jumping off and swimming away,” she added. “And there was nobody who was going to be empathetic to my situation. I realized that this was nothing new to them.”
