Hayden Panettiere’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, had his request to reduce his past felony charges denied by a judge just three days before the actress died.
Back in April 2021, Hickerson plead no contest to two felony counts of injuring a spouse or girlfriend after he was arrested in Los Angeles and hit with an eight-count criminal indictment. The charges stemmed from a series of abusive incidents between May 2019 and January 2020 involving Panettiere.
The prosecution objected both his motions to expunge and to reduce the charges to a misdemeanor in a hearing on Aug. 13, and the court denied it in docs obtained by Page Six.
Judge Olivia Rosales denied the motion last Thursday, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office confirmed to Page Six Monday.
This isn’t the first time his request to reduce and dismiss his felonies has been denied — he made the same request in July 2025, we’re also told.
In Hickerson’s petition for dismissal, it’s noted that he had fulfilled the conditions of his probation.
Hickerson was sentenced by a judge in 2021 to 45 days in county jail, four years of formal probation, 52 mandatory domestic violence classes and a five-year restraining order. He ended up serving 33 days in LA Men’s Central Jail after receiving credit for 12 days previously served.
Panettiere and Hickerson dated on and off starting in 2018, though the relationship was tumultuous and marred by multiple domestic violence incidents and arrests.
On Valentine’s Day in 2020, cops alleged he punched Panettiere “with a closed fist on the right side of her face” at a private residence in Jackson, Wyoming.
Panettiere candidly wrote about suffering physical abuse in her memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” and later admitted she had a hard time cutting off contact with Hickerson.
“Getting an abusive person out of your life is like trying to rip a weed out that is so entangled into your life, and every time you pull it out another weed pops back up and you’re like, I thought I killed this,” she told Us Weekly in May.
She added, “They always manage to find a way to slither back in, even if you’re an incredibly strong-willed person. What happened in Wyoming helped push me in the right direction, but it still took me a long time. I still struggled to fully put a kibosh to it for a while.”
That same month, Hickerson admitted to one particularly harrowing incident he didn’t want in her book, but she included it anyway.
“There’s a story where I was drunk, right? Hayden was standing across the room and I had a phone in my hand and I said, ‘Hayden, I’ll give you 10 seconds to run as fast as you can before I throw it at you,’” he recalled.
“Who wants to read something about themselves, right?” he admitted about reading her memoir. “But you gotta be vulnerable and I did it. I did it, so.”
He also recalled of their time together, “I went into such a dark place, man, drugs, alcohol. Good God, almighty, she’s five foot two on paper, four foot 11 in real life. I mean, come on.”
Panettiere died after an “overdose,” according to 911 dispatch audio obtained by Page Six. Emergency responders attempted to resuscitate her at the apartment complex with “advanced cardiac life support” and chest compressions, but she was pronounced dead at 2:32 p.m.
Narcan — a medicine typically used to quickly reverse an opioid overdose — was found at the scene of her death, TMZ reported.
The “Nashville” alum was 36 years old.
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