hayden panettiere told us she was bisexual in may. by august she was gone, and now we know how.

via NBC News and CBS News, with her coming-out interview as reported by Good Morning America.

"I'm comfortable to confidently say that yes, I am bisexual."

Hayden Panettiere said that in May, to Us Weekly, in the run-up to her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning. She had spent most of her life on camera, the star of Heroes and then Nashville, and this was the first time she had said it publicly. The book, she said, was where she had "chosen to be completely brutally honest about this, and that's something about me that I was never able to share with the world."

Three months later she was gone. She was found on August 16 at a residence in Greenville, South Carolina, according to NBC News and CBS News.

what the coroner found

On Tuesday, the Greenville County Coroner's Office ruled her death an accidental overdose, listing "the toxic effects of" fentanyl, 4-ANPP, alprazolam, methocarbamol and quetiapine. NBC reported that the DEA is investigating and that investigators would try to reconstruct her final days.

The memoir was about addiction, abuse and postpartum depression, and it read like the work of someone trying to get out the other side. "Still working on myself all the time," she told CBS's Gayle King in May. "I had a great therapist and I'm, I'm better, healthier than I've been in a long time."

the part we want to keep

Coming out at 36, after a whole life lived in front of an industry that decided who she was before she could, is not a small thing. It looked like a woman finally narrating her own life, and getting to say one true sentence about it out loud before the end.

That sentence is hers, and it stays. Bi women spend a lot of time being told they are a phase or a trend. Hayden Panettiere said it anyway, on the record, in her own book.

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