Credit: Matt Baron/BEI/Shutterstock
September 2022
Panettiere praised her ex for being a “fantastic” parent to Kaya but pointed out during an episode of Red Table Talk that there will be some things their daughter will need her for in the future that Klitschko may not be able to deal with on his own. “I also remember her dad calling me, and he said, ‘Kaya’s going around and asking other women if she can call them mommy,'” she recalled. “And my breath hitched and my heart stopped, and he was laughing. He thought this was funny, and it was horrifying to me. He didn’t get it as it was to me who saw that’s a trauma reaction. That’s a cry for help. … I have tried to explain how much she needs her mom and how it’s going to rear its ugly head later when she is older, and it could turn into anger, depression, sadness, whatever it is, but it’s going to be a trauma.”
Elsewhere in the episode, the Scream 4 star also claimed that she wasn’t “fully” involved in the decision to send Kaya overseas to live with her dad. “I didn’t even know it was happening until she was already over there,” she alleged. “[She’s] in a country where her uncle is the mayor, and they are icons over there. It’s a country where it’s very male dominated, so there wasn’t a heck of a lot that I could do. … I thought she was going over to visit him like she always did. She went back and forth between me in Nashville and Ukraine, and then once she was over there, it was immediately, ‘I want full custody of her,’ which was a shock to me.”
