James Blunt shared an article Monday defending himself amid rumors that he was the “very famous” and “undressed” British singer-songwriter Hayden Panettiere was left in bed on a boat with as a late teenager.
The article, titled “Hayden Panettiere and James Blunt – An Internet Lynching” from the Substack “WTF With Dean Piper,” goes into the allegations that have swirled since Panettiere’s death on Aug. 21 as fans revisit the troubled actress’ May 2026 memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning.” Piper argues that Blunt couldn’t have been the man in question.
Blunt shared the article on X in apparent agreement on Monday, simply adding, “👀” to the post.
In “This Is Me,” Panettiere described being introduced to a “a famous thirty-something British singer-songwriter lying in a bed” on a boat, where her friend said, “I want you to get in bed with him. He has a huge dick.” The late actress still in her teens at the time and remembered the experience as a past trauma. She said, “This is not going to happen,” before leaving the room but being stuck on the boat.
“My thoughts were a blur, but I’d spent my life trusting that others had my best interests at heart. Being ‘managed’ was routine, to the point where I lost faith in my intuition,” she wrote in the memoir. “I could feel my heart pounding, as I settled in underneath the sheets, I disassociated. My body no longer felt like my own. The shock was so great it didn’t even occur to me to say no.”
Piper, a former celebrity journalist who wrote an article in 2009 about Panettiere and Blunt at a charity event in Cannes where they “arrived together, had been flirty throughout and had gone to the afterparty together,” said he’s been inundated with “internet sleuths” asking for more details.
“Here lies the problem with the Wild West of internet chatter. Facts don’t matter. Legalities don’t matter,” Piper wrote. “People are saying whatever they like and getting away with it and that is wrong.”
Piper listed three facts that he felt cleared Blunt of the commenters’ suspicions that he was the man in question. The first is that, since the Cannes event took place in 2009, Panettiere would’ve been 19, not 18 (as she has specified in interviews), meaning her meeting with Blunt would’ve been too late for him to be the suspect. It should be noted that, while Panettiere has said elsewhere that she was 18 at the time of the incident, she specifies in her autobiography that it took place in 2009, lining up with the Cannes event.
The second is that the charity event took place a day before pictures place Blunt and Panettiere on a boat together, meaning he couldn’t be a man she hadn’t met before the boat.
And the third is a bit more personal. Piper pointed to an article written by The Spectator’s Joan Collins titled “The Day James Blunt Stripped Off in Front of Me.” There, Collins noted that, when Blunt performed the titular stripping, he “wore nothing but a pair of Speedos, concealing what one wag described as ‘a package worthy of a field mouse.’” This, Piper argues, clears Blunt of being the man Panettiere’s friend described as being well endowed.
Blunt, beyond the repost and telling eye emoji, has otherwise been mum on the viral allegations.
Editor’s note: References to Panettiere’s age at the time of the boat encounter have been amended.
