Paris Hilton is standing next to me wearing a black Alice + Olivia pleated mini skirt and top with an embroidered collar, Louboutin boots with pearl studded heels, black Prada bucket hat, sunglasses and phone case around her neck, leaving voice notes for her Uber driver. He's mistakenly arrived at The Beverly Hilton hotel to collect her, as opposed to the Waldorf Astoria, where we’ve just spent the afternoon together. As far as I can tell, the Uber driver has no clue that the passenger issuing him directions is, in fact, the most famous member of the Hilton hotel dynasty. It’s the voice; several octanes deeper when off-duty, compared to Paris Hilton’s ‘on duty’ soft, coquettish, baby voice. It’s quite extraordinary to witness this vocal dichotomy IRL.
I tell Paris I’m surprised that there’s no chauffeur waiting, delivering one of her fleet of supercars (including a Barbie pink Bentley and an iridescent holographic BMW i8 Roadster with butterfly wings.) “Oh, I don’t drive those very often,” she replies (in the deep voice). “Getting an Uber is much easier.”
Paris’s low-key mode of transport is a surprise, for sure. But it is just one of the many, much more significant and startling things that I discover during my two hours with the 42-year-old world-famous icon of pop culture. Afterwards, I think how incredibly unbridled and honest Paris was, opening up for the first time about many dark elements of her past. But then the following week, I discover – along with the rest of the world – that she was keeping a massive, life-changing secret, more on which later.
Many of us grew up with Paris on our screens, but for those who think they know Paris Hilton, the forthcoming publication of Paris The Memoir on March 14 is about to blow everything out the water. It’s one of the best celebrity biographies I’ve ever read; the revelations within it are shocking, moving and deeply personal.
Paris opens up for the first time about her experiences of sexual assault and abuse, including being groomed by one of her teachers and a narrow escape from an aggressive encounter with Harvey Weinstein. It really does offer a different context to her life and past behaviours.
It also reveals Paris as funny, self-aware and surprisingly profound, while offering a fascinating insight into celebrity culture, which she has undoubtedly helped define for the last two decades.
Paris Whitney Hilton was born in New York City on February 17, 1981, the first child of property developer Rick and former child actress Kathy, and the great-granddaughter of legendary hotel magnate Conrad Hilton. Her childhood was one of extraordinary privilege as she and her three siblings – sister Nicky and brothers Barron and Conrad – divided their time between Bel Air and Park Avenue. When Paris was growing up, she wanted to be a vet and was a tomboy who had a collection of pet ferrets and a goat. “I didn’t even like pink”, she tells me.
As the woman whose name became universal shorthand for blonde, spoiled and rich in the early noughties, thanks to her hit reality TV show The Simple Life – which spawned the omnipotent cult of reality TV (never forget Kim Kardashian was once Paris’s assistant) and whose ‘That’s hot’ catchphrase is as famous as she was for being a “hot mess” in her twenties – it may be surprising to hear that Paris’s book tells a different story: one of female empowerment and survival.
“I’m not a dumb blonde, I’m just very good at pretending to be one,” she tells me. “The real me is someone who is strong and resilient, brave, smart and fun.”
A dark, secret past
Paris arrives for our interview entirely on her own, bar Ether, her miniature white Pomeranian, who is literally the size of a guinea pig. She’s giving Cher from Clueless meets Audrey Hepburn vibes and it’s easy to see why she’s become a Y2K fashion icon to Gen-Z on TikTok – and why Donatella Versace chose her to close her show in Milan at Fashion Week last September.
In the Diptyque-scented serenity of the white marbled lobby, the only thing belying the fact that this tall, willowy blonde is indeed Paris Hilton, is her bubblegum-pink dog carrier – emblazoned with her catchphrase, ‘Loves It’ – from her luxury pet accessories range. (Yours, or rather your pooch’s, for just $750.)
Paris admits she is nervous about the interview, and her hands are visibly shaking as she struggles to get the key card to work in the elevator. Other guests are starting to twig and selfies are rapidly requested, to which the woman who invented the selfie, politely obliges (cue on-duty baby voice.)
We arrive in a suite high above Beverly Hills and the room is filled with pink roses, Diet Coke, herbal teas, bowls of crisps and a plate of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cut into circles, no crusts. “I just love kids’ food,” she says, peeling back one of the sandwiches to layer on more jelly as she settles on the sofa next to me, Ether in between us.
From the word go, Paris is unflinchingly honest and not afraid to tackle the heavy stuff – of which there is a lot.
Depending on your level of Paris Hilton expertise, the well-versed will know that three years ago, she first revealed details of her abusive past in her acclaimed 2020 YouTube documentary, This Is Paris.
In it, she opens up about the abuse she suffered during her two years in various schools for troubled teens, such as Provo Canyon School in Utah, where she spent 11 months.
She was also the victim of a leaked sex tape and the general misogynistic mood towards women in Hollywood throughout the early 2000’s, it seems entirely justified that she says she feels like a survivor.
“I think I’ve just been through so many things that I’m a warrior, I’m a fighter, I’m brave. And I’m a badass.”
As if this isn’t enough for anyone to live with, she is now speaking out about two further incidents of abuse that she has encountered, both at the age of 15.
“I was just such a young girl and I got manipulated by my teacher,” she tells me quietly. “He took advantage of a young girl and that was something I blocked out as well, I didn’t remember it until years later. He would call me on the phone all the time, just flirting with me, trying to put in my mind that I was this mature woman.”
One night, he lured her outside her home and into his car, before her parents drove up. “We only kissed, but if my parents didn’t come, imagine what he would’ve tried to do?” she asks. The teacher panicked and they embarked on a car chase with the Hiltons in pursuit. “We literally drove through Bel Air at like 100 miles an hour,” she recalls, still frightened at the memory. “We were going so fast and somehow we got away from them through a red light. He was freaking out and drove me back home to Bel Air, where he was like, ‘Get out.’” Paris returned before her parents and she raced back to her room and pretended to be asleep.
“To this day, I’ve not talked about it with my family. I’ve never told anyone,” she says. However the unjustified shame she felt because of this experience started to seep into her psyche. “I don’t know what it was, I just felt so ashamed by the whole situation – just from the beginning at such a young age and it really stuck with me in a weird way.”
After that, Paris was sent to live with her maternal grandmother in Palm Springs. She would return to Los Angeles on the weekends to see her friends and hang out at Century City mall. “We would go there almost every weekend,” she tells me. “That was our favourite thing to do and these [older] guys would always just be hanging around the stores… we’d talk to them, give them our beeper [pager] numbers.”
“And then one day, they invited us to their house and we’re drinking these berry wine coolers,” she tells me, recalling how one guy was particularly forceful in making her drink the wine. “I didn’t drink or anything back then, but then when I had maybe one or two sips, I just immediately started feeling dizzy and woozy. I don’t know what he put in there, I’m assuming it was a roofie [Rohypnol].”
Paris recalls waking up a few hours later and discovering that her friend had left, but she knew something had happened. “I remembered it. I have visions of him on top of me, covering my mouth, being like, ‘You’re dreaming, you’re dreaming,’ and whispering that in my ear.”
The experience, her first sexual experience, once again made her feel ashamed and she retreated into herself. And then came two years of boarding school.
Paris was sent to a series of expensive behavioural modification programmes from the ages of 16 to 18, by her well-intentioned and despairing parents, who hoped that these institutions – which promised a cross between bootcamp and boarding school – would discipline their wayward daughter, who was skipping school and sneaking out from home (then the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue) in the dead of night to party at Manhattan’s most exclusive clubs. Paris has since been diagnosed with ADHD, something that she claims contributed a lot to her erratic behaviour when she was younger.
Amongst the many horrors she endured at these institutions, Paris tells me that she was force-fed drugs. “I got sent to solitary confinement because a girl told on me for not taking the pills,” she recalls quietly, revealing that following this a group of the staff tackled her to the ground. “They [the staff] carried me into a room, threw me in there, took my clothes. And I don’t even know how long I was in there, I was just in hysterics, crying. There’s blood on the walls, faeces, urine, only a drain. No windows. Crazy.”
She was also subjected to late-night gynaecological examinations.
“This was something that I had blocked out from my memory, but after hearing the story from other survivors, I started having flashbacks,” she recalls. “Late at night, staff members would come in and take certain girls and bring them into this room. And literally you would scream and cry, they would hold you down, four of them, men and women, and literally just be putting fingers… and just doing things on a regular basis to certain girls.” She confirms to me that she was one of those ‘certain girls’.
As she’s recalling the abuse from Provo Canyon school, tears start streaming down her face and she clutches my hand, almost childlike.
“I’m sorry, I just get so emotional thinking about it,” she says while I pass her tissues. “I was just a little girl. I just feel like they stole my childhood and it’s heartbreaking that it’s still happening to so many kids today.”
Her parents knew nothing about this – any attempt to tell them on rare phone calls home would be thwarted by teachers. And despite Paris’s numerous attempts to run away, she was always caught and sent back until she turned 18. When she left, she chose to keep it a secret for 20 years. (She has since received apologies from both her parents, who she tells me, were also victims of the system as they were kept in the dark about the truth.)
“When I got out, I made a promise that I’m never going to talk about this again,” she says. “‘This did not happen, this is not part of my story, this is not who I am…’ I think that the reason they’ve got away with it for so long is because they instil that into the children, where you feel so ashamed – like you’re this bad person when they’re emotionally and psychologically torturing you to the point that you don’t even know who you are any more. It’s horrible that I held that shame in for so long.”
Turning pain into power
Since going public with this trauma, she has turned her pain into purpose, becoming an activist and lobbying congress to reform and regulate the industry, campaigning for the Stop Institutional Child Abuse bill.
To lighten the mood, I suggest that if 10 years ago, I’d told anyone that Paris Hilton would become an activist, meeting with senators in Washington DC, helping pass laws advocating for hundreds of thousands of abused children, they would not have believed me! She laughs in agreement, “They’d be like, ‘no way!’”
“I feel most empowered when I’m doing my advocacy work, she says. “Knowing that I can be the hero I always needed when I was a little girl.”
In 2021, Paris detailed the allegations of abuse she’d suffered at Provo Canyon and other schools before a state-senate committee hearing at the Utah capitol.
“A lot of people say to me, ‘If this could happen to Paris Hilton, I can’t even imagine what’s going to happen to a poor foster care child or an orphan.’”
GLAMOUR reached out to Provo Canyon school for comment but had yet to receive a response at the time of publication.
She’s conscious that the atmosphere of women being silenced by society allowed for institutions and individuals to get away with this kind of behaviour. Like many other women in Hollywood at that time, she had an unpleasant encounter with Harvey Weinstein at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000 when she was 19. The incident happened at the amfAR (The Foundation for Aids Research) gala, of which Weinstein was the host, the day after Paris met him at lunchtime.
“I was at lunch with my girlfriend and he came up to the table and was like, ‘Oh, you want to be an actress?’ And I said, “Yeah, I really want to be in a movie,’” she recalls. “I was a teenager, so I was impressed by him. I was like, ‘Oh my god, Harvey Weinstein is so cool!’ and he said, ‘Well, we should have a meeting. You can come up to my room and read scripts’… and I just didn’t want to go, so I never went.”
The next night at the gala, Weinstein became aggressive with her, following her into the ladies’ toilets screaming at her, “Ya wanna be a star?”
“I went into the bathroom and then he followed me,” she recalls. “He tried to open the door, he was hammering on the door, banging on it. And I wouldn’t open it, because I was like, ‘I’m in a stall, why do you want to come in here?’ And I just wouldn’t open it. And security came and literally carried him away and he was like [shouting], ‘This is my party,’ going nuts. It scared me and freaked me out.”
I ask if she’d heard the rumours about him at the time?
“Yeah, and it was just someone so powerful in Hollywood who everyone was terrified of,” she says. “I didn’t even want to say anything about it because I was like, ‘I don’t want people getting mad at me for saying anything,’ because it was just a known thing. He was just like that and people were like, ‘OK, just turn a blind eye.’”
Harvey Weinstein denies that the incident ever happened, including Hilton’s allegations that he yelled at her and followed her into the toilet.
While the MeToo movement has blown wide the truth about the way women were mistreated in Hollywood, the issue of women's bodily autonomy in the US is still very much on her mind. Having found her voice with her political activism, Paris is keen to speak out about last year’s repeal by the Supreme Court of Roe v. Wade, restricting women's access to safe abortions – especially as she herself had an abortion in her early twenties.
“This was also something that I didn’t want to talk about because there was so much shame around that,” she tells me. “I was a kid and I was not ready for that.”
However, now that Paris has seen the power of her political activism, she feels she has to speak out.
“I think it is important,” she says. “There’s just so much politics around it and all that, but it’s a woman’s body… Why should there be a law based on that? It’s your body, your choice and I really believe in that. It’s mind-boggling to me that they’re making laws about what you do with your reproductive health, because if it were the other way around with the guys, it would not be this way at all.”
I can’t help but wonder about her thoughts on a certain former President Donald Trump, a close family friend of the Hiltons since Paris was a child and who she claimed to have voted for. So I ask her how she feels, knowing that it was Trump who put in place the Supreme court judges who overturned Roe v. Wade.
As I am asking, she interrupts me at ‘close family friend’ and for the first time she bristles and snaps back: “Not any more.” And with that, that topic is abruptly halted.
Paris herself is all too familiar with not having ownership over her own body. In 2003, she suffered a public humiliation that would not only have the most devastating impact on her attitude to sex, relationships and her mental health, but also come to define her reputation for the rest of her life.
A private video of Paris having sex with her then-boyfriend, Rick Salomon, made two years before when she was 19, was leaked onto the internet. The video, that Paris tells me she didn’t even want to make, exploded across the world. Then, in 2004, things reached rock bottom when Salomon, by-now her ex, betrayed her, selling a longer version of the video, repulsively named 1 Night In Paris.
It made front page news and seemed to justify making her the butt of jokes: they referenced it on South Park, chat show hosts in America made sniggering and sexist gags about it, strangers in the street would shout ‘whore’ at her.
“I was vilified when it came out. I was made to look like I was the bad one and no one was looking and seeing this grown man [Salomon].”
She tells me how to this day it still haunts her. “It’s always in the back of my mind when I walk into a room and I see people,” she says.
“Because of one night, I am going to be judged for the rest of my life, for someone who I was in love with,” she says. “And then people think that I am bad or I’m a slut because of something I did with someone who I was with and that was never meant to be public.”
The experience made her not want to have sex with boyfriends. And that she even considered herself for a long time to be asexual. “I already had severe trust issues,” she says. “But people assumed that I was [a certain way] because of the tape and because of the way I portrayed myself…” Yet she says she always felt like a teenager who didn’t want to go any further.
“My nickname was Kissing Bandit or Mrs Blue Baller, because I would only like to kiss and make out,” she says. “And if they tried to do anything else, I’d be so scared. And obviously a lot of relationships wouldn’t really work for that long… the guy’s going to go out and cheat.”
Hiding behind a character
Her coping mechanism was to lean deeper into her fake heir-head persona.
“The character was a trauma response, it was actually more comforting to put on this mask just to deal with everything I’d been through in life.”
Paris tells me that when she was in solitary confinement at Provo Canyon, she would create the fantasy character. “I would literally just think about who I wanted to be and who I was going to become,” she says. “I started closing my eyes and dreaming of this world; I’m going to work so hard and become so successful and no one will ever control me again.
“I was inspired by Marilyn Monroe, Barbie and Dolly Parton, all these blonde icons who were definitely playing characters as well. And that just made me not think about any of the bad stuff. It was like a total escape.”
It was when she starred in The Simple Life alongside her best friend, Nicole Richie, daughter of Lionel at the age of 22 that the character was really cemented. One of the first-ever reality TV shows, the hit show was based on the premise of two real-life rich, privileged LA girls trying to fit into life in midwest America. The producers told Nicole to play the troublemaker and Paris the ‘dumb blonde’.
“I think I got stuck in the character, too, because when I did The Simple Life, it was the first of its kind and I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” she confesses. “I got lost in the character and I forgot who I was before I was sent to Provo.”
And while the character may have messed with her sense of identity, Paris ‘the dumb blonde’ also amassed her a huge personal fortune - estimated to be around $300million.
Over the past two decades Paris has tried her hand at acting, singing, cooking, presenting, fashion designing and has made a successful career as a DJ – commanding up to $1million a gig, the highest-paid female DJ in the world. She has 19 product lines including clothing, lingerie, jewellery, sunglasses, skincare, dog accessories, cookware and 30 perfumes. Her catchphrases “That’s hot!” and “Sliving” (a hybrid word she created from ‘slaying’ and ‘living your best life’) are both trademarked. More recently Paris has branched out into the metaverse, one of the first celebrities to do so, working with cryptocurrency and NFTs. And she tells me she is currently building the first-ever digital art fund for women at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and an exhibition of female digital artists.
She is also planning a Paris Hilton line of spas. Her skin up-close is flawless, though she’s “never had a needle put in [her] face”, not even Botox. I tell her, I find this surprising. “I’m scared of needles,” she explains. “I stay out of the sun, I get facials and use EMS electric therapy, preventative things… I have a whole wellness centre at my house with the sickest equipment you’ve ever seen. I have a hyperbaric chamber that fits four people, a cryo machine that fits three people, the NuEra Tight machine, which is the new laser that tightens your skin. The Icoone that goes and does a lymphatic thing, but shapes your whole body. I have like 20 machines.”
Her extraordinary privilege is something Paris acknowledges and references frequently, both to me and in her book, often with wry observation. Like recalling the time her mother, Kathy – now one of The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills – sent a private jet full of Chinese food from LA’s exclusive Mr Chow’s to her daughter on location when filming The Simple Life. (“So much better than the squirrel they were serving us,” she deadpans to me.) However, she is adamant that she never received any money from her family. “I really am a self-made woman,” she states.
“But I can understand why people would think [I’ve been handed it all] if they don’t know my businesses and what I’ve accomplished.”
“My family always instilled that hard work ethic in myself, my sister. That was something that was passed on from my great-grandfather to my grandfather and to my father; that having wealth and privilege, you can give your children whatever they want and more – but you’re only going to destroy them. And I am so grateful, because I could’ve ended up just like another one of these kids who lives off their family.”
While there’s no doubt that Paris has worked incredibly hard, and she’s no doubt earnest to check her privilege, it makes me wonder if her life has been so far from normal that she’s not capable of seeing beyond the bubble. But while she may have played a fake character, (and played us all in the process,) one thing she has never played is the victim. And given all she’s been subjected to, I find this incredibly courageous.
The conversation returns to the way women in the public eye were treated in the first decade of the 2000’s; the misogyny and the double standards that she and her fellow famous female friends were subjected to. Who could forget the 2006 New York Post front page paparazzi shot of Paris, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan in a car, under the headline ‘Bimbo summit’?
We talk about the impact this had on her mental health.
“Back then, people were not even speaking about mental health,” she reminds me.
“[It] was not even on people’s minds to think that we were human beings with feelings, and we were just young girls growing up and discovering who we were. And doing [what] any other normal girl would do – except that our lives were being magnified by the press.
“One thing that the 2000s was about was really pitting women against each other,” she tells me as we discuss the misogynistic tabloid culture surrounding reports that she and her famous friends were always feuding. “Back then a woman standing up for themself, a woman speaking her mind was like, ‘Oh, they’re difficult, they’re hard to deal with,’” she says.
“Any woman who I’ve seen in this industry growing up as a teenager, who would ever say anything would get persecuted for it, get so much backlash.”
Given all this and her party girl reputation, I wonder if Paris ever developed a dependency on alcohol or drugs? Did she ever consider herself an addict?
“No,” she says firmly. “I think I just wanted to escape, so I would just drink to not have to think about the bad things that had happened to me. And when I was out at night and just with the loud music, the clubs and the people would distract me from anything. I think when you go through something traumatic, you just want maybe to party the pain away.”
“And I’m such a shy person. A lot of people don’t realise how painfully shy I am, so it was a way where I would just not feel the shyness and awkwardness.”
Finally, her happily ever after
There is however a happy ending to the Paris Hilton story. That massive secret I mentioned earlier? It turns out that the day before we met in LA, on January 16, she had become a parent for the first time, welcoming a son, via surrogate, with her husband, venture capitalist, Carter Reum. Yes; the day before we met!
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The couple who married in November 2021 and whose romance was chronicled on her most recent Peacock reality TV show Paris in Love (season 2 of which is currently in production) announced the little boy’s arrival on social media on January 25.
Accompanied with a picture of the baby’s fingers intertwined with his mother’s and the caption: “You are already loved beyond words.”
Yesterday on her podcast, This is Paris, they revealed they have named him Phoenix Barron Hilton Reum.
We had discussed her plans to become a mother via surrogate during our afternoon together, she told me that baby Phoenix would be arriving “very soon”. Little did I know, he had already arrived.
We catch up again on the phone after baby Phoenix's birth has been made public, and she tells me how she and Carter initially kept the news secret, even from their family. “I felt my life has been so public, I really wanted to keep it private,” she says. “Of course, it was hard not to tell anyone, because it’s such an exciting time. But I also loved being able to share this with just Carter.” Of her son, she says: “I’m so obsessed with my little angel and when he looks into my eyes, I just melt. He’s such a good baby.”
And as these beautiful first pictures of Phoenix – shared in a world exclusive with GLAMOUR – show, he’s angelic.
On her journey to motherhood, Paris turned to her childhood friend Kim Kardashian for advice and had her eggs frozen in her late thirties because she was planning to have a baby on her own.
“I went and did the one round of IVF, because Kim had told me about it. So I had eggs frozen,” she says.
But when she started dating Carter, whom she’d known for 15 years, but got together with in November 2019, they realised, just as Covid-19 hit, that it would be more prudent to freeze embryos.
She told me the couple had frozen 20 embryos during lockdown.
“Carter and I had already been talking about the future and then the world was shut down, so I was like, ‘What do you think about us making embryos?’” she recalls. “And he said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ And we’ve done it seven times… I have all boys. I have 20 boys.”
But, she tells me, the couple would really like a girl.
“I just went through the process again a month ago, so I’m waiting for the results to see if there’s any girls.”
“Kim told me about that [surrogacy] as well,” she says. “I’m using the same doctor, Dr Huang, who’s the best and he has a concierge team that deals with everything and interviews the people [the surrogate] to make sure that they’re healthy. And we’re in the process of everything now, so it’s a lot.”
I ask her why she is using a surrogate – is she worried about carrying the baby at her age?
“No,” she tells me, saying that if she was 20 years old, she would still be using a surrogate.
“I’m just so scared, I think, again, leading back to Provo of even being in a doctor’s office, just all of that. The shots, the IVs that they put in [she claims they used to regularly take samples of her blood]. When I was in The Simple Life, I had to be in a room when a woman was giving birth and that traumatised me as well. But I want a family so bad, it’s just the physical part of doing it. I’m just so scared… childbirth and death are the two things that scare me more than anything in the world.”
Paris agrees when I observe that she seems happier than she’s ever been and credits her marriage to Carter and her new-found purpose as an activist. Of course, she is also a mother now, something she has longed for all her life.
But, by her own admission – and recent track record completing a GLAMOUR interview and 10-hour cover shoot, 48 hours after welcoming her first child – she doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.
So as our conversation draws to an end, I ask her where she sees herself in 10 years?
“I just want to enjoy my life with my family and be normal.”
“Really?” I ask, “You want to be normal?” She nods her head,“My mom has always said to me, ‘Paris you’ve worked so hard, you’ve achieved so much, just sit back and smell the roses and enjoy it.’ I don’t know, I just finally feel like I’m building a real life and I’m really living.”
“Or ‘Sliving’?” I suggest. “Yaas!” she responds, laughing.
Paris The Memoir is available for pre-order now wherever books are sold and officially goes on sale March 14th 2023.
Photographer Jeremy Choh
Digi Tech Sharon Reza
Lighting Assistant Dante Velasquerz Jr
Lighting Assistant Matthew Withers
Video Assistant Francis Gum
Styling Katie Qian
Stylist Assistant Abby Gordon
Hair Chad Wood
Make Up Steven Tabimba
Nails Ashlie Johnson
Production Amelia Trevette (ACT) & Joanna Smirnova (Hen House)
On Set Producer Carlye Burke
Runner Mike Switzer
VIDEO:
Director Tom Campbell
Camera Operator Yu Gu
BTS Chir Yan
