Paris Hilton has had a rough ride over the years, especially in the 2000s, when she was the subject of widespread mockery. More recently, the public perception of her has begun to change, particularly when she opened up about being sent at the age of 16 to a series of boarding schools for “emotionally troubled teens”, where she says that she was physically and mentally abused by the staff.
Now she’s telling all in her new book, Paris: The Memoir, extracts of which have been published in The Sunday Times. She recounts being sexually assaulted by a male teacher at the Provo Canyon School in Utah, as well as being kidnapped in the dead of night in front of her crying parents, forcibly drugged, restrained, strip-searched, and placed in a seclusion room.
Hilton explains in the book that this left her with a fear of sex:
“The ironic thing is, because of the abuse and degradation I survived at the schools I was sent away to as a teenager – and maybe partly because of the way I was raised – I feared sex. I hated the idea of sex. I avoided sex until it was absolutely unavoidable.”
This must have made the enormously publicized 2004 sex tape leak that much more traumatic. As she says:
“The world thinks of me as a sex symbol, and I’m here for that, because symbol literally means icon. But when people saw that sex tape, they didn’t say ‘icon’, they said ‘slut’. They said ‘whore’. And they weren’t shy about it.”
Hilton has since led protests against the schools she was sent to. In October 2020 she led hundreds of protestors and former students through the streets of Provo, Utah to raise awareness of what’s going on behind closed doors, explaining at the time that:
“When I was there, I was physically, psychologically, emotionally abused on a daily basis, so I’m using my platform to make a difference so this doesn’t happen to any other children.”
Hilton will go into more detail about her time at the Provo Canyon School in Paris: The Memoir, but has also recounted her experience in the YouTube documentary This is Paris, in which she attributes her ongoing insomnia to what happened to her at this school.
Paris: The Memoir will go on sale on March 14, 2023.
If you know someone suffering from sexual violence, contact RAINN or the National Sexual Abuse Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.