Content Warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual violence and can be triggering for some. If you have experienced sexual violence and are in need of crisis support, please call the RAINN Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
In her own words, Paris Hilton is a “warrior,” “fighter,” and “bada*s.” The heiress opens up about her childhood sexual trauma and the abuse she endured while at Provo Canyon in her February cover story for Glamour UK.
The interview focuses on a lot of Hilton’s teen years, particularly her time at Provo Canyon, where she was subjected to solitary confinement, abuse, forced medication, and “late-night gynecological examinations.” If she didn’t take the medication, Hilton said she would be stripped naked and “carried” into a windowless room with “blood on the walls, faeces, urine, only a drain.”
However, this wasn’t the first time Hilton experienced some type of abuse. At age 15, she was drugged and raped by “an older guy” she’d met at the mall.
“We would go there almost every weekend,” she said of her and her friends’ weekend shopping trips. “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.”
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She recalls one instance when her group was invited back to a guy’s place to hang out. They were given “berry wine coolers,” Hilton said, adding he was “particularly forceful in making her drink the wine.”
Two sips in, she began “feeling dizzy and woozy.”
“I don’t know what he put in there, I’m assuming it was a roofie,” she said. Hilton recalled waking up several hours later alone with an inkling that “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,” Hilton said.
Albeit, this isn’t Hilton’s earliest memory of alleged assault. Prior to this incident, Hilton as a “young girl” was “manipulated” by one of her teachers.
“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,” she told the outlet.
One time he visited Hilton at her parents’ home, coaxing her to come hang out in his car. Hilton said he was kissing her when her parents pulled into the driveway, stopping his advances. Startled, he drove off with Hilton still in the car, leading to a wild car chase with her parents.
“We literally drove through Bel Air at like 100 miles an hour,” Hilton recalled. “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.’”
Hilton returned home before her parents, rushed up to her bedroom, and they never spoke of it. For many years, Hilton refrained from opening about her traumatic childhood because she “just felt so ashamed by the whole situation.”
Now, as a new mom, Hilton’s sharing her truth. “I feel most empowered when I’m doing my advocacy work,” she said. “Knowing that I can be the hero I always needed when I was a little girl.”
Read Hilton’s full interview here.
