Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
PARIS HILTON
When Paris Hilton made love with her boyfriend Rick Salomon in front of a video camera in 2001, she had no idea the tape would go viral on the internet.
Almost 20 years later, as the 39-yearold socialite plans to marry the love of her life, she is still haunted by the backlash from an intimate experience that she never wanted to share.
“That was just the most painful experience,” she says, talking via Zoom from her parents’ home in Bel Air, California.
“It made me really lose faith in love and trust and men and it just really breaks my heart that for the rest of my life I’m going to be judged on a private moment between two people that no one was ever supposed to see.”
The tape was released two years after she and Salomon made it – without Paris’s knowledge or consent.
“The way I was treated when this came out... people were so mean about me and making fun of me and villainising me when I was just this young girl who had trusted somebody,” she tells me.
“If this happened today it would be so different. So I am happy that things have changed and a woman is not going to be shamed for something like that and she is regarded as the victim.
“But back then I was not lucky enough to be treated that way.”
Paris, who is planning to marr y boyfriend Carter Reum, is speaking frankly and freely about her life, “abusive” relationships and horrors she says she suffered at a tough boarding school.
She is talking ahead of the release of Youtube documentary This Is Paris, in which she opens up on her experience in more detail. Paris alleges that staff at the school would hit and attempt to strangle students, keep them in solitary confinement and put them in restraints when they were seen to have misbehaved.
“I don’t think it’s something I’ll ever get over fully,” she says.
“But to actually discuss it for the first time, which I did during the documentary, was a very therapeutic experience.
“Going through that was one of the most difficult times of my life. It was like living in hell every single day.
“And the people who work at these places are very abusive and just not good people. I’ve had nightmares ever since I was a teenager, and it has affected my life in so many ways, but it’s made me strong and I think I could make it through anything after going through all of that.
“The original film was only supposed to be about me as a businesswoman and my family and basically the glamour in front of it all.
“I never thought that I would ever reveal my secrets and the traumatic experiences I went through because I’d never talked about it with anyone so I was definitely not planning on saying it on camera.
“But I ended up telling it and I am happy I did because it is really just an amazing feeling to finally get that off my chest.”
Her parents sent her to board at the Provo Canyon School in Utah, because she started to run wild after her hotelier family moved to New York to live in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
“My parents were always super, super
SISTERS Mum Kathy, Nicky & Paris
strict and I was not allowed to go on dates, go to a school ol dance, I wasn’t allowed to wear make-up ke-up and I wasn’t allowed basically to go o anywhere.
“So then when I moved oved to New York I rebelled and I was going out at night ight and ditching class. I wasn’t a bad kid.
“I think nk I just was so sheltered d and then to move to New York City, this whole new ew world.
“I was just excited to be able to go places, but my parents were not used to that because ause I had been so sheltered ered and I was like their r little girl and I think they th ey were scared to o watch me grow up. They sent me to this hellish school, but it wasn’t their fault. They didn’t know now what these places were.
“They just thought it was a normal boarding school because that’s how w they advertise these places. s. They
I never thought I’d reveal my secrets and traumatic experiences PARIS HILTON ON FRANK YOUTUBE DOCUMENTARY