Names and faces
■ Paris Hilton testified before a legislative committee in Utah about abuse she says she suffered years ago at a boarding school as she lobbied for a bill seeking to regulate the state’s troubled-teen industry. The socialite and reality TV star was sent to Provo Canyon School for 11 months at age 17 where she says she was abused mentally and physically, recalling that staff members would beat her, force her to take unknown pills, watch her shower and send her to solitary confinement without clothes as punishment. The 39-year-old Hilton said the treatment was so “traumatizing” that she has suffered nightmares and insomnia for years. Hilton testified Monday at a state Senate committee hearing at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City in favor of the bill that would require more government oversight of youth residential treatment centers and require them to document when they use restraints. The state measure passed unanimously after emotional testimony from Hilton and several other survivors. “Talking about something so personal was and is still terrifying,” Hilton told the committee. “But I cannot go to sleep at night knowing that there are children that are experiencing the same abuse that I and so many others went through, and neither should you.” The Provo institution has been under new ownership since 2000 and the administration has said that it can’t comment on anything that happened before the change, including Hilton’s time there.
■ The U.S. Justice Department has withdrawn a lawsuit it filed in October against a onetime friend and aide to Melania Trump over her book, one of several cases in which the Trump administration went after former allies who wrote critical memoirs. The Biden administration requested Monday to dismiss the case against the friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, which Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered. That brought to an abrupt end a lawsuit whose filing had prompted accusations that Trump administration officials were abusing their power over the machinery of federal law enforcement to enact retribution. Wolkoff’s book, “Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady,” depicted the then-first lady as selfish and shallow. The book contains no classified information, but the Justice Department accused Wolkoff of violating a nondisclosure agreement. A department official said its new leadership had evaluated the case and concluded that ending it was in the best interests of the United States based on the facts and the law. “We are very pleased that the Department of Justice has dismissed this lawsuit,” Lorin Reisner, a lawyer for Wolkoff, said in a statement.