Paris Hilton has revealed new details of sexual abuse she experienced as a child, in her newly published book, Paris: The Memoir.
In the account, Hilton, 42, alleges an eighth-grade teacher groomed and “kissed” her.
WARNING: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault against a minor.
Identified in the book as “Mr Abercrombie,” Hilton says that he gave her his phone number and asked her to keep their contact a secret.
“Mr. Abercrombie called me almost every night, and we talked for hours about how amazingly mature, beautiful and intelligent I was, how sensual, misunderstood and special,” she writes.
Their contact culminated in a night-time meeting, with the teacher reportedly pulling the then-14-year-old into his car and kissing her.
Her parents, Kathy and Rick Hilton, arrived home to find the pair in the car together, which followed in the teacher allegedly blaming Paris.
This report comes just a month after an interview with Glamour UK, where Hilton described the same experience, saying, “We only kissed, but if my parents didn’t come, imagine what he would’ve tried to do?”
In the interview, she says her parents’ arrival also triggered a high-speed car chase, with her teacher panickedly driving away from the Hiltons.
“We literally drove through Bel Air at like 100 miles an hour,” she recalled in the interview. “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.’”
After the incident, Hilton writes in her memoir, she was sent away to live with her grandmother and grappled with confronting the gravity of what had happened.
“It took decades for me to actually speak the word paedophile,” she wrote.
“Casting him in the role of child molester meant casting myself in the role of victim, and I just couldn’t go there,” she added.
In the Glamour UK interview, Hilton also recalled another instance of sexual assault, which also took place when she was 15. Hilton and her friends would frequent Century City mall, where they would talk to and exchange numbers with “older guys.”
On one trip, Hilton and her friends were invited back to the men’s house, where they were “particularly forceful” in encouraging the girls to drink 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],” she details.
When Hilton woke up hours later, she says she knew intuitively that something bad 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 also touches on a third occasion of assault in the interview, this time a near miss with now-defamed producer, Harvey Weinstein.
At the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, Hilton, then 19, alleges she was approached by Weinstein while having lunch.
“I was at lunch with my girlfriend and he came up to the table and was like, ‘Oh, you want to be an actress?’,” she recalled.
The following night, at the Foundation for Aids Research gala, Weinstein, the host of the evening, followed her into the bathrooms.
“He tried to open the door, he was hammering on the door, banging on it. And I wouldn’t open it,” she remembers. “Security came and literally carried him away and he was like [shouting], ‘This is my party,’ going nuts,” she added.
These new details of a traumatic past come as Paris is set to release her biography, Paris the Memoir, on February 14. It also comes three years after she released her YouTube documentary, This is Paris, where she revealed traumatic details of her time at Provo Canyon School in Utah in the late ‘90s.
It was her experiences of abuse that led Paris to use a surrogate for the birth of her first son; she and husband Carter Reum welcomed their son, Phoenix, via surrogate in February. She told Glamour UK that she would have used a surrogate even if she was (for example) 20 years old.
“I’m just so scared, I think, again, leading back to Provo of even being in a doctor’s office, just all of that,” she said. “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.”
In 2022, she told ELLE Australia that her ‘dumb blonde’ persona from The Simple Life was created as a trauma response to her time at Provo.
“I didn’t even realise until I was an adult that it was just like a whole coping mechanism,” she said. “Because it was just so traumatic to have been through it that I didn’t want to think about it. I kind of invented this fairy tale, Barbie, perfect character.”
Hilton has since dedicated her time to lobbying for child abuse law reform, in particular campaigning for the Stop Institutional Child Abuse bill. “I feel like that’s my real mission in life,” she continued to ELLE. “I just want to be known as an activist and someone who brings light and kindness and sparkle to the world, because we need more of that.”
If you would like to speak with someone about the issues raised in this article, please contact 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732, the child abuse helpline Blue Knot Helpline on 1300 657 380, or if you are in crisis, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
