Paris Hilton shares the traumatic story behind her scandalous sex tape.
In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, published in a UK newspaper the timesThe 42-year-old heiress and entrepreneur talks candidly about how she came to be involved in the tape with her ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon, whom she does not mention by name.
Hilton, who was just 18 when she first met Salomon, who proudly went by the nickname “Scum,” says she doesn’t remember much about the night he asked her to make the video. But she says “he kept insisting” and told her no one but them would see him. Desperate to appear mature to her older boyfriend, Hilton struggled to understand her sexuality at that age and “wanted to feel like a woman who was comfortable in her own skin.”
“He told me that if I didn’t do it, he could easily find someone who would, and it was the worst thing I could think of – to be dumped by this old man because I was a stupid kid who doesn’t know how to play adult games” Paris: The Memoirs author wrote, adding that she used alcohol and Quaaludes to let her guard down.
“I needed to prove something to him and to myself, so they hit me and I did it,” she shared.
In 2003, long after the couple had separated, Hilton learned that the recording had been leaked online.
“It took me a minute to link to this private video. I had to close my eyes and breathe. I felt like I was going to throw up. It was unimaginable to me,” she wrote. While she approached Salomon, begging him to stop the release, he told her he had every right to sell the tape because it “had great financial value” due to her burgeoning fame.
“Obviously more valuable than my personal space. My dignity. My future. Shame, loss and horror washed over me,” says Hilton, who was scheduled to appear in The simple life. Now a mother herself, Hilton also looks back on the effect her video had on her mother, Kathy Hilton, who “just curled up in bed and stayed there.” Her father, Rick Hilton, was “red-faced and furious” and did his best to do damage control.
“The world thinks of me as a sex symbol and I’m here for it because symbol literally means icon.” But when people saw this sex tape, they didn’t say “icon, they said slut.” They said “whore”. And they weren’t ashamed of it,” the star wrote.
Last month, Hilton revealed in a revealing interview with Glamor UK about the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager. She shared about losing her virginity to an older man who she says drugged and raped her, and that she was groomed by one of her high school teachers.
“I was such a young girl and I was manipulated by my teacher,” she explained. “He took advantage of a young girl and that was something I blocked out too, I didn’t remember it until years later… he was calling me on the phone all the time, just flirting with me, trying to score I think I was the one mature woman.”
Hilton also spoke at length about his experience at Provo Canyon School in Utah, where he faced emotional and physical abuse as a teenager. She first spoke about her experience in her 2020 YouTube documentary and has gone on to serve as an advocate for closing such school programs.
“It made a change like that and I changed the laws and now I’m taking it to the federal level,” she said last year during an appearance on an Australian news program The project, Yahoo Entertainment previously reported. “So I just feel proud of the woman that I am and what I’ve been through and how strong I am. I feel like this is now my legacy and something that is my mission in life and something that really has a deep meaning and that I will continue to fight for until change is made.”