Paris Hilton has revealed she was drugged and raped as a teenager in a new interview published Thursday.
Talking to Glamour UK, the reality-TV star, hotel heiress and pop-culture icon detailed the assault along with other incidents of abuse and sexual trauma. She also discussed a harrowing encounter with a high school teacher and a frightening run-in with convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein.
Hilton described hanging with her friends at the Century City mall in Los Angeles as a teen. It was their favorite thing to do, and where she met a group of older men, one of whom later raped her.
Paris Hilton photographed at home in Beverly Hills in 2019.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“One day, they invited us to their house and we’re drinking these berry wine coolers,” she told Glamour UK. “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.”
Paris said she woke up hours later and knew something bad had happened to her. “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.”
It was her first sexual experience, but not the first time she’d encountered abusive behavior at the hands of an older man.
“I was just such a young girl and I got manipulated by my teacher,” she told Glamour UK. “He took advantage of a young girl and that was something I blocked out as well, I didn’t remember it until years later. 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.”
One night, he showed up to her home and persuaded her to sit in his car with him, until her parents arrived home and he sped off with Hilton still in the car.
“We only kissed, but if my parents didn’t come, imagine what he would’ve tried to do. We literally drove through Bel-Air at like 100 miles an hour. 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.’”
“To this day, I’ve not talked about it with my family. I’ve never told anyone,” she said. “I don’t know what it was, I just felt so ashamed by the whole situation — just from the beginning at such a young age and it really stuck with me in a weird way.”
In the 2020 YouTube documentary “This Is Paris,” Hilton opened up about the sexual and psychological trauma she’d grappled with when attending Provo Canyon School in Utah, a boarding school where she spent 11 months. She endured a leaked sex-tape scandal in 2004. And when she was 19, she encountered a belligerent Harvey Weinstein at the Cannes Film Festival.
“I was at lunch with my girlfriend and he came up to the table and was like, ‘Oh, you want to be an actress?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I really want to be in a movie,’” she told Glamour UK. “I was a teenager, so I was impressed by him. I was like, ‘Oh my God, Harvey Weinstein is so cool!’ and he said, ‘Well, we should have a meeting. You can come up to my room and read scripts’… and I just didn’t want to go, so I never went.”
The next evening, she alleged, Weinstein followed her to the women’s restroom.
“I went into the bathroom and then he followed me,” she said. “He tried to open the door, he was hammering on the door, banging on it. And I wouldn’t open it, because I was like, ‘I’m in a stall, why do you want to come in here?’ And I just wouldn’t open it. And security came and literally carried him away and he was like [shouting], ‘This is my party,’ going nuts. It scared me and freaked me out.”
Hilton’s forthcoming book, “Paris: The Memoir,” hits shelves March 14.
