In This Is Paris, set to drop on YouTube September 14th, Paris Hilton dishes family secrets and her history of abuse.
The Simple Life? Not so much.
ABUSE
The 39-year-old DJ opens up about the abuse she allegedly suffered at a Utah boarding school, and blames her pattern of dysfunctional relationships on the experience.
“I've been in a lot of relationships where people get so controlling and get so angry that they become physical,” she revealed, going on to address the shocking photos of her from 2004 in which she has bruises, a bloodied lip and what appeared like swelling under her eye.
“We just got in an argument,” she recalled of the incident. “I was trying to leave his house and he just got really mad and was just grabbing me and pulling me. I don't really remember most of it because I've had worse stuff happen.”
She said of her time at Provost Canyon School: “I feel like a lot of the people who worked there got off on torturing children and seeing them naked. They would prescribe everyone all these pills. I didn't know what they were giving me. I would just feel so tired and numb.”
When she stopped taking them, Paris said she was punished. “They would make people take their clothes off and go in there for like 20 hours,” she alleged. “I felt like I was going crazy. Someone was in the other room, there was like, a straitjacket…I was just freezing. I was starving. I was alone. I was scared.”
PARENTS, PERCEPTION
She kept the abuse from her parents. She told her mother Kathy, who started crying: “But I couldn't tell you guys because every time I tried I got punished by them or they would say, 'We're just going to tell your parents you're a liar and they're not going to believe you.' Basically they just told me that so many different times that I was afraid to even say anything or bring it up.”
Paris said she kept silent on the abuse because she didn’t want to hurt her image. “I wanted to do something, but at the same time I didn't want to hurt my brand,” she said. “I can't have this be part of my business, and people won't understand. But if I don't do this it's going to continue to happen and I'm going to continue being traumatized and think about it the rest of my life.”
Before being sent away, she said she came into her own in NYC.
“I felt accepted,” she explained. “I just felt like the queen of the night. That's where I really became Paris.”
Her parents didn’t know how to handle her, they admit. “Finally, I locked her in the room,” Kathy recalled. “I was afraid she could run into a predator, get kidnapped. Fear, to me, is the most powerful feeling there is. More than pain, more than love, more than hate, more than light, fear. And I thought this was the worst mistake ever, moving here. I gotta get her out of here.”
But Paris thinks it may have more to do with PR. “I feel like my parents were scared and they didn't want their reputations to be ruined because Page Six was writing all these stories.”