Paris Hilton shares the traumatic story behind her infamous sex tape.
In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir published in the British newspaper the timesthe heiress and entrepreneur, 42, talks candidly about how she ended up taking part in the affair with ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon, who she does not 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 videotape. But she says “he kept pushing,” telling her that no one but themselves would ever see it. Desperate to look mature in front of her older boyfriend, Hilton struggled to understand her sexuality at that age and “wanted to feel like a woman who is comfortable in her own skin.”
“He told me that if I didn’t want to do it, he could easily find someone who would, and that was the worst thing I could think of – to be dumped by this grown man because I was a stupid boy, who didn’t know how to play adult games,” the Paris: Memoirs author writes, adding that she used alcohol and Quaaludes to fail her.
“I needed to prove something to him and to myself, so I got hammered and I did it,” she says.
In 2003, long after the couple had separated, Hilton found out that the tape had been leaked online.
“It took me a minute to connect to the private video. I had to close my eyes and breathe. I felt like throwing up. It was unimaginable to me,” she writes. While she reached out to Salomon and asked him to stop the release, he told her he had every right to sell the tape because it “had a lot of financial value” due to her burgeoning fame.
“More value than my privacy, of course. My dignity. My future. Shame, loss and sheer terror swept over me,” says Hilton, who was set 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 what he could to do damage control.
“The world sees me as a sex symbol, and I’m here for it, because symbol literally means icon. But when people saw that sex tape, they didn’t say ‘icon, they said slut.’ They said ‘whore.’ And they weren’t pale over it,’ writes the star.
Last month, Hilton opened up in a revealing interview with Glamor UK about the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager. She told of losing her virginity to an older man who she says drugged and raped her, as well as being groomed by one of her high school teachers.
“I was just such a young girl and I was manipulated by my teacher,” she explained. “He was taking advantage of a young girl and that was also something I blocked out, I didn’t remember it until years later … he was calling me on the phone all the time, just flirting with me and trying to put in. my mind that I was this mature woman.”
Hilton has also spoken at length about her experience at Utah’s Provo Canyon School, where she suffered emotional and physical abuse as a teenager. She first opened up about the experience in her 2020 YouTube documentary, and has gone on to act as an advocate for shutting down similar school programs.
“It has made such a change and I have changed laws and am now taking this to a federal level,” she told the Australian News program last year 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’s my mission in life and something that really has deep meaning and that I I will continue to fight until changes happen.”