On the day her son was born, Paris Hilton donned a brown wig and hoodie and entered the hospital under a different name. Her platinum hair is one of her many calling cards, and she must be seen. The existence of her upcoming child was, at the time, a secret to the rest of the world, which Hilton, her husband, Carter Reum, and their surrogate mother knew. Even their family would not find out until shortly before he announced his arrival on Instagram. “My whole life has been public,” Hilton said by phone in late January, hovering outside the baby’s room and talking softly as she slept. I’ve never had anything for myself. We decided we wanted to have this whole experience for ourselves.
Once she was cleared from the hospital, she and Reum took their son home to their recently purchased home in Beverly Hills. For two days, they were really alone (they told their staff that the house was being painted), enjoying the quiet life with the newborn – making his sleep patterns known and feeding it and singing. (Hilton has a thing for “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and the 2006 hit, “Stars Are Blind.” “The Acoustic Version,” she explained.) Then, when it looks like the story is about to go away. they broke the snake and announced that they had become parents.
Even for a pregnant woman, pregnancy is a big secret to keep. But Hilton has a habit of hiding parts of her life. In the 2020 documentary This is Paris, he spoke for the first time about the abuse she suffered as a teenager when his parents, Rick and Kathy Hilton sent him to a boarding school with promises to change teenagers and difficulties. Since then, she has become a vocal advocate for closing down so-called troubled youth centers; in 2021, she supported a bill to control Utah schools again and is now advocating for federal reform.
It’s the start of a three-year transition for Hilton. The entrepreneur, reality TV star, DJ, actress, perfumer, model, and socialite helped create the brand’s undisputed popularity in its early days. famous for his surname, going to parties, being sex,y and saying “That’s hot,” but at 42, the timeless star has changed Paris qua Paris for his style that is true and obvious. Her memoir, Paris: A Memoir, which comes out this month, puts Hilton in charge of her cultural reorientation – “How can we not see that the treatment of Her Girls turns into the treatment of All girls in our culture? ?” she writes at one point, sounding Elle Woodsian — and dives into dark, haunting details from her high school days. This is the final stage of pregnancy and all the changes that come with it, including marriage, motherhood, and a major shift in priorities. “To support,” she wrote in Paris, “saved my life.”
Hilton himself was a child who ended suddenly, violently. One can understand why she would want to make sure that welcoming her son into this world felt sacred and safe. “I want to protect her and be with her every time,” she says. “You have this motherly instinct that’s starting, which I’ve never had before. I feel perfect now.
It is well known that Hilton has two distinct voices. One is his constant speaking voice, which is deep and almost melodious; the other is the voice she uses for Paris Hilton’s public persona, which is more high-pitched and flirtatious, a true Valley Girl standard. In a mid-2000s video that went viral on TikTok, where Hilton thrived on a new Gen Z fanbase, Hilton scolded a waiting driver for waiting “two minutes.” When the waiting paparazzo asks how he’s doing, she switches between: “Damn,” she mumbles.
In Paris, Hilton described the character as “my steel armor”, a “dumb head with a sweet but negative side”: “I’m sure I never had a quiet moment to Find out who I am without him. I am afraid this time because I do not know what I will find. Ending the practice will mean navigating and overseeing another social reconstruction of one’s self.
When Hilton agreed to participate in Paris, she didn’t give it this thing to make his experience in high school. But when it shooting, the director, Alexandra Haggiag Dean, and closer, and Hilton began to open what she got. She was nervous before her debut in September 2020, not knowing how her audience would react. “My score is different from that. I have this whole beachhead Barbie doll” – and here she instinctively slips into the neck, as she sometimes does in our conversation – “‘perfect life’ character. But there was a big injury that caused all of this.
It was early December and we were hiding in a corner room of his house, where French doors opened onto a spacious backyard with a pool. Hilton was so tired that it was difficult for her to spend another morning at her maternity hospital, where she delivered her seventh egg to date. (Hilton and Reum, an investment banker, would like to continue growing their family; she says her determined to have a daughter one day.) On the coffee table between us, someone Doesn’t dream of a university dormitory – many dishes. More food than a cold Stone, plus a big jar of lemonade – and she takes sliced fruiteating, two Pomeranians, Ether Reum and Crypto Hilton, screams like parakeets on the floor. (“They’re named after the market,” Reum tells me apologetically. “Now we’re thinking about the Web3 name.”)
Hilton and Reum are still coming in, but their interior designer has already begun to hang pictures. Most of them are Paris-themed. In the room where we spoke, there was a large black and white portrait of Hilton; there is also, equally, that of Marilyn Monroe. “It’s misunderstood,” Hilton says, straddling the white couch in a black velour tracksuit and rainbow socks. She read Monroe’s memoir My Story while she was working on her book and found it so telling that it brought her to tears. “A terrible thing happened to him, but he hid everything and showed this thought life. And I did it well as a coping mechanism for all the mess I got. I don’t even know who I am.
When Hilton was 15, she moved into a Waldorf Astoria condo with her parents and three siblings (sister Nicky and brothers Conrad and Barron) in Manhattan. He started going to clubs and, with undiagnosed ADHD, fell behind in his studies. She was expelled from two prestigious private schools in Manhattan.
“I’m not a bad boy,” Hilton says. “I went out at night, got bad grades, and dropped out of school. But my mom and dad were close. They want me to come home at 11:00 in the morning.
Hilton wanted to focus on her touring career, but Kathy, a former actress, didn’t want her to rush into the business. When he was 16, Kathy and Rick decided to send him to a well-funded for-profit behavior modification program. “She was breaking all the rules,” Nicky recalled. “My parents don’t know what to do. They were trying to protect him.
It happened one night. Hilton recalled being woken up by two young men who dragged her home while her parents watched in tears from their bedroom door. She was thrown into a waiting SUV and driven across the country without much explanation. For nearly two years, Hilton visited several residential “healing centers” across the country.
At CEDU, the now-shuttered medical school in California that Hilton attended, students were forced to participate in “fight therapy” or “raps,” long group fights in which they were encouraged to insult and criticize each other. them. the bad behavior that brought them there.
After CEDU, Hilton was sent to other similar programs and tried to escape them with incredible stubbornness – his passion for climbing fences, it turns out, is not just food – but she is always seen, when some with the help of his family. and bring it back. In one school, she was slapped and bullied in front of other students. His fourth and final stop was Provo Canyon School (PCS) in Utah, which she described as a total lockdown. She was not allowed to leave for eleven months. At some point, she stopped taking the prescribed medication and was sent to a small solitary confinement cell, called ‘Obs’ – short for observation – as punishment. “It was a cold room,” Hilton recalls. “There was blood all over the house and it was just a hole in the middle of the room. I don’t know what time it is; there is no clock. You’re just crazy. She spent that time thinking about how she was going to spend the rest of his life: “I started thinking, ‘What am I going to do when I leave this place?’ I will work hard and be successful enough that my parents, these people, man, no one will tell me what to do next. I equate money with freedom, independence, and happiness. It became my focus on the laser beam.
(In February 2021, Hilton detailed allegations of abuse at CEDU, Provo, and other schools before a state Senate committee hearing at the Utah Capitol. When contacted for comment, the current president of Provo Canyon School issued a statement stating that “Provo Canyon School was sold to its previous owner in August 2000. Therefore we cannot comment on the transaction or student experience before that date. … We do not support or promote any form of abuse. Media attempts to get a response from the former representatives of CEDU, which closed in 2005, failed.)
Hilton’s parents eventually discharged him from PCS in January 1999, just a few weeks shy of his 18th birthday. She said: “It’s a whole new world. “I haven’t watched television. I haven’t seen the magazine yet. I don’t know what’s going on in the pop culture.
Almost 25 years later, Hilton says she has forgiven her parents for kicking her out. (Nicky says she didn’t know how bad it was until she watched the documentary; in it, Kathy learned for the first time about Paris’s condition. She said: “If I had known that, my dad and I would have been there in minutes.”) Kathy apologized to him before filing the lawsuit. Hilton said she felt like she was wasting “the most important and fun years of being a teenager. 16 to 18 like…” She trails off, unable to remember anything like a promotion or graduation ceremony.
When Hilton returned to New York, She was eager to make up for a lost time. She got a job as a model, and she and Nicky started going to fashion shows and movie shows. She quickly learned to use the young paparazzi following him around New York and LA to his advantage, making him a huge asset that could put him in the tabloids and create a new brand of fame. “I don’t have an agent, I don’t have a publicist, I don’t have a stylist,” she says. “I had a fake email address and pretended to be [my] manager.
“I remember going out with my sister and seeing 50 photographers screaming my name,” Hilton says. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s love.’
She uses a nose for childhood excess: Barbie roses, trainers turned into rollerblades, Juicy Couture tracksuits – an experimental form of pure youth style, which now seems old. Nicky said: “Everything from our shopping. “The stylists removed everything from the game. It was very different back then. It is real.
At the time, no one would call the look timeless, but the style of Hilton that helped make it popular in the 2000s – low-cut jeans – is back. In September, she closed Versace’s Spring 2023 show in a hot pink metallic mini dress. Nicky says that one thing she loves about her sister is that she “doesn’t care about the designers or what’s the norm”.
“She just brought her to Céline’s show. She was like, ‘What is Celine?’ Nicky laughs. “She just wears what she wants, and I think it’s no mistake that she created some of the best fashion moments of my generation.”
Hilton’s defining moment came in December 2003, when The Simple Life – the popular Fox reality show about her and her childhood friend Nicole Richie – brought in 13 million viewers. “That’s when the character came out because the producers wanted Nicole to be the troublemaker and [me] to be the main character,” Hilton says. “Everyone thinks it’s who I am in real life.”
The show catapulted Hilton to stardom and the scrutiny that came with it. It’s a difficult time for young women, but Hilton’s lack of interest is hard to brew: She is the heir to a restaurant with a famous last name, no visible talent, fries volume, and a distance of a thousand meters. The reception she gave her could be horrible. Nicky, who had always been protective of her big sister, remembers sneaking out of the Waldorf house to the newspaper in the hallway so their parents wouldn’t see the news about Paris.
In 2007, Hilton’s career as a young woman came to a screeching halt when she was sentenced to 45 days in the LA County Jail for a misdemeanor charge related to reckless driving. She attended the MTV Movie Awards the same night she was treated, and comedian Sarah Silverman told the crowd, “Paris Hilton is going to jail.” Everyone grew up. “I heard that to make him feel more comfortable in prison, the guards had to paint the sticks to look like penises,” Silverman added as the camera panned over the injured Hilton. (Silverman has since apologized.) A few months later, after serving his sentence (she was released after 23 days for good behavior), Hilton appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman and sat down for almost five minutes of fun doing something about it. stay in jail. She begged him to stop and cried as she left the set. (Leta later apologize.)
“The way I’ve been treated — myself, Britney [Spears], Lindsay [Lohan], all of us — it’s a joke,” Hilton said of the famous trio in a 2006 New York Post article titled “Bimbo Summit. ” “We are girls discovering life, going to parties. We were also scolded because of it. She has learned to cancel himself, a skill she associates with CEDU’s rap sessions. “We spent hours there, everyone was insulting everyone else in the room,” she said. “I used to.”
When journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis tied the knot with Hilton for a Rolling Stone documentary in 2003, she said that Hilton seemed to “seek respect” and had “different reservations.” “People have this preconceived notion that I’m not who I am,” Hilton, 22, told her. “I’m smart, I’m sweet, I’m kind. I’m a good person.”
Twenty years later, her story was told in full, and she finally got that kind of recognition. There is an obvious relief in Hilton’s behavior and relationship with the world, a great pleasure in being taken seriously – and listened to – for the first time. “I’m very happy with the woman I’ve become because for a long time I was, carrying everything,” she says. “All the bad words and threats they say to me every day, stick with you. I do not feel well. Now I feel like people are finally respecting me and accepting me in a way they never had before.
There is also a practical aspect to the innovation. In 2005, the contents of her moving closet were sold, and a few years later, a video of a 20-year-old Hilton yearning for a force that uses race and gay to find its way online. When I asked him about it, the story went back to where she was. He said, “Yes, I have.” “But when I talked to other survivors, I saw that many of the things I did were signs of survival. Everyone lives and learns in life. In Paris, she writes that in anti-healing sessions, “people went to the most obvious place in the most horrible language possible. The N-word. Word C. Word F. (Not the F-word, the worst ones.) …I don’t remember half the things people say I said when I was a freakout, but I won’t deny it. She went on to rattle off several of his other listed errors, including a new one, which she did not support in the 2016 election: “Do I support these options? Would I make one more choice, knowing what I know now? Of course not!”
Hilton says that the novel “changed my whole life” and allowed him to settle down, get married and start a family: “I’m not going to let those walls fall.” She met Reum at a family-friendly reunion on Long Island in 2019. It’s different from what it used to be. “He’s not a celebrity. He has intelligence. He comes from a wonderful family. He is a good person,” he said. “It’s the opposite of what I’m used to when I’m looking for guys.”
Beginning in her 20s, Hilton began to think of herself, privately, as a homosexual. She is linked to a different celebrity every week, but he says that her sexual experiences are terrible – in addition to the sex tape released against her will in 2004, she writes in Paris about being a male teacher looking for and training her in high school – made her soft. “I’m known as a sex symbol, but anything sexual scares me,” she says. “I call myself a ‘kisser’ because I just like kissing. Most of my relationships didn’t work because of it.
With Reum, he found a new kind of confidence. “It’s only with Carter that I don’t end up like that anymore,” she says, adding with a laugh, “I like hanging out with my husband.”
They quickly fell in love, stuck together during the pandemic, and got married in November 2021. (Their relationship was featured on the Peacock series Paris in Love, which will return for a second season.) someone to build a real life with,” Hilton says.
As a mother, she says she’s starting to slow down – “I like babies more than billions,” she says, raising her voice – but in the weeks since our first conversation, she celebrates her mother’s Christmas every year. . , releasing a new version of “Stars Are Blind” performed on stage with Miley Cyrus in NBC’s New Year’s Eve special. She also has big plans for the metaverse: in addition to completing the mystery AI, she created something called Paris World on Roblox, where she hosts DJ events and perfumes.
In the meantime, she’s enjoying being a mom and having real-world time that she loves — or the latest version of herself. For a long time, people approached her for selfies and wanted her to say, “That’s hot.” These days, she says, “it’s usually ‘I like what you do with kids’ or ‘I already have one'”. rewarding time of my life.
“It’s a good feeling to be real,” she continued. “To not always be like an actor. It’s a really good feeling.”