Paris Hilton shares the traumatic story behind her infamous sex tape.
In an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir published in a British newspaper the temperaturethe 42-year-old heiress and entrepreneur candidly shares how she ended up getting involved with recording with ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon, whom she doesn’t mention by name.
Hilton, who was just 18 when she first met Solomon, who proudly went by the nickname ‘Scum’, says she doesn’t remember much about the night he asked her to do the video. But she says “he kept pushing” and told him no one but themselves would ever see him. 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 good woman about herself.”
“He told me that if I didn’t, he could easily find someone who would, and that was the worst thing I could think of – being dumped by this grown man because I was a stupid kid who didn’t know how to play adult games,” Paris: Memories author wrote, adding that she used alcohol and Quaaludes to let her guard down.
“I needed to prove something to him and myself, so I got hammered, and I did,” she shares.
In 2003, long after the couple split, Hilton learned that the tape had been leaked online.
“It took me a minute to relate to this private video. I had to close my eyes and breathe. I felt like I was going to vomit. It was inconceivable to me,” she wrote. . As she reached out to Solomon to beg him to stop the release, he told her he had every right to sell the tape as it “had a lot of financial value” due to his burgeoning fame.
“More valuable than my privacy, obviously. My dignity. My future. Shame, loss and utter terror overwhelmed me,” says Hilton, who was to appear in simple life. Now a mother herself, Hilton also reflects on the effect her video had on her mother, Kathy Hilton, who “just collapsed in bed and stayed there.” Her father, Rick Hilton, was “red-faced and furious” and did everything he could to limit the damage.
“The world thinks of me as a sex symbol, and that’s what I’m here for, because symbol literally means icon. But when people saw this sex tape, they didn’t say ‘icon, they said bitch.’ They said ‘damn.’ And they didn’t hesitate to do so,” the star wrote.
Last month, Hilton opened up in a revealing interview with Glamor United Kingdom about the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager. She recounted losing her virginity to an older man who she says drugged and raped her, in addition to being groomed by one of her high school teachers.
“I was so young and I was manipulated by my teacher,” she explained. “He took advantage of a young girl and that’s also something I blocked, I didn’t remember that until years later… he was calling me on the phone all the time, just flirting with me, trying to set up my mind that I was this mature woman.”
Hilton also spoke at length about her experience at Utah’s Provo Canyon School, where she was emotionally and physically abused as a teenager. She first spoke about the experience in her 2020 YouTube documentary, and later defended the closure of similar school programs.
“It made such a change and I changed the laws and now it’s going federal,” she shared last year during an appearance on the Australian News Program The project, Yahoo Entertainment previously reported. “So I’m proud of the woman I am and what I’ve been through and how strong I am. I feel like that’s now my legacy and something that’s my mission in life and something that really has a deep sense and that I will continue to fight until changes are made.”