Paris Hilton’s Traumatic Childhood: Groomed at 14, Medicated in Institutions, and ‘Recruited’ by Ghislaine Maxwell

Hailed as the original reality star who made it possible to be famous for doing nothing, Paris Hilton looked like she had the life that many of us could only dream.

She rose to fame as one of the most notorious party girls of the 2000s, decked out in designer fashion and towering heels.

But behind the mini dresses, side-swept bangs, frosty pink lip gloss and ditzy blonde persona, Paris was holding onto traumatic memories that she would end up keeping hidden for two decades. 

‘I just kind of created this character of this Barbie doll [with a] perfect life,’ she told Grazia magazine in 2019.

‘But I think it all really stems back to just everything that I went through as a teen.’

From being groomed by her teacher to having her sex tape leaked by an ex, the Daily Mail takes a look inside Paris’ traumatic childhood.

Groomed by her teacher 

Paris was groomed by an eighth-grade teacher who ‘kissed her and told her she was sensual’ when she was just 14.

In Paris, The Memoir, the socialite detailed how she and her friends grew attracted to a ‘handsome young teacher with an ‘Abercrombie look’ in middle school.

She claimed the teacher told her as a young teenager: ‘I’ve got a crush on you’ before asking for her phone number and warning her not to tell anyone.

She wrote: ‘Mr. Abercrombie called me almost every night, and we talked for hours about how amazingly mature, beautiful and intelligent I was, how sensual, misunderstood and special.

‘He reminded me that Princess Diana was thirteen years younger than Prince Charles. 

‘And Priscilla Presley was my age when Elvis fell in love with her.’

The teacher then secretly lured her into his car outside her home, with Paris writing: ‘Teacher pulled me into his arms and kissed me.’

However, her parents, Kathy and Rick Hilton, discovered them kissing, and she was sent to Palm Springs that summer to live with her grandmother.

She added that ‘Mr Abercrombie’ blamed her, asking: ‘Why did you make me do this?’

Paris said it took ‘decades’ for her to realise she was a victim of child abuse.

She wrote: ‘It took decades for me to actually speak the word pedophile.

‘Casting him in the role of child molester meant casting myself in the role of victim, and I just couldn’t go there.’ 

Raped by an older man at 15 

Paris was living with her grandmother in Palm Springs and would often visit the Westfield Century City shopping centre in Los Angeles with her friends.

She said older men would often hang around the stores and speak to them and one day they invited Paris and her friends back ‘to their house’.

Paris said she was offered ‘berry wine coolers’ to drink and one of the men was particularly forceful about getting her to drink it.

She told Glamour Magazine in 2023: ‘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 [Rohypnol].’

Paris said she woke up several hours later knowing something bad had happened.

She said: ‘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.’

Paris added that the experience made her feel ashamed.

The reality star claimed she was sexually abused after being forced to undergo cervical exams performed by staff members in the early hours of the morning while attending the school.

Abuse at tough love camps

When Paris turned 16, her parents turned to CEDU, a company that operated what it euphemistically described as therapeutic, emotional-growth boarding schools for misbehaving teenagers.

She first shared her harrowing experiences in the youth congregate care industry in an interview with People magazine in August 2020.

In the interview, which focused primarily on her time spent at Provo Canyon School in Springville, Utah, she revealed that she faced psychological abuse daily for 11 months, and was subjected to continuous bullying, solitary confinement and was prevented from communicating the abuse to her family by staff.

‘I knew it was going to be worse than anywhere else,’ said Paris, who had already spent time in several other facilities prior to being moved to Provo Canyon.

‘From the moment I woke up until I went to bed, it was all day screaming in my face, yelling at me, continuous torture. They wanted to instil fear in the kids so we’d be too scared to disobey them.

‘They would use [solitary confinement] as punishment, sometimes 20 hours a day. I was having panic attacks and crying every single day.’

Paris made three escape attempts, but each time, she was caught and sent to an even stricter institution.

‘Having everything taken away, like, not being able to look out of a window, not being able to speak, just feeling like a prisoner when you are just a child,’ she told The Times.

‘And your family thinks that you’re in an emotional-growth boarding school and you’re riding horses and it’s so happy, and they have all these fake brochures and the marketing is so deceptive.’

Paris testified on Capitol Hill last year about the devastating experience she suffered at Provo Canyon School as she advocated for sweeping reforms to the foster and youth rehab system.

‘When I was 16 years old, I was ripped from my bed in the middle of night and transported across state lines to the first of four residential facilities,’ Paris told the House Ways and Means Committee in June.

‘For two years I was force-fed medications and sexually abused by the staff. I was violently restrained … stripped naked, thrown in solitary confinement,’ she continued.

Leaked sex tape 

When Paris was 19, her sex tape was leaked in the early 2000s, made with her ex, Rick Salomon.

She admitted that she drank alcohol and took Quaaludes prior to the making of the tape.

But she was horror-struck when a 37-second clip of the video began circulating online years later.

Paris had begged Rick not to release the full version of the tape but he said he had every right to sell something that belonged to him.

In June, the star got emotional as she opened up about the ‘painful’ aftermath of her infamous leaked sex tape, admitting that her then-boyfriend’s brutal betrayal will affect her the ‘rest of her life.’

During a sit-down with Louis Theroux, the former reality star laid bare the ‘heartbreak and devastation’ that she endured.

‘It was the most painful experience I’ve ever been through in my life,’ Paris reflected during the event.

‘To trust somebody and have them put something out in the world that no one was supposed to see… and then to have people judge me based on one night with someone I trusted… that’s something that will affect me for the rest of my life.’

The blonde beauty said the public scrutiny over the tape was ‘heartbreaking and devastating,’ especially because it came right before the release of her reality show The Simple Life. 

‘Back then, the media, the public, everyone was just so cruel to me. It was so heartbreaking and devastating,’ she continued.

Paris previously explained in her 2023 book Paris: The Memoir that she felt ‘weird and uncomfortable’ about filming herself and Rick ‘making love,’ but claimed that he ultimately pressured her into doing it. 

‘He had often said it was something he did with other women, but I felt weird and uncomfortable about it. I always told him, “I can’t. It’s too embarrassing,”‘ she wrote.

‘He told me if I wouldn’t 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 kid who didn’t know how to play grown-up games.

‘The truth is, I wanted to be alive in a sensual way. I wanted to feel like a woman who’s comfortable in her own skin.’

She said he vowed that ‘no one else would ever see it,’ and insisted that she would never ‘under any circumstances be involved in the production of an amateur teen porn video.’

‘If this was something I had chosen to do, I would have owned it,’ she stated. ‘I would have stood tall in my Louboutins and said, “Yup, that was my choice.”

‘I would have stood by it, capitalised on it, licensed the f**k out of every frame, and then boogied on over to the bank without apologising to anyone.’

‘Recruited’ by Ghislaine Maxwell

Paris was apparently just 19 when she was spotted by Maxwell at a party, who reportedly told friends she had set her sights on the teen for Epstein.

Maxwell, who was in a relationship with the notorious sex offender Epstein for several years in the nineties, was said to be scouring parties looking for girls who would date him.

Maxwell was later convicted and sentenced for her role as Epstein’s ‘chief recruiter’ and a partner in his sex trafficking operation.

However, despite Maxwell’s alleged intentions for Paris, the mother of two has insisted that she ‘doesn’t remember ever meeting her’.

During a new interview in the Sunday Times magazine, Paris reflected that she may have been dragged into the media storm at the time because of the weight her name carries, adding: ‘I’m such a good clickbait name.’

The revelation emerged as President Trump called on Republicans in the House to vote for the release of the so-called Epstein Files, marking a reversal from his previous position.

The vast trove of documents is made up of material the Justice Department gathered in its investigations into the convicted late sex offender, including transcripts of interviews with victims and items confiscated from raids of his properties.

More than 20,000 pages of documents have been released from the estate of the disgraced financier, revealing how he repeatedly discussed Trump in private correspondence dating from 2011 to 2019.

The claims about Maxwell’s plans for Hilton were made by a former friend of the British socialite in 2020.

Christopher Mason said Maxwell stopped in her tracks and said ‘oh my god’ when she saw a young Hilton at a party.

Maxwell said she would be ‘perfect for Jeffrey’ and told a friend: ‘Can you introduce us?’

Mason, a British journalist based in New York who has known Maxwell since the 1980s, did not give a date for the encounter.

But it appears to have been around the year 2000 when Hilton signed up to Donald Trump’s modeling agency, T management, and began her ascent to celebrity.

At that point, she would have been 19 years old and on the cusp of becoming a star.

If you have been affected by this story, in the US contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline on 800-656-4673 or visit www.rainn.org 

In the UK contact, Rape Crisis on 0808 802 9999 on contact the service using their online chat function