The heiress spoke openly about how she agreed to take part in a sex tape. (Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
Paris Hilton shares the traumatic story behind her infamous sex tape.
In an excerpt of her forthcoming memoir, to be published in British newspaper The Times, the 42-year-old heiress and entrepreneur opens up about how she ended up dating her ex-boyfriend, Rick Salomon, whom she doesn’t mention by name. participated in the band.
Hilton, who was just 18 when she first met Salomon, who proudly went by the nickname “Scum,” says she doesn’t remember much of the night he asked her to do the videotape. But she says that “he kept pushing” and told her no one but them 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 was comfortable in her own skin.”
“He told me that if I didn’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 for being a stupid kid that didn’t do it knew how to play adult games,” writes the author of Paris: the Memoir, adding that she used alcohol and quaaludes to lower her alertness.
“I had something to prove to him and to myself, so I got hammered and I did it,” she shares.
In 2003, long after the couple split, Hilton learned the tape had been leaked online.
“It took me a minute to connect to this private video. I had to close my eyes and breathe. I felt like throwing up. It was unimaginable for 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 “great financial value” due to her burgeoning fame.
“More valuable than my privacy, obviously. My dignity. My future. Shame, loss and sheer terror washed over me,” says Hilton, who would appear in The Simple Life. Hilton, who is now a mother herself, also looks back on the effect her video had on her mother, Kathy Hilton, who “just fell into bed and stayed there.” Her father, Rick Hilton, was “red-faced and angry” and did whatever it took to do damage control.
The story goes on
“The world thinks of me as a sex symbol and that’s why I’m here because symbol literally means icon. But when people saw this sextape, they didn’t say ‘icon, but slut’. You said ‘whore’. And they weren’t shy,” the star wrote.
Last month, in a revealing interview with Glamor UK, Hilton opened up about the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager. She shared how she lost her virginity to an older man who she says drugged and raped her and was nursed by one of her high school teachers.
“I was such a young girl and I was manipulated by my teacher,” she explained. “He took advantage of a young girl and that was something I blocked too, I didn’t remember it until years later… he used to call me on the phone all the time, just flirting with me and trying to fit in, I think that.” I am that mature woman.”
Hilton has also spoken extensively about her experiences at Provo Canyon School in Utah, where she was subjected to emotional and physical abuse as a teenager. She first spoke about the experience in her 2020 YouTube documentary, and then emerged as an advocate for the closure of similar school programs.
“There’s been such a change and I’ve changed laws and now brought this to the federal level,” she shared during an appearance on Australian news show The Project last year, Yahoo Entertainment previously reported. “So I’m just proud of the woman I am and what I’ve been through and how strong I am. I feel like this is my legacy now and something that is my life purpose and something that really has deep meaning and that I will keep fighting until changes are made.”