For Paris Hilton he was “Mr. Abercrombie”: the young teacher at her strict Catholic private school who was so handsome he resembled an Abercrombie & Fitch model.
“Thrilling eyes,” she recalls. “Everyone loved him, including the nuns.” But the sisters would never have been so smitten with Mr Abercrombie had they known the extent of his interest in Miss Hilton, who was then a minor.
As the hotel heiress, TV star and socialite reveals in her new book Paris: The Memoir, her teacher had a perverse fascination with the 15-year-old. ”I have a crush on you,’ he told me, giving me a flirtatious smile.” Hilton explains how her unnamed teacher prepared her for sex — until one night, things came to a horrifying conclusion. That kind of victimhood is hard to reconcile with the rich, glamorous, and seemingly so confident Hilton.
The great-granddaughter of hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, who along with her friends Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears was one of the it girls of the noughties, partied in the nightclubs of New York and LA.
She became the epitome of the phrase “famous because she’s famous” when her star rose to celebrity heaven in 2003 with the leak of a sex tape filmed by a friend. His notoriety, along with a prison sentence for drunk driving and a cocaine scandal, helped Hilton become a (nearly) billion dollar brand.
Paris Hilton was one of the it girls of the noughties, partying wildly in the nightclubs of New York and LA
Paris is the great-granddaughter of hotel magnate Conrad Hilton. Pictured: Father and mother Rick and Kathy Hilton with daughters Nicky and Paris
One of the first social media influencers, she was reportedly paid $1 million just to show up to a party and starred with friend Nicole Richie in a reality TV series, The Simple Life, which spawned dozens of similar shows.
But then came a jarring 2006 biography, House Of Hilton, which portrayed her family as so dysfunctional that “the Osbournes looked like the Brady Bunch.” Hilton’s parents, Rick and Kathy, reportedly left most of their upbringing to relatives and nannies.
A relative, Pat Hilton, recalled that Kathy once planted a nine-month-old Paris on her without instructions on how to care for the infant. “Kathy Hilton is very selfish and very spoiled, and that absolutely carries over to Paris,” Pat told writer Jerry Oppenheimer. The latter even claimed that while Rick and Kathy insisted they were “sad” about their daughter’s sex tape scandal, they were secretly proud.
But times go on. Hilton recently became a mother for the first time: a son, Phoenix, was born to a surrogate mother. And now the heiress – who is married to tech mogul Carter Reum – is trying to shatter popular perceptions of her as a spoiled rich chick by reinventing herself as a serious and intelligent woman. As she claims, “I’m not a dumb blonde: I’m just very good at pretending to be one.”
According to her book — which her publisher calls “surprisingly profound” — and promotional interviews, what the world may have seen as a spoiled, bland, and chaotic life story is actually a story of female empowerment and survival.
Behind her gleaming exterior, haughty smile, and grating baby voice, the theory goes, Hilton was a victim whose oppressors were predatory men. These include: The ex-boyfriend who she says talked her into making the sextape and then sold it without her permission; an unnamed young man who she believes stole her teenage virginity after spiked her drink; and the staff at a brutal boarding school for troublesome teenagers who harassed them through fake medical exams. She now calls what the staff did to her “digital rape.”
But in Hilton’s mind, they all pale next to Mr. Abercrombie, who set his sights on her when she was in eighth grade at St. Paul The Apostle School. “He made me feel important in a grown-up way. He flattered and teased me and said all the other girls were talking about me behind my back because they were jealous of my hotness,” Hilton writes. “Because their friends probably wanted to break up with them as soon as I walked in the room.”
Hilton says the teacher asked for her phone number and warned her not to tell anyone. “‘It’s our secret,’ he said, and I kept that secret like candy under my pillow. I never felt like I was being manipulated. I felt adored.
“Why wouldn’t I love this story? It was all about me, me, my beautiful little me. The focus was on my intoxicating beauty rather than his inappropriate behavior.’
Her teacher called almost every night and they talked for hours about “how amazingly mature, beautiful and intelligent I was, how sensual, misunderstood and special,” she writes. Looking back, she now sees the eighth grade teachers are “like a security guard in an art gallery” to enforce the rules, the first of which was “DO”. NOT. TOUCH. Keep your fingers, lips and man bites away from the masterpieces.
Her suitor, she says, would ask her during their late-night talks if her parents were home, and one night she told him she was alone with her nanny. He was soon outside of her family’s Bel Air mansion.
She claims she climbed into his car through a drainpipe outside her bedroom window. “The teacher pulled me into his arms and kissed me,” she says. “I was amazed and delighted by the intensity. My brain lit up, flushed with adrenaline, curiosity and a multitude of feelings I couldn’t even name.’
She continues, “That terrifying, blissful kissing seemed to last for a long time and seemed to grow into something bigger.
‘I don’t know where he would have taken it if my parents hadn’t pulled it into the driveway.
“Headlights smashed across the windshield and the spell was broken. I saw my dad’s stunned face.” According to Hilton, her seedy suitor started the car and sped away, clutching the edge of her seat.
“He raced like a maniac through the posh streets of Bel-Air and Westwood, staggering around corners and freaking out the whole time,” she writes. ‘I giggled. Nervous. tachycardia. Ringing ears…that was like Bonnie and Clyde!’ She adds: “F***! F***! F***!” Mr. Abercrombie sounded like he was crying. “My life is over. What am I doing? Why did you make me do this?”
Paris Hilton and ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon in a scene from their infamous sex tape
In an interview to promote the book, Hilton says her parents were chasing her, but when the teacher was driving at up to 100 miles per hour and jumping a red light, he managed to lose her and go in front of them to return to her house. She was shocked that he told her to get off and didn’t even kiss her goodnight — “like I imagined someone would if you were on a date” — before speeding off.
She ran back to her bedroom and ducked under the covers just before her parents burst in. She insisted she had been sleeping and while she didn’t think they believed her, no one mentioned the “embarrassing incident” again. “It was decades before I actually uttered the word ‘pedophile’. To cast him in the role of child molester was to cast me in the role of victim, and I just couldn’t go there,” she writes.
“I couldn’t accept that all of his praises – affirmations that an eighth grade girl needs to hear – came from a place of malice and that I was stupid and vain enough to believe it. To this day I have not spoken to my family about it. I’ve never told anyone,’ she said.
Hilton may have had her teacher in mind when she tried to blame her obnoxious behavior in her younger years — she used the N-word and was also derogatory toward Jews and gays — to “unprocessed trauma.”
But her run-in with Mr. Abercrombie was only the first of her encounters with predatory men, she says. After that, the wayward Hilton — who snuck into nightclubs all the time while she was in school — was sent to live with her grandmother in Palm Springs and returned to LA on the weekends.
She recalls being invited to an older boy’s house in LA, where one of his friends “forced” her to drink wine. She only drank a few sips and immediately felt “dizzy and light-headed.”
She believes she was spiked with the date sex drug Rohypnol when she woke up hours later to ‘visions of him on me, covering my mouth, saying ‘you’re dreaming, you’re dreaming’ and whispering that in my ear’. It was, she says, her “first sexual experience” and she felt ashamed.
More unwelcome sexual advances came, she claims, when her parents sent her between the ages of 16 and 18 to a series of harsh “therapeutic” boarding schools for “troubled teenagers” that she calls her “superpower.”)
That spell culminated at the now infamous Provo Canyon School in Utah, where Hilton says she and other girls were sexually abused by staff members during nightly gynecological exams or drug searches — something else she banished from her mind until it was discovered by other survivors heard and “started having flashbacks,” she told Glamor magazine. “Late at night, staff came in and took certain girls and took them to this room.
“And you would literally scream and cry, they would hold you down, four of them, male and female, and literally just put fingers … and certain girls would do things on a regular basis.” She somberly added, “If we resisted, there always was a tray of syringes.”
After Hilton was released from Provo at the age of 18, she met Rick Salomon – a professional poker player whom she described as a “cocky bad boy” – at a nightclub. They began a romantic relationship and she became “obsessed” with him.
A year later, although Salomon claimed to “hate the idea of sex” (a condition she attributes to the “abuse and humiliation” she suffered in the schools), he asked her to allow him to marry her to film lovemaking.
Eventually, the 19-year-old reluctantly agreed, initially drinking heavily and taking Quaaludes, the powerful tranquilizer and recreational drug. “I had something to prove to him and to myself, so I got hammered and I did it,” she writes.
When the 37-second video surfaced online two years later, critics saw it as just another example of Hilton’s shamelessness. However, she insists she was horrified. “I was overcome with shame, loss and sheer horror,” she says. She insists her parents felt the same and her mom “just fell into bed and stayed there.”
When she called Salomon, who later married actresses Pamela Anderson and Shannen Doherty, “he said he had every right to sell something that was his — something that had great financial value.”
What seems particularly bothering Hilton – which somewhat undermines her outrage – is that the video was so amateurish. Everything from the lighting to her hair and makeup could have been a lot better, she says now.
Hilton says she became “asexual” around this time, writing, “My sexy clothes, music, videos… it was my way of reclaiming a healthy sexuality that had been stolen from me. I felt as alive and playful as I would have liked when I was in bed with someone I cared about.”
Paris Hilton during an interview with host Jimmy Fallon on March 13
She also reveals that she hasn’t escaped the vile attention of disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein. In the spring of 2000, when she was 19, she was at the Cannes Film Festival with a fellow film producer when they met Weinstein for an unsuccessful business dinner at which he made “perverted, odd comments about me and my potential huge future in.” his world’.
They met at an industry event the following night and Weinstein, she says, pursued her into the women’s room after trying to avoid him.
Hilton says Weinstein was “dragged out” by security guards after “pounding on the stable door” and shouting “gross, drunken nonsense like, ‘Do you want to be a star?'”.
As well as being an entrepreneur and DJ, the ‘new’ Paris Hilton is also an activist campaigning for tighter regulation of the type of schools she attends.
But as she says she once “pretended” to be a goofy blonde, is this surprisingly serious side of party girl Supreme just another act?