Paris Hilton revealed that opening up about the abuse she endured from her past boarding school and a former teacher who groomed her in her new book Paris: The Memoir was “painful” but “healing” in a new interview on The View on Tuesday, March 14. The Simple Life star, 42, said even though it was difficult to revisit what she went through at the school and the abuse from older men as a teen, she wanted to use her platform to help others.
When asked about the abuse she endured at the Utah boarding school from troubled teens, Paris said she experienced “fear and torture every day.” She told the hosts that reform schools that abuse children are able to stay open by monitoring phone calls to make sure students don’t tell their parents and that they use “deceptive marketing” to convince parents to send kids there. “It looks like this happy place, and people have no idea what’s happening behind closed doors,” she said.
Paris continued and said she wanted to open up about it once she learned that children were still going through what she went through. “When I found out that it was still happening today, I just knew that I couldn’t keep silent any longer. When I was in there, I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t ever going to talk about it. I would just pretend like it never happened. Just knowing that I could help stop others’ nightmares and use my platform for good has just been incredibly impactful and so healing,” she said.
Earlier in the interview, the hosts spoke about revelations that Paris opened up about including that she was groomed by a teacher and drugged and raped by an older man. The reality star said that opening up about it brought a range of emotions. “I held onto so much shame from others hurting me for so long, and I just think it’s important to tell your story. It’s really healing,” she said. “[It was] extremely painful, extremely emotional, but so therapeutic and cathartic. Just getting so much weight off of my shoulders of things I’ve just been holding in for so long.”
Paris opened up about the teacher grooming her in the new memoir. She said that he had called her “almost every night” when she was in 8th grade, via Page Six. “We talked for hours about how amazingly mature, beautiful and intelligent I was, how sensual, misunderstood and special,” she said, before revealing that he had come to her home when her parents weren’t home. “Teacher pulled me into his arms and kissed me…Casting him in the role of child molester meant casting myself in the role of victim, and I just couldn’t go there.”