“That will always be something that will hurt me for the rest of my life.”
After the release of NYTimes’ Framing Britney Spears, the public has been re-examining the treatment of celebrity women in the media during the early ’00s — and some of those women have started speaking out themselves, including Paris Hilton.
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Last month, she reflected on a “cruel” interview with David Letterman, in which she thinks he was “purposefully trying to humiliate” her. She also admitted she was “hurt” by Sarah Silverman’s 2007 MTV Movie Awards jokes about her being sentenced to jail — sparking Sarah to make a lengthy public apology.
During Vanity Fair’s Cocktail Hour on Thursday, Paris said, “Just after seeing the Britney documentary, my heart was broken. Watching all of that brought up a lot of memories for myself, and just the way we were treated was so wrong.”
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She noted that they were both just young girls going out, doing what anyone would their age would do, but “because we were in the public eye we were made to be these villains…It’s such an amazing time right now that people are looking back at that and seeing it was all of these really misogynistic views,” adding that not having to deal with it anymore is a “weight off [her] shoulders.”
One of those memories is the leak of her sex tape back in 2003 and the harmful aftermath she said she still experiences today.
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“That will always be something that will hurt me for the rest of my life. It’s always there in the back of my mind,” Paris began.
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Some background: In 2003, a sex tape featuring Paris and then-boyfriend Rick Salomon was leaked online. A year later, he began distributing the video himself, now titled 1 Night in Paris. Salomon sued Paris and her family for defamation after she stated she “never, ever thought these things would become public,” implying it was taped without her consent. Paris then countersued Salomon for releasing the tape and won a settlement, part of which she donated to charity.
“When it happened, people were so mean about it to me. The way that I was spoken about on nightly talk shows and the media…to see things with my family was just heartbreaking.”
“I would be in tears every single day, I didn’t want to leave my house. I felt like my life was over.”
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“It was a private experience between two people,” she continued. “You love someone, you trust someone and to have your trust betrayed like that and for the whole world to be watching and laughing… It was even more hurtful to me to have these people think that I did this on purpose — that killed me.”
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“It still gives me post-traumatic stress disorder to talk about it,” she stated.
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Speaking on the incident in 2011, Paris said, “I didn’t want to be known as that. And now when people look at me they think that I’m something I’m not just because of one incident one night with someone who I was in love with.” “People assume ‘Oh, she’s a slut’ because of one thing that happened to me,” she added at the time, “and it’s hard because I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life and explain it to my children. And it’s something that’s changed my life forever and I’ll never be able to erase it.”
Nearly 20 years later, Paris has made a name for herself as a successful businesswoman and is happily engaged to fiancé Carter Reum.
On moving on, Paris told Vanity Fair, “I’m more interested and care more about the next phase of my life, and getting married and having babies. I just feel like that’s the true meaning of life…I’m not really focused on material things like I used to be. It’s more about growing as a person and being an adult.”
Wishing Paris nothing but the best in this new chapter 💕.
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