Paris Hilton revealed in a new interview that, when she was 15 years old, she was drugged and raped by an “older” man.
Prior to the publication of her biography Paris: The Memoir — where she writes about the incident in greater detail — the heiress and reality TV star talked to Glamour UK about the alleged rape, which she said was her first sexual experience.
While living with her grandmother in Palm Springs, the 15-year-old Hilton would travel back to Los Angeles on weekends and, like teenagers, go to the mall. “We would go there almost every weekend,” Hilton told Glamour. “That was our favorite thing to do, and these [older] guys would always just be hanging around the stores… we’d talk to them, give them our beeper [pager] numbers.”
Hilton continued, “And then one day, they invited us to their house, and we’re drinking these berry wine coolers.” One of the “older guys” was insistent that she drink the wine they were providing. “I didn’t drink or anything back then, but then 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].”
She said that she woke up hours later and knew something had happened to her. “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,” Hilton said.
Hilton previously opened up about the sexual abuse she suffered while attending the Provo Canyon School, the Utah boarding school she spent a year at as a teenager, soon after the rape incident.
“Very late at night – this would be around 3 or 4 in the morning – they would take myself and other girls into this room, and they would perform medical exams,” Hilton wrote in the New York Times. “This wasn’t even with a doctor. It was with a couple different staff members, where they would have us lay on the table and put their fingers inside of us. And I don’t know what they were doing, but it was definitely not a doctor.”
Elsewhere in the Glamour interview (as well as in the memoir), Hilton talks about her close-call encounter with disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein. She also reveals that, in her early twenties, she had an abortion, which in turn has made her a vocal advocate on the topic.
“This was also something that I didn’t want to talk about because there was so much shame around that,” Hilton told Glamour. “I was a kid and I was not ready for that.” Now, however, “There’s just so much politics around it and all that, but it’s a woman’s body… Why should there be a law based on that? It’s your body, your choice and I really believe in that. It’s mind-boggling to me that they’re making laws about what you do with your reproductive health, because if it were the other way around with the guys, it would not be this way at all.”