“It was just inhumane on all levels,” Paris Hilton tells Sky News, claiming she was forced to submit to cervical tests, force-fed medication and “locked up in this little cell with bloodstains on the wall” in a residential care home. facility for so-called troubled teens in Utah.
Paris Hilton’s mansion is located in a gated community in Beverly Park, one of Los Angeles’ most posh enclaves that is also home to Adele and Mark Wahlberg.
In the driveway is a pink Bentley and a blue Porsche. The grand entrance is flanked by a giant white model giraffe and a neon pink Chanel sign, and the hallways are lined with framed prints of the woman herself.
We’re led to an upstairs room with a large bar and fluffy white chairs where even the cushions have prints of Hilton’s face.
It’s a house befitting the original “It Girl” – a reality TV star who once traded in her goofy persona.
But this is an adult Hilton and we’re here to discuss serious matters, especially the two years she spent in boarding schools for so-called troubled teens.
“It was like something out of a horror movie,” she says. “It’s like they enjoyed abusing children.”
In the early 2000s, Hilton was one of the most photographed women in the world, the leader of a party set featuring Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian And Lindsay Lohan.
But behind the celebrity, there was a dark reality.
As a 16-year-old, she was sent to a series housing facilities for so-called problem teenagerschildren with all kinds of problems, from bad behavior to addiction problems and mental illness.
“I wasn’t a bad boy,” she says.
“I was just a normal 16-year-old girl. My parents were very strict. They didn’t want me to go out and I rebelled and started sneaking out and getting bad grades.
“My parents spoke to a therapist who recommended these schools. I later found out that this therapist and many others are under orders to send children to these places.”
Like many other kids who attend these schools, Hilton’s parents paid for safe transportation, effectively an authorized kidnapping, where strangers pull teens out of bed in the middle of the night and put them in the back of waiting vans.
“At 4:30 in the morning, two big men came into my room and just shook me out of bed and said, ‘Do you want to take the easy way or the hard way?’
“They held up handcuffs and I had no idea what was going on, I thought I was being kidnapped, I had no idea who these people were.
“It just amazes me that there are people like that in the world who can treat kids like that and get away with it for so long.
“I still have serious nightmares about it.”
Read more:
‘Ripped out of bed by strangers’: Inside the multi-billion dollar industry of ‘troubled teens’
Hilton ended up at Provo Canyon School, in the foothills of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains.
It’s marketed as an “intensive, juvenile psychiatric treatment center,” but she says every day was hell.
Paris Hilton: ‘Troubled Teen’ School Was a ‘Living Hell’
In her recently released autobiography, Paris: The Memoir, she claims she was awakened in the middle of the night by male staff — not doctors — and led to a private room, where they forced her to undergo cervical exams.
“To be treated like a criminal when you’re just a kid,” she says, “and the comic is constantly searching.”
“As an adult I now see that as sexual abuse. Male and female staff watching a young girl change or undress or take a shower, it was just inhumane on all levels.”
She also claims to have been forced to take drugs.
“One time I thought, ‘I don’t want to take these anymore.’ So I just had the pills under my tongue and put them in a Kleenex.
“Someone found out later and I got in such a mess and they sent me to what they call ‘obs’ where you’re just locked up in this little cell with bloodstains on the wall.
“They turn the air conditioning as cold as possible, take away all your clothes and leave you there for hours.”
Read more:
Paris Hilton opens up about alleged abuse and trauma from infamous sex tape
Responding to the allegations, Provo Canyon’s owners say the school was sold in 2000 and they are unable to comment on student activities or experiences prior to that time. But that they do not condone or promote any form of abuse.
Hilton, now 42 and the mother of a two-month-old son, Phoenix, says her view of the troubled teen industry has hardened.
America’s ‘troubled teen’ industry
“I’m just so in love with my little baby boy,” she says.
“I want to do everything I can to protect him and I know that by doing this job I will protect future children.
“I just can’t imagine my son being around people like this. My heart goes out to all the children who are locked up there right now.”
She thinks her own parents were victims of misleading marketing by the troubled teen industry.
Hilton has become a figurehead of a movement campaigning to close troubled teen schools across America.
She helped introduce new laws in Utah that now restrict the use of restraints, drugs, and isolation rooms in youth treatment programs. It also requires facilities to document any instance where physical restraints and seclusion are used.
But now she wants to bring about change on a national level.
“These people need to be held accountable,” she says.
“They need people who have the proper permits, people who don’t have a criminal record. There’s so much that goes into it. That kids should have rights should be common sense, but unfortunately in some states it’s not that way.
“I know if we keep fighting this battle we will succeed and they messed with the wrong girl.”
Listening to her relive the darkest moments of her life and the determination to bring those responsible to justice, it’s hard to deny that they did indeed mess with the wrong girl.