WHEN Paris Hilton first burst on to reality TV two decades ago she played up the image of the airhead heiress who loved shopping and partying.
Back then, Kim Kardashian was her stylist, her telly show The Simple Life was a massive hit — and the world loved to hate her rich bimbo persona.
But now Paris, who turned 42 last week, has revealed the shocking traumas that blighted her younger days.
Ahead of the release of her autobiography, Paris: The Memoir, next month, she has told how she was raped at party aged 15, preyed upon by teachers, had an abortion and had to fend off film mogul and serial sex offender Harvey Weinstein.
This week she and her husband, financier Carter Reum, showed off their first child, son Phoenix, born to a surrogate mum using IVF.
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And in the latest edition of Glamour magazine, Paris reveals she took this route due to the sexual abuse she experienced in school which left her terrified of childbirth.
She says: “I want a family so bad, it’s just the physical part of doing it. I’m just so scared.
“Childbirth and death are the two things that scare me more than anything in the world.”
But she adds: “I think I’ve just been through so many things that I’m a warrior, I’m a fighter, I’m brave. And I’m a badass.
“I’m not a dumb blonde, I’m just very good at pretending to be one. The real me is someone who is strong and resilient, brave, smart and fun.”
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The great-granddaughter of hotel tycoon Conrad Hilton, Paris was raised in luxury by her parents, former child actress Kathy and property multi-millionaire Richard.
Her early life was largely untroubled, but when she was 15 one of her teachers in Los Angeles started to groom her.
Then one evening he persuaded her to get into his car and began to kiss her, only stopping when her parents appeared.
Paris says: “We only kissed, but if my parents didn’t come, imagine what he would have tried to do.
“To this day, I’ve not talked about it with my family. I’ve never told anyone. I just felt so ashamed by the whole situation.”
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Then came a phase of hanging around with older men at a shopping centre, including once going with her pals to one of their houses, where she was urged to drink alcohol.
Paris, then still only 15, thinks one man spiked her drink with the sedative Rohypnol, because she woke up a few hours later aware that she had been raped.
She says: “I immediately started feeling dizzy and woozy. I don’t know what he put in there.
“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.”
It was her first sexual experience, and affected her for years to come.
When the family moved to New York in 1996, Paris became a wild child, skipping school and going to late-night parties without her parents’ permission.
She says: “I would just drink to not have to think about the bad things that had happened to me.”
Fearing for her future, her parents sent her to a series of boarding schools for troubled teens.
But there she only suffered worse emotional, physical and psychological abuse.
One school forced students to take part in “attack therapy”, long, vicious sessions where they were meant to hurl insults and scream at each other.
Paris tried to escape several times and refused to take medication prescribed to her at the institutions. As a punishment she has force-fed the drugs and put in solitary confinement.
She says: “They carried me into a room, threw me in there, took my clothes. I was in hysterics. There’s blood on the walls, faeces, urine, only a drain. No windows. Crazy.”
Worse was to come at Provo Canyon School in Utah, which is now under new management. She told how, sleep-deprived and heavily medicated, she would be taken for “cervical exams” during the night.
Paris says: “They would hold you down, four of them, men and women, and literally just be putting fingers . . . and just doing things on a regular basis.
“They’re emotionally and psychologically torturing you to the point that you don’t even know who you are any more.”
Her parents didn’t know of the abuse because staff convinced her they would never believe it if she told the truth.
When she was released at 18, she was determined to build a shiny new life. She started to make a name for herself on New York’s social scene and signed for Donald Trump’s modelling agency.
At 19 she caught the attention of notorious movie mogul Weinstein, who invited her to his hotel room to “read lines from a script”.
Knowing his reputation as a sexual predator, Paris sensibly decided not to, but she claimed that just brought out the notorious bully’s temper at a party they both attended.
She says: “I went into the bathroom and he followed me. He tried to open the door, he was banging on it, and I wouldn’t open it.
“And security came and literally carried him away. It scared me and freaked me out.”
In 2003 she was about to find global fame in The Simple Life when a sex tape was leaked online showing her with ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon, a poker player who later married Pamela Anderson.
He claimed the tape had been leaked without his permission but he did earn money from it, whereas Paris has always insisted she didn’t make “a dollar” from it. But she did get flak for it, as she told Glamour: “I was vilified when it came out.
“People think that I am bad or I’m a slut because of something I did with someone who I was with and that was never meant to be public.”
In her early twenties Paris got pregnant but felt she was not ready for motherhood and had an abortion.
She says: “This was also something that I didn’t want to talk about because there was so much shame around that. I was a kid and I was not ready for that.”
During her wildest days, Paris landed in trouble for a host of reasons, from drink-driving and being caught with cannabis and cocaine to making racist comments.
Since then the successful businesswoman, who makes a fortune from selling perfume, jewellery and tracksuits, has largely avoided controversy.
These days she is a political activist, meeting politicians, trying to persuade them to help children abused at institutions like those she attended.
She says: “I feel most empowered when I’m doing my advocacy work, knowing I can be the hero I always needed when I was a little girl.”
Her attitude to sex has also changed since she met hubby Carter in 2019. She tells this month’s Harper’s Bazaar mag she thought she was “asexual” until they got together.
She says: “Anything sexual terrified me. I called myself the ‘kissing bandit’ because I only liked to make out. A lot of my relationships didn’t work out because of that.”
She wed Carter in 2021 and adds: “It wasn’t until him that I finally am not that way. I enjoy hooking up with my husband.”
Paris has had 20 embryos frozen in case she decides to have more children — which seems likely, given her feelings for Phoenix.
She said: “I’m so obsessed with my little angel and when he looks into my eyes, I just melt.”
- Read the full interview in the Glamour UK February Digital Issue online now.
