Paris Hilton has revealed the devastating impact of physical and mental abuse she suffered at a boarding school during her teen years. The heiress is baring all of her personal life, as she strips away the facade of fame in her upcoming documentary This Is Paris.
She opens up in the YouTube Originals documentary for the first time ever about the abuse she faced as a teenager at Provo Canyon School, a boarding school she attended in Utah.
The 39-year-old told People: ‘I buried my truth for so long. But I’m proud of the strong woman I’ve become. People might assume everything in my life came easy to me, but I want to show the world who I truly am.’
She ended up at a series of boarding schools, following a rebellious phase, while living at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City with her family. Hilton spent 11 months at Provo Canyon, the last in a series of schools her parents enrolled her, which focused on behavioral and mental development.
She recalled: ‘I knew it was going to be worse than anywhere else… It was supposed to be a school, but [classes] were not the focus at all.
‘From the moment I woke up until I went to bed, it was all day screaming in my face, yelling at me, continuous torture.’
The House of Wax actress continued: ‘The staff would say terrible things. They were constantly making me feel bad about myself and bully me. I think it was their goal to break us down.
‘And they were physically abusive, hitting and strangling us. They wanted to instill fear in the kids so we’d be too scared to disobey them.’
‘You couldn’t trust anyone there,’ she said of a classmate who snitched on her for trying to escape.
Hilton said she was subsequently placed in solitary confinement as punishment: ‘They would use that as punishment, sometimes 20 hours a day.’
Three of her former classmates from Provo Canyon also appear in the documentary, making similar allegations, including the use of restraints and being force-fed medication.
She added: ‘I was having panic attacks and crying every single day. I was just so miserable. I felt like a prisoner and I hated life.’
Hilton said she never told her parents: ‘I didn’t really get to speak to my family, maybe once every two or three months. We were cut off from the outside world. And when I tried to tell them once, I got in so much trouble I was scared to say it again.
‘They would grab the phone or rip up letters I wrote telling me, “No one is going to believe you.” And the staff would tell the parents that the kids were lying. So my parents had no idea what was going on.’
The Stars Are Blind artist left the school in 1999, after she turned 18, recalling: ‘I was so grateful to be out of there, I didn’t even want to bring it up again. It was just something I was ashamed of and I didn’t want to speak of it.’
Hilton opens up about Provo Canyon School and more in This Is Paris, which premieres September 14 on her YouTube channel.
