All of the things that every teenage girl would go through: going to school, going to the prom, going to college, I missed out on so much of that,” Paris Hilton tells me. It would be natural to assume this was just the opportunity cost of her fame; the Shirley Temple of partying, she’s been red-carpeting so long that even if she’s younger than you – she’s 42 – it probably feels as if she’s lived longer. Of course she didn’t go to college: those sequins weren’t going to wear themselves to Coachella.

In the beginning, Paris Hilton was famous because her parents were, and they were famous because of her great-grandfather, hotel tycoon Conrad Hilton, and the whole family was famous because of its wealth. As she moved into her late teens, she became a name in her own right: a model and It girl, the “OG influencer”, as she describes it – the first person on record to seek and attain payment for turning up at parties. This, at the time, seemed to seal her in the public imagination as a bauble, one of life’s fripperies. Certainly, we didn’t spend a lot of time pondering that it takes quite a lot of entrepreneurial moxie to recognise the value of your stardust and monetise it, especially when you’re already minted.

Hilton’s gear change to global fame came in 2004, when a former boyfriend, Rick Salomon, released a sex tape filmed the year before that rapidly caught fire online. At this point, Hilton was already becoming known for the reality show The Simple Life, which she did with Nicole Richie: two fabulous, pampered socialites, slumming it in minimum-wage jobs, living with a regular family in Arkansas. It was strangely compelling and memorable: I can still get a pin-sharp visual on Hilton and Richie trying to make onion rings in a fast-food restaurant.

That show seemed to fix her reputation as the punchline of a joke she’d actually authored. The Simple Life marked the dawn of the age of a certain type of structured reality TV; the next nearest thing was Laguna Beach, which didn’t air until the following year. Hilton, obviously along with numerous TV execs, created what would become an endlessly replenishing genre, and yet managed to emerge from it the ditzy, clueless little rich girl.

With sidelines in perfume, boutiques, beach clubs and other product lines, she started DJing in the 2010s and, unarguably, by then had created more wealth and notoriety than had ever been bestowed on her by the accident of birth. Granted, none of this would have shaken out the same way without the privileged start, but she’s no Donald Trump character, sitting on piles of inherited gold and claiming to have made it. The late Barron Hilton probably put it most pithily when he said that he used to be known as Conrad Hilton’s son, until he was known as Paris Hilton’s grandfather.

But none of that is why she missed out on her teenage years, has no education to speak of, and spent years battling “so much trauma that I didn’t want to think”. She was “going out, travelling, doing all these things just to not have to think about what I had been through”. It sounds so improbable, impossible even, for anything that bad to have happened in a family so scrutinised, but her teenage years were horrific.

She’s speaking to me over Zoom from Los Angeles, and we’re talking about Paris: The Memoir – she looks on the screen much as she does on its cover: blond, glossy, flawless, features so strong and symmetrical that it makes her seem self-possessed and a bit remote, irrespective of what she’s actually saying. Her friend Kim Kardashian once said, while they were making frittata and french toast coated with Frosted Flakes, “I don’t know anyone who parties as hard as you do and looks as good as you do”, and that’s as true now as it was any other year.

In a story probably familiar to anyone with ADHD who grew up before it was common to get a diagnosis, Paris Hilton struggled at school, and the upsides of attention deficit disorder – “We’re so creative, we’re constantly thinking, our minds move as fast as a race car” – went unrecognised. “My childhood would have been very different if I’d been diagnosed: I definitely wouldn’t have been sent away,” she says. When she was 14, she was groomed by a teacher at her school, and her parents came home to find her in a car on the drive, kissing a grown man. They were about to move from Bel Air to the Waldorf Astoria anyway, and “they were worried”, she says, “to have a young girl in New York City at that point, and thought I would be safer with my grandma. But they had no idea it was a teacher.” So the Hiltons, having asked no questions about the incident, sent their oldest daughter to live in Palm Springs and moved with their other three children, Nicky, Barron II and Conrad.

Full interview: theguardian.com

In November 2003, after we had filmed the first season of The Simple Life and before it premiered, I was living my best life. The show started getting tons of great press. My co-star Nicole Richie and I were working it, showing up, doing interviews. I was out clubbing almost every night, posing for the paparazzi, talking to everyone about this crazy, wonderful show about to come out, promising everyone that they’d be blown away. I shuttled between New York and L.A., working the red carpet at premieres and award shows, and wherever I went, the growing army of paparazzi followed. I was having a wild-child moment, and it was sort of glorious.

It all came crashing down when I realized I was pregnant at 22. It was like waking up on the ledge outside a 40th-floor window. I was terrified and heartsick. The hormones sent my ADHD symptoms spiraling. Everything I knew about myself was at war with everything I’d been raised to believe about abortion. No one can ever know how hard it is to face this impossible choice unless she’s faced it herself.

Luckily, I wasn’t fully alone. At the time, I had been dating a guy named Jason Shaw for two years. I had first seen him on the curb in front of the Four Seasons in L.A., waiting for valet parking, and recognized him from a towering Tommy Hilfiger billboard that featured him stretched out in his underwear in Times Square. He was a lovely, down-to-earth guy. He had a degree in history. He bought a house on Kings Road where we could live together… But I knew I wasn’t in the right place to make any sort of commitment. It had nothing to do with him or a baby. I just wasn’t capable of being honest or loyal or whole. After suffering abuse at Provo Canyon School and three other programs within the “troubled teen” industry network, I was damaged in ways I couldn’t tell him about, and the fact that I never confided in him about my past—that says it all, doesn’t it? Secrets are corrosive. They destroy anything you try to layer over them.

Choosing to have an abortion can be an intensely private agony that’s impossible to explain. The only reason I’m talking about it now is that so many women are facing it, and they feel so alone and judged and abandoned. I want them to know that they’re not alone, and they don’t owe anyone an explanation. When there is no right way—all that’s left is what is. What you know you have to do. And you do it, even though it breaks your heart.

Over the years, I’ve looked back on all this with sorrow, even though I know I made the right choice. In my loneliest moments, I’ve romanticized that time in my life and tortured myself with melodrama—thoughts like, What if I killed my Paris?—but the fact is, there was no happy little family at stake. That was not going to happen. Trying to continue that pregnancy with the physical and emotional issues I was dealing with at the time would have been a train wreck for everyone involved. At that moment, I was in no way capable of being a mother. Denying that would have jeopardized the forever family I hoped to have in the future, at a time when I was healthy and healed.

Until I met Carter, who would become my husband, I wasn’t totally convinced that forever was a thing for me.

With Carter, for the first time in my life, I began a relationship on a foundation of full disclosure. I made a connection that didn’t include separate corners for carefully kept secrets. We were honest with each other. Crazy concept, right? First you own it. Then you can share it.

We’re now a comfortable married couple. We love our Saturday mornings when we go to the farmers’ market for fresh eggs, fruit, and veggies, which we haul home so I can cook an elaborate brunch, and then we sit there and eat and eat and talk about exquisitely nerdy things like cross-collateralization and negative pickup. We laugh a lot and take time to wonder and be grateful. We love our work, our homes, our jobs, and we adore our dogs.

And we’ve started a family—on our own terms, because we were both ready to be parents. That doesn’t mean it was easy. I’ve always wanted twins: a boy and a girl. “It’s possible,” our doctor said. “In a perfect world…” If only my world were as perfect as it looks. For so many people, having babies is like plug and play, right? That’s how it seems, anyway. And when you want a baby, it seems like everyone around you is getting pregnant. It sucks, but I’m not alone in this either. There are so many young women at the fertility doctor’s office, so many families waiting to happen.

That’s what IVF is all about. Possibility. Hope. It’s hard, but you’re willing to go through anything to find your heart’s desire.

Month after month of injections, several egg-harvesting procedures, more IVF injections, new ADHD meds, my natural state of chaos—it was a lot. The shots are painful. At times, I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to confront the fact that my mind and body had never fully healed—and probably never will fully heal—from the trauma I went through as a teenager. But after two years, we finally welcomed our son, Phoenix Barron Hilton Reum, in January via surrogacy. He is my everything, the child I was always meant to raise.

I know I wouldn’t have this life if I hadn’t made that difficult choice in my early 20s. Women need to control their reproductive destiny. We need to know ourselves, trust ourselves, and know what’s right for us—and when—and stay in the driver’s seat.

Source: time.com