Paris Hilton has opened up about the aftermath of her leaked sex tape, distributed by her ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon in 2004. The leak — and subsequent media attention — left her with PTSD, she says, and she cried “every single day”.
The influencer, actress, and reality star spoke out on the distressing experience after watching Framing Britney Spears, in an interview with Vanity Fair. “After seeing the Britney documentary, my heart was broken,” she says, adding: “It just brought up a lot of memories for myself.”
Going on to talk about the tape specifically, she says: “That will always be something that will hurt me for the rest of my life. It’s always there in the back of my mind.”
“When it happened, people were so mean about it, to me. Just the way that I was spoken about on all the nightly talk shows and all the media… every day having to see things with my family was just heartbreaking.”
“I would be in tears every single day. I didn’t want to leave my house, didn’t want to show my face. I just felt like my life was over.”
“That’s a private experience between two people. You think that you love someone and you trust them, and to have your trust betrayed like that, and for the whole world to be watching and laughing… even more hurtful to me for people to think that I did that on purpose, that just killed me.”
“It still gives me post traumatic stress disorder to talk about it.”
“I’m happy that things have changed,” she goes on, talking about the potential impact if the sex tape was leaked today. “And that people are realising that the woman in the situation who is the victim should not be treated like that, or spoken about like that.”
Earlier this year, Hilton also spoke out about being “purposely humiliated” by David Letterman, in a 2007 interview that recently resurfaced online. In February, she recalled “traumatizing” mistreatment she experienced as a teenager at school in Utah, and has since helped push through a bill prohibiting youth treatment centres from certain punishments of students.
Last week, it was announced that she will star in a new, pandemic-inspired thriller, 18 & Over, alongside Sky Ferreira, Pamela Anderson, Winnie Harlow, A$AP Nast, and more.
