In September 2020, Paris Hilton released a documentary titled “This is Paris” on her YouTube channel. In the almost two-hour film, the hotel heiress reported on what was probably the worst year of her life. When she was 17, her parents sent her to the “Provo Canyon School” in Utah, a boarding school for difficult children and young people. Even then, Hilton said in the documentary: “I went through hell” and reported on physical and psychological abuse.
In an interview with the “New York Times”, Hilton spoke in detail about the allegations of abuse. “Very late at night, around 3 or 4 in the morning, they brought me and other girls into this room and did medical exams. It wasn’t with a doctor, it was with various other staff. They put us on a table and put their fingers inside us. I don’t know what they did, but it definitely wasn’t a doctor. It was really scary and something I’d pushed aside for many years,” Hilton said in a video.
The American wrote on Twitter: “With sleep deprivation and heavy medication, I didn’t understand what was going on. I was forced to lie down on a padded table, spread my legs and undergo an examination. I cried while they held me down. They just said, ‘Shut up. Shut up. Stop struggling’.”
According to Hilton’s descriptions, such incidents happened regularly. Not only she, but also other children and young people at the boarding school were victims of abuse. Like other former students, Hilton calls herself a “survivor.” “I was raped and I cry as I write this because no one, especially a child, should be sexually abused. My childhood was stolen from me and it breaks me that this is still happening to other innocent children,” Hilton tweeted.
She had to endure eleven months in the “Provo Canyon School” in the nineties, when she was 18 she was allowed to leave the boarding school. Her mother and father didn’t know what she was going through for years. It was only during the shooting of her documentary that Hilton told her mother about her traumatic experiences.
Since then, the hotel heiress has been publicly fighting for the boarding school to be closed. The school is currently owned by Universal Health Services. Those responsible have repeatedly declined to comment on the allegations from the 1990s. According to the “New York Times”, there are currently several lawsuits against the company and its facilities, including for sexual abuse by a medical worker.
Quelle: “New York Times”, Paris Hilton Twitter
