Paris: A Memoir for Young Women in the Age of Influencers

by Paris Hilton

I forced myself to eat the sort of food I wouldn’t feed a dog, because I had to stay strong.

These broken CEDU people practiced cruelty like a martial art: largely self-defense but lethal as needed.

“Whatever-the-fuck-ever Propheet”—it made no difference to me. You had to sit through several hours of lectures by team leaders and counselors, who read from voluminous scripts written by the great god of furniture sales, Wasserman himself.

I got on top of the toilet, clawed my way over the sill, and dropped to the ground on the other side of the building. I darted across the yard, keeping to the shadows, climbed the fence, and ran like hell. Without looking back, I scrambled down a steep embankment, through thick underbrush, into the mossy forest.

It was late afternoon. The sun disappeared behind the ridge. I was cold and scared, but I was on fire with adrenaline. I felt like I was in a movie. This was some James Bond shit!

“Kyle, you have to save me. Please. And don’t tell Mom. Just come and get me, Kyle. Please. Please, hurry. This place is fucked up.

I went behind the building and scrunched down in the weeds. After a little while, a police car rolled into the parking lot. “Have you seen a blond girl?” the cop asked someone coming out of the restaurant. Shit. Shit. Think. Think. Think. Hide.

I didn’t know until that moment that it was possible to be physically hungry for both food and music, but I was.

Fuck my life.

“Well, look who it is!” I didn’t even see the back of her hand coming at me. Next thing I knew I was down on the ground. An enforcer hauled me up, and they just went crazy on me, hitting and choking me, and shrieking at everybody to look what happens. And everybody looked. Their eyes were as big as soccer balls. A lot of them were crying. No doubt, this was an intense thing to witness, and I suppose that was the whole point. That’s why they didn’t need barbed wire or steel bars or iron doors. There was something a lot stronger keeping people inside. They had horror stories about dead kids in the woods. They had everyone teed up to tell on everyone else. They had the people who love you fooled.

And then Lindsay got in the car, which was kind of awkward because I was driving a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren that had only two seats. She got in, and Britney kind of wedged up on the middle thing where, ideally, you would put your purse. On a video that captured this moment, there’s a collective gasp, and then one of the paps says, “Oh, this is gonna be classic!” And they go at it, snapping their asses off, holding their cameras over the hood of the car. The raindrops on the windshield lit up like BeDazzled-time. “Paris! Paris! Wipe the windows! Wipe the windows!”

“Paris, Britney, & Lindsay: The Triumph of the Bimbo Summit”—about

I leaped out over the stairs, skipped like a stone, stumbled, found my feet, and kept pounding toward the one safe haven I could think of. The Hilton. Conrad Hilton was ahead of his time. In 1959, air travel was cutting edge, marketed with high fashion and art cross-promotions. Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol did commercials for Braniff with stewardesses in Pucci uniforms. My great-grandfather turned travel upside down, building a luxury hotel right there at SFO. You could fly in, live your best life, and fly out again without ever leaving the airport. Papa was a young man at the time, and he loved that hotel, because it was always full of pilots, stewardesses, and jet-set people from all over the globe.

A good concierge doesn’t ask questions. He hustled me out to the curb and into a waiting cab. The baffled driver started to ask, “Where—” “Just go! Just go!” He peeled out. Tiger! Tiger! Tiger-a-Go-Go! As we sped away from the hotel, I peeked over the back of the seat and saw Mr. Meathead on the curb, looking like he was about to have a heart attack.

“Mom! Mom . . .” I was crying before she had a chance to accept the charges. This was only the second time I’d heard her voice since I was taken. “Paris, where are you? What have you done?” “Mom, please,” I sobbed. “You have no idea what’s happening here. There’s like—I got beaten up—they’re crazy—I don’t want to go to this place. Please, let me come home.” As I pleaded for my life, I could tell she didn’t believe me. “Paris, calm down. It’s all right.” “I’ll never go out again. I won’t lie. I won’t go to clubs. I hate clubs! Mom, I just want to be home. I’ll do good in school. I’ll do anything you say. I’ll be good, Mom. I’ll be good, I swear.” “Paris, calm down. It’s okay,” Mom said. “Of course, you can come home.” “Thank you.” I closed my eyes and slumped against the wall of the phone booth, desperately weary, desperately grateful. “Thank you, Mom. I’ll be so good. I promise.” “Just stay on the phone with me. Stay right there.” I was happy to do that. All I wanted was her soothing voice in my ear. “Everything’s okay, Paris. Just stay with me while we figure this out.” It’s cute how I kept forgetting that my mom is way smarter than me.

I expected him to put me into the back of a cop car, but there wasn’t one. He was a bicycle cop. He put handcuffs on me, got on his bike, and made me run behind him all the way to the police station, which was only a couple blocks, but come on. Fuck you, bicycle cop. Fuck you and your hideous shorts and the lame-ass gel seat you rode in on.

Mrs. Meathead was holding an ice pack on her face. The front of her shirt was spattered with blood. While Mr. Meathead was at the front desk talking to the police officer, she bent down and burbled through her swollen lips, “Fuhtt you, you libble dwat. You’re gomma be sowwy you did dat.”

When we arrived at Ascent, a burly woman in combat fatigues strip-searched and groped me in full view of the staff and gawking students. There was a crew-cut-and-camo white-supremacist vibe to the place: a shack with a guard, a common area with wooden benches, a circle of tepees, a mess tent with a log for a table. The only sanitation was a pair of porta-potties. Instead of showers, you got a bucket of cold water with a cup and a bar of soap. Kids were required to strip naked and wash while staff watched.

I tried to drain off the sour milk, but the team leader said, “Eat it or I’ll shove it down your throat.”

Asking questions or voicing a complaint got you a slap across the face, and they made sure everyone saw it. Kids got punched, choked, and thrown to the ground, held facedown in the dirt with a staff person’s knee on their neck. They kept us scared and hungry. If the milk was bad, and you couldn’t eat your cereal, you had to carry it with you all day until you ate it.

Burly kept me on the log all night. I was shivering cold and exhausted from the long day of manual labor, but I sat there and said nothing, because I didn’t want to get my tentmate in trouble. It didn’t sink in until morning that my tentmate had ratted me out.

When people woke up and found us still out there in this standoff, Burly lost it. She had to show them she could break me. Everyone crouched by the opening of their tent, watching with huge, scared eyes as she slapped and strangled me, yelling with her hot breath on my face. “If you fucking run—say one word about running—try to be a bad influence on other kids—I will make your life hell, understand? You are never gonna leave here. I will bury you here, and no one will give a shit. Your parents hate you. Get it through your stupid little bimbo head! You belong to me.”

Years later, when I finally found the courage to google it, I was glad to see this place had been shut down. Kids had died there, and the lawsuits finally got to be too much. But other places just like it sprang up. It’s infuriating how widespread this type of thing is—and that a lot of people have known about it for a long time.

GAO found thousands of allegations of abuse, some of which involved death, at residential treatment programs across the country and in American-owned and American-operated facilities abroad between the years 1990 and 2007. . . . GAO could not identify a more concrete number of allegations because it could not locate a single Web site, federal agency, or other entity that collects comprehensive nationwide data.

Burly wasn’t lying. She really could have buried me there, and no one in any official capacity would have known or cared. The report goes on to cite one agonized example after another: May 1990—Female, 15—died while hiking after reporting symptoms of dehydration for two days; left on dirt road for eighteen hours September 2000—Male, 15—held facedown in the dirt for forty-five minutes; died of severed artery in the neck February 2001—Male, 14—attempted to commit suicide severing artery with camp-issued pocketknife (knife was not taken away); hanged himself in his tent the following day July 2002—Male, 14—died of heat stroke exertion while hiking; staff member hid behind a tree to observe if he was “faking it”; checked for pulse after child lay motionless for more than ten minutes November 2004—Male, 15—forced to wear twenty-pound sandbag around his neck as punishment for being “too weak”; collapsed and died; autopsy revealed bruises over entire body. This list goes on and on like a beatbox loop and doesn’t even address the thousands of kids who suffered these horrific conditions and survived. I’ve testified before House committees, so I know what it’s like presenting information like this in a cold conference hall, facing a sea of men in dark suits. Most of them are there because they sincerely want to make a difference, but after a while, they look numb. It’s impossible for them to see these statistics as children—but it’s impossible for me to see these children as statist...

The skin-crawling reality of the observed bucket shower had become normalized.

I no longer felt the sting when they talked about my parents hating me or told me I’d be a crack whore and die in a gutter and had no future. What did that even mean?

There was a young girl who’d arrived recently and was having a bad time, mouthing off and getting slapped around a lot. (Let’s just call her Tess.) One night, I whispered to her, “Let’s get out of here. I’ll tell you when.” Tess nodded, scared but resolute.

At two in the morning, we took off through the trees, down the mountain to a dirt road. She struggled to keep up, and I badgered her like a football coach. “Keep going! You can do this! We can’t slow down!” After a while, we came to a small group of old mobile homes scattered around a cluttered field of junked cars and rusted machinery. We crept through the clutter, peeking in windows. Inside one of the trailers, a woman sat by herself, reading a thick book in the lamplight. She had a long, thick braid over her shoulder, jet black and steel gray, and a big dog curled up at her feet. A dog person. I thought maybe we could trust her.

“I’m so sorry to bother you. Me and my friend were camping with some boys, and they’re really drunk and tried to rape us, and we don’t have anywhere to go,” and on and on. I don’t know if she believed us or not, but she didn’t ask questions, so either she accepted the story on face value, or she knew the truth was something too terrible to tell. “You must be freezing,” she said. “Come in, come in.”

When Tess came out of the shower, the sun was coming up. “They’ll know we’re gone,” I whispered. “We need to leave.” The lady let me use her phone to make a few long-distance calls to my friends in LA. One of my guy friends bought us train tickets, and our fairy godmother gave us a ride to the station. “Good luck.” She gave me a hug and drove away.

We tend to second-guess people when they’re down. What did that girl do to make her boyfriend beat her? Why doesn’t that junkie just get a job?

two crewcut Ascent goons blocked us on the platform. So, forget about goodness in the world. The world fucking sucks. I gripped Tess’s hand, and we were both trembling. Back at the camp, they made everyone sit on logs. Strip search. Cavity examination. One of the guys who always watched me during soap and bucket time said, “Now you’re gonna see what happens when you run away.” The creepy way he was smiling, I thought he was going to rape me right there in front of everyone. Thank God, he just beat the shit out of us.

I slayed the three-week hiking marathon, up and down snow-covered mountains, carrying my eighty-pound backpack. (Not exaggerating. They told us every day, “It’s an eighty-pound pack, so use your legs when you lift.”)

We reached our encampment and built a sweat lodge—big branches lashed together into a roundhouse frame covered with canvas—and then the camo-squad led us in some bastardized version of a supposedly Native American ritual. This vision quest thing lasted for days. We sat in a circle around a fire, allowed to leave the sweat lodge only to go to the bathroom—except we never had to go to the bathroom because we were given virtually no food or water and were sweating so profusely. We weren’t allowed to sleep for seventy-two hours. If a kid passed out, we dragged them out in the snow to be revived and then trudged back in. It was our only breath of cool air, so I sat there praying for someone to keel over, even if it was me.

we were in no condition to understand or appreciate anything like that, and the Camo Goons were in no way qualified to oversee it.

When I got there, Burly was all happy happy joy joy. “You did it, Paris! You graduated!” “I’m going home,” I said. “Where are my parents?” “They’ll meet you in Redding and drive you to Cascade.” “Cascade . . . what . . .” “You’ve still got another year to work the program,” she said. So—wow. Trying to find words.

I begged and cried. “Mom, please, please, please take me home.” “You’ll like this place,” she said. “Look. It’s really nice.” She showed me a brochure that featured happy students, green grass, and a stately lodge with a rainbow arcing across the sky above, with the words The Cascade School. Again. Actual ad copy: As a community, we acknowledge the true potential of humanity and the nobility of the struggle toward a sane, caring, and enlightened world. For fuck’s sake. “Mom, I can’t,” I said. “I’m literally going through hell. These places are insane. These people are lying!” “Let’s not spend our time arguing,” said Mom. “This is hard for all of us. We have to be strong. We have one year left before you turn eighteen. This is our last chance to save you. We have to see it through.”

CEDU script: Don’t believe anything your child says. She’ll make up stories and say she’s being abused. She’ll say anything to go back to her old life—a life that will leave her dead or in prison. Tough love is the only way. You must be strong enough to save your child.

“I need to use the restroom,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” In the bathroom, I tore the smock off, jammed a magazine rack under the doorknob, and climbed out the window. I ran like hell, dragging the foils from my hair and jamming them in my pockets. I saw a Greyhound bus station and dodged into the bathroom.

Eventually, I fell asleep with my knees pulled up to my chest, my arms covering my head. I didn’t realize we’d stopped again until I felt a firm hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes to find a cop standing there.

I felt nothing when the male counselor told me to take off my clothes. I squatted and coughed and endured the cavity search without whimpering. I put on the pinks and followed my new “big sister” to our room.

The cavity searches—like any sexual assault—that was about them, not the person they were doing it to. Once I understood that, it was easy to fool them.

“You’re going to run, aren’t you?” she whispered. I didn’t say anything. Didn’t look at her. “Take me with you,” said Mouse. “If I stay here, I’ll die.” Fuck.

She was so skinny and small—barely up to my shoulder, maybe fourteen—and she cried a lot. She kept getting ripped apart in Raps for “tempting” her uncle and making him do bad things.

“Please, take me with you,” said Mouse. “Please.”

On a night when the moon was good and bright, Mouse and I took off running. I dragged her down the mountain, gripping her skinny wrist in my hand. No mercy. No stopping. We had to get back to that Greyhound station. It was the only way out.

I was being careful with my cash, but I bought some inexpensive brown mascara and used it to thicken our eyebrows into heavy unibrows. I feathered on mustaches and even gave myself a thin goatee. We slicked our hair back under baseball caps and hoodies from the clearance bin and got on a Greyhound bus, attempting to walk like b-boys. (Honestly, thinking about that cracks me up now.)

Mouse and I sat in front of the TV for hours, soaking up all the interesting things we’d missed.

When it felt safe to venture out, I went to the Whiskey Bar in the Sunset Marquis Hotel, where all the rock stars stay. I sat in the corner bobbing my head to the Cardigans’ “Lovefool.” I sang along, loud and joyful. I felt safe and fully alive, lost in the crowd. Love me, love me, say that you love me Fool me, fool me . . .