When Paris Hilton appears, finally, at the top of the grand twin staircase in her $63 million Beverly Hills mansion, the room pauses. Standing below her, in a huge, marble-floored entrance hall strewn with pink skeletons and cobwebs for Halloween, is her entourage of the day: her personal photographer, her make-up artist, her business partner, a handful of her household staff, her husband and me.
“Welcome,” she says, her voice soft but deliberate as she descends the staircase in pink heels and a floral dress. We are already 30 minutes into my allotted interview time but her photographer, Mark, has other priorities. He wants to take a photo of us together and ushers us under a large chandelier to pose in front of a set of white pillars. Hilton leans in towards me, then freezes at the sight of my feet. The disposable pink paper crime-scene-style covers I’m wearing — apparently mandatory for anyone entering her home — are a no-no for photos. “Oh yeah,” Mark says, “pinks have to come off. The only time Paris says that!” Hilton gives a self-deprecating laugh in confirmation.
Her husband, Carter Reum, a venture capitalist, drifts into the background, momentarily in frame. Mark sighs. “I’m in the way?” Carter asks, before retreating to the kitchen. Mark resumes directing. “One arm up — let’s go.” I panic and raise a peace sign. “Yass, loves it,” he says. “Sliving.” Hilton smiles. The word — a Hilton catchphrase that blends “slaying” and “living”— hangs in the air.
Hilton, 44, was born into this world to wealth and fame, an heiress whose great-grandfather was the hotel magnate Conrad Hilton. In her late teens she began modelling professionally, and as an It girl was the first to realise you could make money by charging to turn up to parties and events. She was also one of the first to start doing paid promotions on her social media accounts in the 2000s. In her words, she was the original influencer.
Paris Hilton at New York Fashion Week, 2003
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She fully came to fame in The Simple Life, a structured reality show (that spawned a thousand more) in which she starred with another rich socialite, Lionel Richie’s adopted daughter, Nicole. The pair took on low-paid jobs and sent themselves up by deploying a baby voice to ask airhead questions such as: “What is Walmart? Like, they sell wall stuff?”
Hilton, now sounding a lot huskier, insists that it was all an act. “I’m not a dumb blonde. I’m just very good at pretending to be one,” she says. “No one really knew the real me. And I always knew there was so much more to me. But I just feel like [to the world] I was kind of like this cartoon character … They didn’t realise I’m like a human being with feelings. And that was always really tough.”
Hilton leads me down a flight of stairs (pinks reattached) to an oak-panelled, cream-carpeted basement cinema. She sits herself down on a snug sofa in the front row and pats the small space next to her.
In the past, she says, “everyone was, like, ‘Oh, she’s famous for being famous.’ ” But that wasn’t for long. Hilton became a singer, peaking with the 2006 hit Stars Are Blind, which reached the Top Ten in the UK, and has a successful DJing career (she has earned up to $1 million a show).
DJing at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, 2022
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She has also made millions as an entrepreneur, with lines in clothing, perfume, skincare, handbags and kitchenware, and even promotes Crocs designed for dogs. In 2021 she launched her own entertainment company. “I’m a multihyphenate,” is how she puts it. “I get to do everything that I love.”
The company, 11:11 Media, is based in a large office building in Hilton’s back garden, nestled between a five-hole golf course, a lagoon-style swimming pool with a water slide and a hot pink tennis court emblazoned with a giant “Paris” signature. “Nobody in the world has that,” she tells me.
Hilton says her business, which has more than 25 employees, is valued at $1 billion. “I’m self-made,” she says. “Like, I’ve done this all on my own. No one’s ever given me anything in my entire life.” Given her surname, this will raise some eyebrows. But by any account, even if she did get a considerable head start, she went on to carve out her own career.
Her billionaire grandfather, Barron, who died in 2019, left 97 per cent of his wealth to the family’s charity foundation and nothing to her. “We were extremely close and we would always have lunches and dinners, and he would always say to me, ‘Paris, you work harder than any CEO I know.’ And he’s, like, ‘I used to be known as Barron Hilton but now I’m known as Paris Hilton’s grandpa.’ We would always laugh about it.”
Hilton has never led an ordinary life. Classmates included Nicole Richie at the Buckley School in Los Angeles and Macaulay Culkin at the Professional Children’s School for aspiring actors and dancers in New York. Her mother, Kathy, a socialite, was best friends with Michael Jackson. “He was like an uncle to me,” Hilton says.
What does she make of the allegations of paedophilia, including in the Leaving Neverland documentary, in which two men accused Jackson of sexually abusing them when they were boys? “I didn’t watch the documentary — I don’t like watching any of that type of stuff,” she says.
“I never saw him date anyone. I never saw him be like that with anyone. I didn’t see him as that type of person. So I’ve never paid attention to any of that because I just — I’ve always loved him like family.” She adds: “I just know the man that I knew my whole life, and I could never see him hurting a fly.”
With her parents, Richard and Kathy, her sister, Nicky, and Michael Jackson in the 1980s
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Another childhood acquaintance was Donald Trump, who mixed in business circles with Hilton’s father, Richard, a property investor. Hilton previously said she had voted for Trump in the 2016 election but retracted this statement in her 2023 memoir. She said she had lied because Trump “was an old family friend and owned the first modelling agency I signed with — and when I left to go to another agency, he was furious and intimidated the shit out of me on the phone”.
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Did she vote for him in last year’s election? “I didn’t have time to do any of it, to vote,” Hilton replies. “My schedule is so insane. I was travelling — I think I was in London during all that … and I was, like, moving houses.”
By all accounts her teenage years were horrific, marked by abuse that she kept hidden until 2019. Her parents did their best to keep her out of the party scene when she was growing up in LA, she says. “I lived such a sheltered life. Like, I was not allowed to wear make-up, not allowed to go on dates. I didn’t really go to the school dances. My parents were very, very strict.”
But when she was 14, Hilton was groomed by a teacher who lured her into his car outside her home. He fled after her parents caught them kissing. She was sent to live with her grandmother in Palm Springs. While on a trip to LA from her grandmother’s, she wrote in her memoir, she was drugged and probably raped by a man she met in a shopping mall.
Hilton, aged 15, in 1996
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When she was 15 she joined her parents and her younger siblings, Nicky, Barron and Conrad, in a luxury suite in the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. Hilton became a wild child, sneaking out of home, partying into the early hours. When she turned 16 her parents turned to CEDU, a company that operated what it euphemistically described as therapeutic, emotional-growth boarding schools for misbehaving teenagers.
This nightmarish episode of Hilton’s life started in the dead of night when two “giant, ’roided-up meatheads” burst into her Waldorf Astoria bedroom, yanked her out of bed and flew her to a school in a remote part of northern California.
There, she wrote in her autobiography, Hilton was forced to strip in front of strangers, including other children, and subjected to a cavity search. This was just the beginning. Students were banned from looking outside the window without permission, singing, throat clearing, crossing their legs and talking about McDonald’s. Then, she recounts, there were hours-long sessions called “raps” in which they were encouraged to verbally abuse each other before being forced into a group cuddle.
Hilton made three escape attempts. Each time, she was caught and sent to an even stricter institution. “The hardest, most difficult point was being a teenager in places like that. It was just like abuse in every sense,” she says. She likens the experience to torture. “Having everything taken away, like, not being able to look out of a window, not being able to speak, just feeling like a prisoner when you are just a child. And your family thinks that you’re in an emotional-growth boarding school and you’re riding horses and it’s so happy, and they have all these fake brochures and the marketing is so deceptive.”
The family with her younger brother Barron, left, 2010
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Her attempts to tell her parents what was going on failed, partly because phone calls were monitored and partly because her parents had been warned by leaders of the schools that students would say anything to escape. At the age of 18 Hilton was allowed home. For years afterwards, “I had severe, severe nightmares,” she says. “It was terrifying, where I would just wake up from these dreams, thinking that I had been taken back to these schools. It was traumatising to have to relive it almost every single night.”
The nightmares stopped only after she had told “my truth” in the 2020 documentary This Is Paris; during the making of it she also spoke to her parents about the extent of her abuse for the first time. Since then, she’s been on a mission to take on what she calls the “troubled teens industry”, to shut down these correctional facilities. “I think it’s made me very, very strong. I can get through anything,” she says.
She has spoken before Congress in Washington and has successfully lobbied for new laws to regulate such institutions in dozens of US states, and prompted a federal study of the sector.
Hilton estimates that more than half the schools — several hundred so far — have been closed down because of her work. “I feel I’ve made the world a safer place for children. I know I have,” she says. But she is not done: “I’m going to continue on this fight for as long as it takes, because there’s still so much work to do.”
When she turned 18 Hilton picked up in LA where she had left off in New York. A paparazzi photograph of her in her car with Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan was dubbed the “Bimbo Summit” by the New York Post.
With Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears in 2006
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Out in LA with Kim Kardashian
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Hilton helped to make the career of Kim Kardashian, her childhood friend and one-time wardrobe assistant. She was romantically linked, often she says without substance, to men ranging from Michael Jackson (“the weirdest rumour!”), Leonardo DiCaprio and the Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. There were stories that Ghislaine Maxwell, girlfriend of the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, met her at a party and wanted to recruit her. “I don’t even remember ever meeting her,” Hilton says, before reflecting: “I’m such a good clickbait name.”
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Hilton spent 23 days in LA’s Lynwood prison in 2007 for driving with a suspended licence after a drink-driving offence. Later, in 2010, she avoided prison with a one-year suspended sentence after Las Vegas police found cocaine in her purse.
On her way to a court hearing after being caught driving while banned in 2007. She served 23 days in jail
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But when I ask her about those wild days, she says: “I was just like any other young girl — growing up, going out — but I had the whole world watching. The media, especially the tabloids, they love to sensationalise everything.”
Plus, she says, she had to contend with “Paris Hilton lookalikes that people would hire to, like, pretend to be me” to have their antics reported in the media. “They would wear sunglasses, they would have fake bodyguards, holding a chihuahua that looked exactly like my dog, dressed in the same exact outfits, trying to do, like, ‘the voice’.” She adds: “I couldn’t stop them.”
Hilton’s life changed for ever in June 2004 when an ex-boyfriend, Rick Salomon, began selling a sex tape they had made when she was 19. “That was just so painful and humiliating,” she says now. He was in his early thirties — yet she was the one shamed. The singer Pink cruelly parodied it in the video for her song Stupid Girls. And South Park made her the star of an episode called Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset.
“It was just very misogynistic,” Hilton says. Salomon was the first man that she had fallen for after the trauma of her teenage years. “So it was obviously meeting like a completely wrong person at the wrong time,” she says. “I just felt like the world judged me from that point on.”
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Now she finds some comfort in the fact that attitudes towards revenge porn have changed. “Like, that would be illegal today,” she says. “People realise just how wrong it was. And that has also been healing for me, for people to be, like, wow, Paris was just a teenage girl being taken advantage of by this older guy.”
Throughout this time, the paparazzi never let up. “They were always nice to me,” she says. “As a teenager it was, like, exciting and something new. But then I noticed it started being scary when it would just be every day.” Often, she adds, “there would be, like, twenty, sometimes forty cars full of these random guys standing outside my house with cameras.”
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Still, she endured where many crumbled, harnessing her fame alongside the rise of social media. Her team estimates that, in the past decade alone, the world has paid $4 billion for Paris Hilton-branded products.
Now the focus is on 11:11, a “next-gen” media company of which she is CEO and chairwoman. It strikes Hilton-fronted advertising deals to promote brands for companies including Motorola, Meta, Hilton Hotels (naturally), Crocs and Walmart, and runs her skincare and fragrance ranges, TV shows including the recent YouTube cartoon Paris & Pups, and her music; and invests in tech start-ups. It says it generates tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue.
On TikTok and Instagram combined, she has nearly 40 million followers. Many are Gen Z, drawn in by Nineties and Noughties nostalgia. When I told my Gen Z sister I was interviewing Hilton, I was told, “She’s iconic.” Hilton looks pleased but not all that surprised and responds with one of her catchphrases, “Loves it”, when I tell her this. Later, she insists we make a selfie video for my sister, whose name she has remembered.
Hilton credits her success to her ADHD, which she has come to see in recent years as her “superpower”, meaning she can juggle several projects at the same time. One of 11:11 Media’s 25 or so employees tells me that Hilton recently told them, “I bet Walt Disney had ADHD.”
Now she is a regular at media and tech industry events, such as the Cannes Lions advertising industry conference. I first saw Hilton there in 2024, talking at a small trade magazine event. At the back of an admiring crowd of American ad industry luvvies was one particularly enthusiastic fan. He whooped the whole time, “Go, Paris!”
At this year’s Cannes Lions festival
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This, I later learnt, was her husband, Reum. A former investment banker turned venture capitalist, Reum happily tells me that, while he isn’t expected to do many household chores, he is occasionally called upon to be Hilton’s “hype man”. Hilton and Reum, a friend of friends, became an item in 2019.
They married two years later and their son, Phoenix, and daughter, London, were born via surrogacy in January and November 2023. Hilton has previously said that one of the reasons she chose surrogacy was that after the trauma of her teenage years she feared her body may not be a healthy place for a baby given she often suffers from panic attacks.
With her husband, Carter Reum, and their children, Phoenix and London, 2024
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When they wake up from their nap, she is keen to introduce me and a nanny brings them in. They toddle over and when I ask if she expects them to be teenage tearaways, a look of horror passes over her face. “I’m going to be so protective,” she says firmly.
“I never thought I would be a strict mom,” she adds. But she predicts they’re “always going to want to hang out here”. After all: the cinema? The pool? The golf course? The tennis court signed by their mother?
She hopes their attitude will be, “I don’t want to go to the club with all my friends and I don’t want to sneak out.” And if they try, she adds, “nothing is going to get past me because I know every trick in the book”. Plus, “This house has so many security cameras, like, I’ll be alerted right away.” I tell Hilton they’ll call her a hypocrite. “Yeah, they will, for sure,” she says, laughing.
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I ask if she would like them to become influencers and follow her career path. “Hmm, not influencers,” she says. But she would like to think that they will be entrepreneurial and perhaps launch their own businesses, maybe in retail or technology. “If I’m in a meeting they’re always sitting with me, so I feel like they’re soaking it in already, to see their mom do so many things and be successful in so many different areas.”
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Having children has, inevitably, made Hilton think about mortality. “I’m, like, obsessed with longevity,” she says. She is building an 8,000 sq ft “wellness and longevity centre” in her home. “It’ll be like no spa you’ve ever seen in the world. The whole room is going to be pink with crystals and it’s just going to look like you’re walking into another realm, like a different planet almost, where it’s just, like, this fantastical, high-tech, futuristic place.”
How long does she expect to live for? “I’ve heard my friends say it’s possible now to live to, like, 150, 160 years old.”
So that’s the plan, then, Paris Hilton still sliving it up in 2125? “I wish I could just, like, live for ever. I’m not scared of many things in life except spiders, bees — and dying. I’m just so scared of that,” says Hilton, who was raised Catholic and believes in the afterlife. “Because I just feel like, if it was just nothing — which I know it’s not — that would be so boring.”