Paris Hilton opened up about the trauma she experienced when her infamous sex tape was leaked in 2004 during a speech on Capitol Hill in which she advocated for new laws to help victims of a new kind of online abuse.
The Simple Life alum, 44, gave a powerful speech as she appeared alongside Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday, January 22 in support of the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act (DEFIANCE Act).
“When I was 19 years old, a private, intimate video of me was shared with the world without my consent. People called it a scandal. It wasn’t. It was abuse,” the heiress said of the tape, which also featured her with then-boyfriend Rick Salomon.
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“There were no laws at the time to protect me. There weren’t even words for what had been done to me. The internet was still new, and so was the cruelty that came with it,” she added.
“They called me names. They laughed and made me the punchline. They sold my pain for clicks, and then they told me to be quiet, to move on, to even be grateful for the attention,” the “Stars Are Blind” singer continued. “These people didn’t see me as a young woman who had been exploited. They didn’t see the panic that I felt, the humiliation or the shame. No one asked me what I lost — I lost control over my body, over my reputation. My sense of safety and self-worth was stolen from me.”
Hilton then pivoted to explain that the same thing that happened to her is happening to millions of young women today in a “new, more terrifying way.” If passed, the DEFIANCE Act would allow victims of AI-generated deepfake pornography to take legal action against both the creators and distributors.
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Hilton explained that this issue is personal to her, not just because there are “over 100,000 explicit deepfake images” of her out there but because she’s a mother who fears for her own daughter, London, 2. (She shares son Phoenix, 3, with husband Carter Reum.)
“Too many women are afraid to exist online or sometimes to exist at all, and I know how that feels, because I lived it,” she explained. “Now I have a daughter who’s just 2-and-a-half years old, and I would go to the ends of the earth to protect her. But I can’t protect her from this, not yet.”
“And that’s why I’m here. This isn’t just about technology, it’s about power,” she concluded. “It’s about using someone’s likeness to humiliate, silence and strip them of their dignity. Victims deserve more than after-the-fact apologies. We deserve justice.”
This story Paris Hilton Speaks Candidly About Infamous Leaked NSFW Tape: ‘They Sold My Pain For Clicks’ first appeared on Globe. Add Globe as a Preferred Source by clicking here.