Paris Hilton speaks out about alleged abuse at ‘troubled teen’ boarding school – and her fight back
Paris Hilton’s mansion is in a gated community in Beverly Park, one of Los Angeles’s most upmarket enclaves where Adele and Mark Wahlberg also live.
On the driveway is a pink Bentley and a blue Porsche. The grand entrance is flanked by a giant white model giraffe and a neon pink Chanel sign and the hallways are lined with framed prints of the woman herself.
We are led to a room upstairs with a full-sized bar and fluffy white chairs where even the cushions have prints of Hilton’s face.
It is a home befitting the original “It Girl” – a reality TV star who once traded off her ditzy persona.
But this is a grown-up Hilton and we’re here to discuss serious issues, specifically the two years she spent at boarding schools for so-called troubled teens.
“It was like something out of a horror film,” she says. “It’s like they enjoyed abusing children.”
In the early 2000s, Hilton was one of the most photographed women in the world, the leader of a party set that included Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan.
But behind the celebrity, there was a darker reality.
Hilton was well known for her friendships with high profile stars, including Britney Spears – the pair are pictured with Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs in Las Vegas in 2007
She was the ‘original influencer’ and inspired Kim Kardashian, who features in her 2020 documentary, This Is Paris
As a 16-year-old she was sent to a series of residential facilities for so-called troubled teens, children with all manner of issues, from bad behaviour to addiction problems and mental illness.
“I wasn’t a bad kid,” she says.
“I was just a normal 16-year-old girl. My parents were very strict. They didn’t want me going out and I rebelled and started sneaking out and getting bad grades.
“My parents spoke to a therapist who recommended these schools. I later found out that this therapist and many others receive commissions sending children to these places.”
Hilton with her parents, Rick and Kathy, and younger sister Nicky in 1990
Like many children who attend these schools, Hilton’s parents paid for secure transportation, in effect an authorised kidnapping, where strangers take teenagers from their beds in the middle of the night and bundle them into the back of waiting vans.
“At 4.30 in the morning, two large men came into my room and just shook me out of bed and said, ‘Do you want to go the easy way or the hard way?’.
“They were holding up handcuffs and I had no idea what was happening, I thought I was being kidnapped, I had no idea who these people were.
“It just blows my mind that there are people like this that exist in the world that could treat children like this and get away with it for so long.
“I still have severe nightmares about it.”
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Hilton ended up at Provo Canyon School, in the foothills of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains.
It is marketed as an “intensive, psychiatric youth residential treatment centre,” but she says every day there was a living hell.
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Paris Hilton: ‘Troubled teen’ school was a ‘living hell’
In her newly released autobiography, Paris: The Memoir, she alleges she was woken in the middle of the night by male staff – not doctors – and led to a private room, where they forced her to submit to cervical exams.
“To be treated like a criminal when you’re just a kid,” she says, “and the strip searches constantly”.
“As an adult now, I see that as sexual abuse. Male and female staff watching a young girl changing or naked or taking a shower, it was just dehumanising on all levels.”
Sky’s Martha Kelner speaks to Paris Hilton
She also claims to have been force-fed medication.
“One time I was like, ‘I don’t want to take these anymore’. So I just kind of had the pills under my tongue and put them in a Kleenex.
“Later on someone found out and I got in so much trouble and they sent me to what they call ‘obs’, where you’re just locked in this tiny cell with blood stains on the wall.
“They put the air conditioning as cold as possible, take away all your clothes and they leave you there for hours and hours.”
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In response to the allegations, Provo Canyon’s owners say the school was sold in 2000 and they cannot comment on the operations or student experience prior to that time. But that they do not condone or promote any form of abuse.
Hilton, now, 42 and the mother to a two-month-old son, Phoenix, says her perspective has hardened on the troubled teen industry.
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America’s ‘troubled teen’ industry
“I’m just so in love with my little baby boy,” she says.
“I want to do everything to protect him and I know by doing this work, I will protect future children.
“I just can’t imagine my little boy being anywhere near these type of people, my heart goes out to all the children who are locked up in there now.”
Hilton announced the birth of her first child in January on social media. Pic: parishilton/Instagram
She thinks her own parents were victims of deceptive marketing by the troubled teen industry.
Hilton has become a figurehead for a movement that campaigns to shut down troubled teen schools across America.
She’s helped introduce new laws in Utah, which now put limits on the use of restraints, drugs and isolation rooms in youth treatment programmes. It also requires facilities to document any instance in which physical restraints and seclusion are used.
But she now wants to effect change on a national level.
“These people need to be held accountable,” she says.
“They need to have people that have proper licensing, people that don’t have a criminal record. There’s just so much that goes into it. For children to have rights, it should be common sense but unfortunately, in some states, it’s not that way.
“I know by us continuing to fight this fight, that we will succeed and they messed with the wrong girl.”
Listening to her reliving the darkest moments of her life and the determination to bring those responsible to justice, it is hard to dispute that they did indeed mess with the wrong girl.
Boy George is contemplating his relationship with fame. Intoxicating, often inescapable, he says he has not always found his decades in the spotlight easy
There has been a cost, he says. Much has been well documented. But in recent years he has been able to enjoy it all much more.
And it’s not real. “Fame is a figment of other people’s imaginations. You’re only famous because other people believe you are.”
Boy George has created a new art collection, titled Fame
Most will know Boy George the avant garde musician, flamboyant frontman of Culture Club, one of the biggest music acts of the 1980s. Big hats, big songs, big personality. He has found new fans more recently through appearances on reality shows such as I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! and as a judge on The Voice.
He is also an artist, and fame is the theme of his latest collection of portraits.
Vivid, bold, punk, they are exactly as you might expect. He has painted his hero David Bowie, fellow music icons Madonna and Prince, as well as a self-portrait.
The collection features images of David Bowie, Madonna and Prince, as well as a self-portrait. Pic: Dave Parry/ PA
“I think of Boy George from the ’80s as a sort of cartoon character,” he says. “Because on the one hand, there was this public persona, which was one thing, and it was very recognisable. And then there was me behind it… I used to have a real problem with [fame] and I feel now I’m like, it’s just a job.”
The portrait of his younger self is a reminder of how his relationship with fame has changed.
“I never really took it that seriously,” he says. “There were moments when I lost my mind – we all know what they were. But I always kind of knew who I was.”
‘I was really lucky to have my family’
Culture Club on stage performing in 1982. Pic: Ron Wolfson/ Rock Negatives/ MediaPunch Boy George/ IPX/ AP
The star, whose real name is George O’Dowd, has spoken and written about his struggles with addiction in the past. In 2009, he was jailed for four months for false imprisonment.
In his last autobiography, he described it as a “stupid, aggressive and regrettable” incident that was over in “less than 30 seconds”. He disputes some of the details that came out in court, but called himself an “idiot who did too many drugs and made a massive mistake”.
George says his family helped him through the dark times. Despite there being more conversation than ever around mental health and the pressures on young stars today, he is not convinced the support is any better.
“I think in my case, I was really lucky to have my family… particularly my late mother. Whatever was going on, she was always there to kind of try and harness me into reality. And sometimes it took a bit of pulling and shoving, but I feel like my family have been so important to me in terms of, you know, keeping me sane. But it hasn’t always been an easy thing.”
The Bowie portrait features the star in his famous Tokyo Pop body suit from the Aladdin Sane tour, designed by Kansai Yamamoto, pictured here during an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in 2018. Pic: Mary Altaffer/ AP
Now in his 60s, as well as Boy George, he is plain old “George from Eltham”, southeast London; although plain is not really an adjective you would ascribe to him.
“As I’ve got older, I’ve kind of accepted I created this Boy George person, and I can either have as much fun with it as I can, or I can make it full of anxiety,” he says.
For his Fame collection, he chose Bowie because the artist “shaped my whole career, my whole childhood”. His relationship with Madonna, whom he has captured in her Madame X era from 2019 rather than one of her more famous earlier incarnations, “because artists continue to evolve”, is more complex.
They first met after he saw her in concert in New York, with fellow ’80s star Marilyn and two friends. They went backstage and he asked for a picture.
‘There’s never been warmth… on either side’
George first met Madonna during her The Virgin tour in the mid-1980s. Pic: AP/ NewsBase
“She grabbed the boys and just sat them on her lap, which is kind of major,” he says. “She took control immediately. And I’ve got this great picture of Madonna and this guy that I kind of lost contact with.”
But he and the Queen of Pop never became friends. “Over the years we sort of met each other, but there’s never been any kind of warmth necessarily on either side,” he says. “But I am a fan… with me, if I like the music, I don’t necessarily have to be best friends with the person… I can like things without being petty.”
It was perhaps part and parcel of fame in the 1980s, he says.
“When you’re young, everything’s a competition. As you get older, you get a bit more confident about who you are and more secure and therefore you’re able to enjoy things without feeling threatened. So I think in the ’80s, all of us were in competition with each other… nowadays I’m kind of able to enjoy a lot of bands that I hissed at in the past, you know.”
Culture Club are touring later in the year, along with Tony Hadley and Heaven 17
Earlier this year, George made his Broadway debut, performing in Moulin Rouge. Now, he is getting ready for gigs with Culture Club again, alongside Tony Hadley and Heaven 17.
They will play their first two albums, Kissing To Be Clever and Colour By Numbers, in full. “[It’s] one of the reasons I agreed to this tour,” he says. “I knew we wouldn’t argue about what we were playing.”
There is also a biopic in the works. George has long said he would like Game Of Thrones star Sophie Turner to play him and the campaign continues, he says. “In this day and age, why can’t have a woman playing a man? Why not break the rules? It’s kind of what I was doing 30, 40 years ago.”
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
And he is still releasing solo music. His latest track, Let The Flowers Grow, is a collaboration with Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy.
“A lot of stuff I release, no one really hears of it unless they’re like a mad hardcore fan,” he says. “I’ve released 54 tracks in the last year, probably more than any other artist. And I will continue to keep putting stuff out and being creative because it feels like breathing, you know, it feels really enjoyable and I feel lucky that I get to do the thing I love.”
He takes a beat. “I mean that. I really enjoy it now in a way that I just didn’t know how to 10 years ago, 20 years ago, because I was so busy worrying about what other people thought about this, that and the other.
“Now I’m like, I want to tell people how I feel more. I mean, I’ve always done that, but I feel like, when you start to understand yourself more and realise what makes you actually happy, then you are able to express yourself in a better way.”
Davina McCall’s partner has said she is out of surgery after undergoing an operation to remove a brain tumour.
The 57-year-old television presenter had revealed in a video posted on Instagram earlier today she had a benign brain tumour, a colloid cyst, which she described as “very rare”.
She said the chances of having it were “three in a million,” and she had discovered it a few months ago, after a company offered her a health scan in return for giving a menopause talk.
She also announced she would be having the surgery this evening.
Now her partner – hairdresser Michael Douglas – has posted on social media to say the operation went well.
He said: “Hey all. Davina is out of surgery and according to the surgeon it was textbook! She’s currently recovering in ICU as a precaution, as you can imagine she’s utterly exhausted.
“Thanks so much for all the love from everyone on here… it’s powerful stuff, we are super grateful.”
McCall at the National Television Awards this year. Pic: PA
McCall earlier said the tumour’s discovery came as a shock.
She said: “I slightly put my head in the sand for a while, and then I saw quite a few neurosurgeons, I got lots of opinions. I realised that I have to get it taken out.”
McCall described it as “big”, 14mm wide, adding: “It needs to come out, because if it grows it would be bad.”
She explained that she would have it removed via a craniotomy, describing the procedure: “They go through the top of my head here and through the two halves of my brain to the middle.
“They get the cyst, take it out, empty it, and Bob’s your uncle.”
She added before the surgery: “Say a prayer for me, I am in good spirits.”
She said she would be in hospital “for around nine days”, but during her recovery, she would be “off my phone for a while”.
Joking and smiling, she urged fans “not to worry about me”, admitting, “I’m doing that enough!”
She went on to counter that, explaining: “I’m not worrying too much, and I am in a good space, and I have all the faith in the world in my surgeon and his team, and I’m handing the reins over to him. He knows what he’s doing, and I’m going to do the getting better bit after.”
She signed off saying, “see you on the other side”.
Celebrity friends were quick to send their support, with stars including Rylan, Alan Carr and Holly Willoughby sending love.
According to the NHS, non-cancerous brain tumours are slow-growing and unlikely to spread, but are still serious and can be life-threatening.
McCall rose to fame presenting on MTV in the mid-1990s, and later on Channel 4’s Streetmate, before becoming a household name as the host of Big Brother from 2000 to 2010.
She’s gone on to present programmes across the networks, and currently presents ITV dating show My Mum, Your Dad.
McCall with the first UK Big Brother winner Craig Phillips in 2000. Pic: PA
Last year, McCall was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to broadcasting.
In recent years, McCall has spoken regularly on women’s health and the effects of menopause in a bid to break taboos around the subject. Her 2022 book, Menopausing, won book of the year at the British Book Awards.
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The same year, McCall fronted the Channel 4 documentary Davina McCall: Sex, Mind And The Menopause, and told the BBC that the perimenopausal symptoms caused her difficulties multi-tasking and she considered that she had a brain tumour or Alzheimer’s disease at the time.
The presenter has previously raised money for Cancer Research UK by running for Race For Life in honour of her late sister, Caroline Baday, who died from lung cancer in 2012 at the age of 50.
Married twice, McCall has three children, two daughters and a son, with her second husband, presenter Matthew Robertson.
She has lived with Douglas since 2022, and they present a weekly lifestyle podcast together, Making The Cut.
Stars have rushed to share their support after Davina McCall revealed she’s undergoing surgery to remove a rare brain tumour.
The presenter shared the news in a short Instagram video, telling fans the benign tumour is called a colloid cyst and is around 14mm wide.
McCall explained it “needed to come out, because if it grows it would be bad,” and described a procedure called a craniotomy which would remove the cyst through the top of her head.
The former Big Brother host said she was “in good spirits,” and would be in hospital “for around nine days” following the procedure.
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Davina McCall diagnosed with rare brain tumour.
It’s not clear on which day McCall’s surgery is scheduled, or if she has had the procedure yet.
Quick to share his love with the 57-year-old star, presenter Rylan wrote: “We’re all thinking of you beautiful,” while comedian Alan Carr wrote: “Big love my darling!!”
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Ex-This Morning presenter Holly Willoughby wrote: “I’m sending you all the love and then a whole lot more,” and singer Ashley Roberts added: “All the love gorgeous one!! Sending all the healing vibes. Love you!!”
Former Popstars judge and presenter Nicki Chapman wrote: “You and I have chatted about this day… you are in amazing hands with your surgeon and the team. Everyone loves you.
“Thank you for not only being a brave girl but for sharing your condition. You will help sooooo many other people. big hugs. 30-second rule. See you soon N xx.”
Actress and chef Lisa Faulkner wrote: “Sending all my love to you. Best wishes and all positive prayers for a speedy recovery”.
McCall’s current partner, hairdresser Michael Douglas, has said he will be sharing updates from her account while she is “off-grid” and recovering, assuring fans the presenter is “in great shape and in very good hands”.
Other celebrities to share positive thoughts included Stacey Dooley, Donna Air, Helen Skelton, Denise Van Outen and Kimberly Wyatt.
McCall rose to fame presenting on MTV in the mid-1990s, and later on Channel 4’s Streetmate, before becoming a household name as the host of Big Brother from 2000 to 2010.
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
She’s gone on to present programmes across the networks, and last year was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to broadcasting.
She has three children with her second husband, presenter Matthew Robertson.
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