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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
Hollywood celebrities are among thousands of people to have been evacuated from their homes as fires rip through areas of Los Angeles.
Sky News’ US correspondent Martha Kelner reported that Tom Hanks, Ben Affleck and Reese Witherspoon were all evacuated on Tuesday as wildfires continued to spread in the Pacific Palisades suburb of LA.
The area, which is home to billionaires as well as Hollywood A-listers, is located between Santa Monica and Malibu.
Other celebrities who have fled their homes include the award-winning actor James Woods, who said last night he had been safely evacuated from his home in Pacific Palisades.
But he added in a post on X: “I do not know at this moment if our home is still standing.”
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Actor Mark Hamill, best known for playing Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films, also posted on social media last night saying he evacuated his home in Malibu and his family were “fleeing for our lives”.
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This Is Us actress Mandy Moore was also forced to leave her home due to the fires.
She said in two Instagram stories she had fled the Eaton fire, which is raging near Altadena, with her children, cats and dog. They have found temporary refuge with friends.
The actress said: “Trying to shield the kids from the immense sadness and worry I feel.
“Praying for everyone in our beautiful city. So gutted for the destruction and loss. Don’t know if our place made it.”
According to Velvet Ropes, which maps celebrity properties, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Matt Damon, Steven Spielberg, Hilary Swank and Sally Field all have homes close to where fires are raging.
Dr Dre, Adam Brody and Leighton Meester, Tyra Banks, Martin Short, Anna Faris, Milo Ventimiglia, Linda Cardellini, Mary McDonnell, Adam Sandler, Miles Teller, and Jennifer Love Hewitt are also said to have houses in affected areas.
In neighbouring Malibu, which was also affected by fires in December, stars including Beyonce and Jay-Z, Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish are said to be among the celebrity residents.
The Palisades blaze has already burnt through more than 11,000 acres of land while the Eaton one has caused the death of two people, Los Angeles County fire chief Anthony Marrone said on Wednesday.
The two other fires are known as Woodley and Hurst, after the main areas affected.
All four blazes are still growing, Mr Marrone said.
A reality TV personality known for appearing on shows like The Hills and Made In Chelsea has told Sky News her family have lost their homes in the California wildfires.
Stephanie Pratt, a model and the sister of fellow reality TV celebrity Spencer Pratt, lives in the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, where more than 30,000 people have fled their homes due to the fast-moving blaze.
Los Angeles fire chief Anthony Marrone said on Wednesday that the Palisades fire is still growing and that “well over 5,000 acres” have been burnt.
At least two people have been killed so far, with around 1,000 buildings destroyed.
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House surrounded by flames during wildfire
California governor Gavin Newsom earlier declared a state of emergency over the four wildfires in the south of the state.
Speaking to Sky News from London, an emotional Ms Pratt said: “It’s just so crazy, I had no idea what was happening.
“I talked to my dad yesterday and he said ‘The Palisades is burning’. He said that he was at my brother’s house on Chautauqua [Boulevard] and they were just watching the flames come.
“The firefighters came and said you got to leave.”
‘I don’t know if my house is there’
Ms Pratt said her parents and brother Spencer, who like her starred in the reality series The Hills, were safely evacuated from the area.
However, the 38-year-old added that “all of the phones are disconnected” and that she doesn’t know what had happened to her home.
“I talked to my neighbour last night and she told me that [Palisades Charter High School] had burnt down, and that’s directly behind me, and so had Gelson’s Supermarket which is adjacent,” she said.
“I just can’t reach anyone to see if my house is okay. I just Googled it and it said that it’s destroyed and terrible… I don’t know if my house is there.”
When she asked her dad about Spencer, 41, who is married to 38-year-old Heidi Montag – another co-star of The Hills – Ms Pratt said he told her “I’ve never seen him like this”.
“I’m assuming he’s just completely catatonic,” she added. “We don’t care about the material things or anything like that, but this was their family home.
“This is where they raised their two little kids.”
The Palisades fire is one of five blazes currently burning in southern California– evacuation orders were in place on Tuesday in Altadena after another fire, called the Eaton fire, started near a nature preserve.
A third blaze, called the Hurst fire, also ripped through Sylmar in the north of the city.
And according to the state department Cal Fire, two more blazes – the Woodley fire in Los Angeles and Tyler fire in Riverside – broke out on Wednesday.
Two School Of Rock co-stars, who met at the age of 10, have got married.
Caitlin Hale and Angelo Massagli, who played Marta and Frankie respectively in the 2003 classic alongside Jack Black, tied the knot in New York on Saturday.
The couple brought some of the original cast of the film, which centres on a pretend substitute teacher turning a group of musically gifted school children into a rock band, together to celebrate their nuptials.
Posting on Instagram, Hale, 33, shared various images of the day, including a photobooth picture with a handful of their former cast mates.
The former actress, who now works as a sonographer, wrote under the post: “Special thank you to everyone who contributed to an unforgettable day!”
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Rivkah Reyes, who played bass player Katie in the film, also posted about the wedding, sharing a video on TikTok.
The clip, set to Stevie Nicks’s Edge Of Seventeen, included cameos from Brian Falduto, who played Billy, Joey Gaydos Jr, who played Zack, and Aleisha Allen, who played Alicia, among others.
The use of the song was a nod to one of the scenes from the film where Black and Joan Cusack, who plays headteacher Rosalie Mullins, sing the song in a bar.
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“Celebrating the marriage of Caitlin & Angelo with my forever fam #schoolofrock #wedding,” Reyes wrote alongside the video, which showed them all dancing together.
After appearing together in the film the only contact Hale and Massagli had was through a WhatsApp chat set up with the entire cast, according to The New York Times.
The pair then both left show business and coincidentally reconnected while studying in schools in Florida.
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Massagli, 32, who now works as a lawyer for TikTok, according to The Times, told the paper the familiarity they both had due to working together when they were younger “cut through some of those early relationship hurdles”.