Paris Hilton’s Pre-Y2k Era: Part 2

Summary

Infamous: "Paris Hilton’s Pre-Y2k Era: Part 2"

August 6, 2026 | Hosts: Vanessa Grigoriadis, Natalie Robehmed | Guest: Lara Marie Shaneholz

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Episode Overview

This episode continues the deep dive into Paris Hilton’s traumatic teenage years and the origins of her public persona. Reporters Vanessa Grigoriadis and Natalie Robehmed explore Hilton's time in the "troubled teen" industry, her family dynamics, key formative incidents, and the ways these experiences fueled both the creation and the evolution of "Paris Hilton" as a cultural icon. The hosts are joined by writer/podcaster Lara Marie Shaneholz, a fellow Cascade School alum, who offers firsthand insights into these institutions and their impact.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Inside the Troubled Teen Industry: Cascade School and “The Forum”

• Background & Personal Experiences
  • Lara describes arriving at Cascade School, its isolated location, and the strict rules limiting self-expression and contact with the outside world.
  • "You were allowed to call your parents every two weeks. A counselor would be listening to your phone calls … if you started to ask your parents if you could come home … they would just hang up the phone." (Lara Marie Shaneholz, 04:01)
• Group Confrontation Practices ("The Forum")
  • Cascade, like other schools influenced by the Synanon cult, enforced "forums"—intense group therapy designed to break down students.
  • “The whole point of a forum is to break someone down to nothing and then kind of build them back up, like indoctrinate them, essentially.” (Lara, 05:40)
• Escalation and Violence
  • While Cascade was less severe than Provo Canyon, stories circulated of abuse at other institutions.
  • “It was like, you get locked in rooms. You get hit by staff… At Cascade, staff cannot physically touch you … but at Provo, it was much worse.” (Lara, 03:22)
• Documentation and Manipulation
  • Staff maintained a "huge red book," meticulously recording students’ issues and histories to use against them in confrontation.
  • “They would bring up anything they knew about your past … tie this problem … back to that.” (Lara, 06:25)

2. Paris Hilton’s Personal Testimonies: Trauma and Survival

• Hilton’s Memoir Excerpts
  • Paris’s written accounts corroborate school folklore—e.g., smuggling cash in her hair for escape attempts.
  • "Only then did I finally allow myself to touch the slim roll of cash tucked under the bun on the top of my head. I formed a strategy for keeping my money hidden while I waited for my next opportunity to run." (Paris Hilton, 09:14)
• Creation of Alternate Personas
  • Under such psychological stress, Hilton adopted alter egos—most notably "Amber Taylor”—for both survival and self-expression.
  • “Amber was more than a disguise. Amber was a totally different person, a little vacation for myself.” (Paris Hilton, 09:42)
• Psychological Aftershocks
  • “It just makes sense of her wanting to craft a very hyper specific image of herself after being at these places where their M.O. is: you do not get to have self-expression and identity here. Like that is in fact punished.” (Lara, 10:05)

3. Decoding “Paris Hilton”: The Birth and Evolution of a Persona

• The Early 2000s Image
  • Vanessa reflects on meeting Paris before her public persona solidified—when she was still a "hot debutante."
  • “Her manner of dressing was actually not so like trucker hat, Juicy sweatsuit. It was more... sort of dressed up to go out for the night, to party.” (Vanessa, 12:56)
• ADD/ADHD and Instinct-Driven Behavior
  • Paris’s memoir frames her impulsivity and social energy as rooted in ADHD, which Vanessa found authentic.
  • “It's like a Ferrari but with bicycle brakes. It's powerful but difficult to control.” (Vanessa paraphrasing Paris, 15:38)
• The Public’s Paris vs. The Private Self
  • Vanessa's Rolling Stone profile captured “this kind of ineffable quality about her and the sense that there's perhaps something else going on underneath … that who she is and who she's presenting to be are separate entities.” (Natalie, 18:30)
  • Notable quote from that article: "What you think of Paris Hilton, what she thinks of herself and what she’s really like are three entities so separate and distinct that if they were people, they wouldn’t end up in the same room.” (Vanessa, quoting from profile, 17:13)
• Formation as Reaction to Trauma
  • Paris’s "Paris" persona is positioned as both armor and rebellion against environments designed to squash individual identity.

4. Family Dynamics & Specific Traumas

• Grooming and Abuse
  • At 14, Paris was groomed by a teacher ("Mr. Abercrombie") and assaulted by an acquaintance after being roofied—a source of shame and confusion, as detailed in her memoir.
  • Paris’s reflections: “Given the choice between victim and influencer … Marilyn [Monroe] and I embraced our siren selves.” (Natalie reading, 23:07)
• Family Responses: Control, Secrecy, Betrayal
  • Parents’ reactions were punitive rather than protective, culminating in forcibly sending her to institutions.
  • “Two men come in her room and … are there to kidnap her. … She writes about this moment really vividly—seeing her mom and dad standing in their bedroom door frame … realizing they knew this was happening. What she sees as a sort of betrayal at the time…” (Natalie, 28:15)

5. Aftermath: Pop Culture, Resilience, and Paris’s Renaissance

• Post-Provo Career Moves
  • After the final institution, Paris rapidly builds her own brand (Simple Life, fashion lines), but faces public skepticism and is eclipsed by others (e.g., Kim Kardashian).
• Narrative Control & Renaissance
  • The recent documentary and memoir have reframed Paris’s image, revealing trauma and resilience behind the persona.
  • “It’s a great story about a documentary where you told the truth and it actually worked. … Showing herself as she really was and talking about the nightmares ... the way that these lines between tough love and abuse really blurred for her.” (Vanessa, 31:32)
  • “I do think there is surprisingly a real story of resilience and toughness in Paris Hilton that I wouldn’t have expected.” (Natalie, 32:22)
• Unresolved Issues and Ongoing Evolution
  • The hosts discuss what Paris chooses to reveal and withhold (e.g., about substance use, apologies for past controversies).
  • “She’s been honest about so much else that I think she gets to keep some things to herself if she doesn’t want to talk about them.” (Vanessa, 34:30)
  • Discussion closes questioning what future evolutions or “voices” Paris may invent.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Group Confrontation:

  “The whole point of a forum is to break someone down to nothing and then kind of build them back up, like indoctrinate them, essentially.”
  — Lara Marie Shaneholz [05:40]

• On Surviving Abuse:

  "That's the objective of rap—to force a person past the last jagged inch of what they can stand."
  — Paris Hilton [08:06]

• On Self-Preservation:

  “Amber was more than a disguise. Amber was a totally different person. A little vacation for myself.”
  — Paris Hilton [09:42]

• On the Public Persona:

  “What you think of Paris Hilton, what she thinks of herself, and what she’s really like are three entities so separate and distinct that if they were people, they wouldn’t end up in the same room.”
  — Vanessa Grigoriadis quoting herself [17:13]

• On Trauma and Image:

  “Given the choice between victim and influencer … Marilyn [Monroe] and I embraced our siren selves.”
  — Paris Hilton (read by Natalie) [23:07]

• On Her Influence and Resilience:

  “I was going to do everything in my power to be so successful that my parents could never control me again.”
  — Paris Hilton (paraphrased) [32:22]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:28 – Lara Marie Shaneholz describes arriving at Cascade School.
• 04:21 – The “forum” group confrontation method explained.
• 06:22 – Staff manipulation and the “Red Book.”
• 08:03 – Paris Hilton’s description of being “railed” in a session.
• 09:14 – Paris’s account of smuggling money in her hair.
• 09:42 – The invention of “Amber Taylor.”
• 12:56 – Vanessa on meeting the “pre-Persona” Paris.
• 15:38 – ADHD as a lens to understand Paris.
• 17:13 – Notable quote from Vanessa’s Rolling Stone profile.
• 23:07 – Paris on embracing the “siren self” vs. victimhood.
• 28:15 – The night Paris was forcibly taken from her home.
• 31:32 – How telling her truth has driven Paris’s recent renaissance.
• 34:30 – Discussion of Paris’s choices about what to make public.

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a nuanced, empathetic exploration of Paris Hilton’s hidden life behind the tabloid stereotype—revealing her early trauma, resilience, the calculated construction of her persona, and her impact on pop culture’s understanding of fame, femininity, and survival. Grounded in stories from those who shared her institutional experiences, and voices from Paris herself, the episode underscores how much of Hilton’s life was about regaining control and agency. As the hosts observe, the evolution of “Paris Hilton” is both a testament to survival and a lesson in the shifting nature of public and private selves.

Transcript

[Hulu Narrator]

The Hulu original series Furious, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

There are three victims we know of. The suspect is female, white, late twenties. Female Serial killers kill for power, control.

[Natalie Robomed]

I believe there is a deeper motivation here.

[Paris Hilton]

You have no idea who you're dealing with and you are going to end up dead.

[Natalie Robomed]

I've been waiting for you.

[Hulu Narrator]

Watch the Hulu original series Furious now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney. For month of subscribers terms apply.

[Natalie Robomed]

Campsite Media. From Sony Music Entertainment and Campsite Media. This is infamous. I'm Natalie Robomed.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

And I'm Vanessa Grigoriadis.

[Natalie Robomed]

So last episode we heard about how Paris Hilton's former school, Provo Canyon, was ordered to shut down amid a litany of abuse allegations. And we spoke to author Maya Salovets about how the troubled teen industry began springing out of California cult cult Synanon.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

But after last episode, there was more we wanted to explore both about Paris and the troubled teen industry as a whole. So we're going to start by talking to someone who actually went to one of those schools. An institution actually that Paris Hilton was also sent to before she went to Provo Canyon. Sort of a not quite as harsh Provo Canyon.

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

I believe it was the last place that she was before she was at Provo. She ran away from Cascade and then ended up in Provo.

[Natalie Robomed]

Lara Marie Shaneholz is a New York Times best selling writer and podcaster who co hosts and created one of my favorite reality TV podcasts, Sex Unique Podcast. And in the early 2000s, she spent two years at the Cascade School, a so called therapeutic boarding school in Northern California.

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

You start out in Reading, which is a really depressing town. You drive and drive, you drive into rolling hills of farmland and then the terrain starts getting mountainous and you're kind of on just a winding mountain road for miles. You hit Whitmore, which is a town of maybe like 3,000 people. It has a post office and a general store. You drive seven more miles up a mountain road and then at the end of the road there's a school.

[Natalie Robomed]

Here's Paris describing it in her memoir.

[Paris Hilton]

We stopped briefly at a set of big iron gates. There was a big rock emblazoned with gold letters. Cascade School.

[Natalie Robomed]

Cascade's campus is anchored by a stately lodge like building overlooking a green lawn. It's rural, which is part of the point.

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

It's not like an easy place to run away from

[Natalie Robomed]

because some of these kids at Cascade, including Paris Hilton who attended in the late 90s, were not there willingly in fact, Cascade was actually the third institution Paris was taken to after running away from a brutal wilderness program in Idaho and a facility founded by a Synanon disciple called Sea Doo. Now, Cascade was not as bad as some of these other institutions, especially not Provo, which was considered the worst of the worst.

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

There was a girl who had been at Provo, and then she transferred to Cascade, so she would tell us about how horrible it was at Provo. It was like, you get locked in rooms. You get hit by staff. Like, you're. They had staff that was sexually assaulting kids at Cascade. Staff cannot physically touch you. They're not allowed to, like, restrain you or lay hands on you.

[Natalie Robomed]

Still, Cascade wasn't a normal school when Lara went there. There was an intense dress code, rules around what music you could listen to or even talk about, and very limited contact with the outside world.

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

You were allowed to call your parents every two weeks. A counselor would be listening to your phone calls. And so if you started to ask your parents if you could come home or, like, begging them to leave, they would just hang up the phone.

[Natalie Robomed]

But probably the strangest thing about Cascade was something called the forum.

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays, they would have forums which were essentially group therapy sessions, where if you had a conflict with another student, you were encouraged to request them in a forum.

[Natalie Robomed]

At forums, kids were encouraged to get up and air out their grievances with other students.

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

If I had a problem with you, let's say, like, we're sitting next to each other in the forum, I would have to get up and cross the room so that I'm facing you. And then I would be like, natalie, you have the worst attitude. Like, I asked you if you would make your bed. You told me to fuck off. You have, like, a shitty attitude, and I don't like it.

[Natalie Robomed]

Were you allowed to swear?

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

Oh, yeah. And then maybe your other friend or someone you thought was your friend, she gets up and crosses, and she's like, yeah, you're a fudgeing bitch. Like, you think you're so much better than everyone, but you're not. And then you would be like, fudge you guys. Like, you're so bossy. Blah, blah, blah. And then your other friend would get up across the room and be like, no, actually, you're a fucking bitch. And, like, then we would yell at you. Then the facilitator would start to yell at you. If you're not kind of, like, rolling over and accepting your fate, they will then lay into you harder. Because the whole point of a forum is to break someone down to nothing and then kind of build them back up, like indoctrinate them, essentially.

[Natalie Robomed]

Cascade was started by a guy who used to work at the Synanon influenced Sea Doo, and it followed a bunch of the same edicts in Synanon. This group confrontation was called the game. At Cedu, it was raps at Cascade, it was forums. It all followed the same aggressive approach. Attack a kid until they break down at Cascade.

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

They would keep a huge red book called the Red Book Creative that they would write down, like everything that happened in forums, just day to day, like a big diary of all the children and what's going on with them at school. So the people in charge, they know all your issues. The facilitator would really go in on you and they would bring up anything that they knew about your past, anything they know about your parents, anything they know about shit you went through in high school or before you got sent there, or they try and take it back to like, your parents divorce or like this horrible thing that happened to you and tie this problem that you're experiencing back to that. They just knew how to like nail you in a very, like, cutting and eloquent way. And some of them were like, more cutting. And then some of them were just like, actually terrifying. It'd be like big men who would just scream at you and basically they won't stop until you're crying or like admitting that you were wrong. And then they kind of leave you crying like a lump and then they move on to the next person and it just goes on like that for two hours or so until they've wrapped it up. So that would be like maybe a mid level intensity 1.

[Natalie Robomed]

Forums could get much worse.

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

If you had committed like a big infraction, then you'd probably be in like the most intense forum where it's just like you're basically getting screamed at the entire time. And they called it getting railed. You'd get railed in a forum.

[Natalie Robomed]

Paris experienced getting railed at one of these group sessions.

[Paris Hilton]

It was worse than sticks and stones. This was like bricks and broken glass. It was relentless. And it lasted a long time. Like, who do you think you are? You got kicked out of, like every school in the world. Stupid, spoiled, fucking stupid, lazy bitch. You think you're all that. Your family hates you. And on and on and on like that until I bent forward with my arms over my head, trying to protect myself from this storm of words and spit and cruelty. I heard someone screaming and realized it was me. That's the objective of rap to force a person past the last jagged inch of what they can stand.

[Natalie Robomed]

Lara finished her two years at Cascade and went on to college. But even though Laura was there a few years after Paris, the lore of Paris lived on at the school.

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

I remember one day I asked the transportation ladies about Paris and they said that she had snuck in like diamonds in her hair or like money. She had like hid money in her hair.

[Natalie Robomed]

Unbelievably, this lore was actually true, at least the money part, because decades later, Paris wrote about it in her memoir.

[Paris Hilton]

And I waited until it sounded like she was sleeping. Only then did I finally allow myself to touch the slim roll of cash tucked under the bun on the top of my head. I formed a strategy for keeping my money hidden while I waited for my next opportunity to run.

[Natalie Robomed]

And run, she would. She'd escape Cascade and make her way to la. Where, and you probably don't know this, she made up a character called Amber Taylor. Named after 90s models Amber Valletta and Nikki Taylor.

[Paris Hilton]

Amber wore black, mostly baggy skater clothes, Hot Topic style, long red wig, fake nose ring, a full sleeve with press on tattoos. Amber was more than a disguise. Amber was a totally different person. A little vacation for myself.

[Natalie Robomed]

And it makes sense to me that someone who has been so broken down would go on to create an alternate Persona, a character.

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

It just makes sense of her wanting to craft a very hyper specific image of herself after being at these places where their M.O. is like, you do not get to have self expression and identity here. Like that is in fact punished if you decide to do that. And we will actively seek out ways to dismantle that for the duration of your time at this institution.

[Natalie Robomed]

Right, so actually like the ultimate act of rebellion is to create the character of Paris.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

I hope you enjoyed hearing from Lara. I thought her perspective was really interesting. And now after the ad break, we're going to talk about that character of Paris. Who is it really and what does she represent?

[Natalie Robomed]

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[Hulu Narrator]

the Hulu original Series Furious now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.

[Natalie Robomed]

There are three victims we know of.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

The suspect is female, white, late twenties. Female serial killers kill for power, control.

[Natalie Robomed]

I believe there is a deeper motivation here.

[Paris Hilton]

You have no idea who you're dealing with and you are gonna end up dead.

[Natalie Robomed]

I've been waiting for you.

[Hulu Narrator]

Watch the Hulu original series Furious. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney. For monthly subscribers terms apply.

[Natalie Robomed]

You're listening to Infamous from Campside Media. Okay, so Paris Hilton, I remember her as this famous for being famous. That's hot. Spewing Valley girl drooling simple life starring paparazzi posing early 2000s caricature of the dumb blonde just trussed up in a trucker cap and a miniskirt. But you actually met her pretty early on into that characterization, right?

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Well, I would say I actually met her before that happened. Back when she was more just like a, you know, hot debutante or what people called celebutantes at that time, meaning that they were debs that were also celebrities. And her manner of dressing was actually not so like trucker hat, juicy sweatsuit. It was more, you know, sort of dressed up to go out for the night, to party. She had been shot by David LaChapelle for Vanity Fair. You know, she's in her like grandma's apartment, which is like, you know, this crazy kind of penthouse y looking thing with a, a white piano and all this Louis XIV furniture and a white plush rug. And she's in there with a mesh shirt on with nothing underneath. You know, a sort of like dark pink purplish miniskirt and this dark pink purplish little half glove on and she's giving the camera the finger. That was what people remembered of her of the year 2000. You know, like a Nancy Spungeon kind of girl. That was a really famous pop cultural moment. People knew that, that David had shot. David being the photographer who shot Tupac in a bath where he's like soaping up his head and you Know, you see his, like, bare torso and it says Thug Life or Lil Kim. He put Louis Vuitton logos all over her and she looked like she herself was a purse. You know, he's this very sort of surreal and very funny photographer. So that's what she was like at that time. And then I was assigned a story for Rolling Stone, and we've talked about this previously on the podcast.

[Natalie Robomed]

Yes. If you want to hear Vanessa discuss that in depth. She talked about it on our episode called who Sold Pam Paris and Kim's Sex Tapes.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Yes.

[Natalie Robomed]

So you can go back and listen

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

to that if you want to. Some real. Yeah, some real intellectual fare there, but you can go check that out if you want to. But I basically was assigned this story about Paris. This is before the Simple Life came out, but that was the peg. And went out with her for the night and, you know, witnessed her being, like, incredibly silly, you know, shouting at people from the car, like, tatiana, come over here. And then, you know, she's like half her body is out the car and she's like, tatiana. And she's like, oh, no, I think that's maybe not Tatiana just being funny and silly. Maybe a little mean. Which, of course she, from her perspective says she was never mean. Never did, you know, any drugs.

[Natalie Robomed]

It was just the add. That's what she blamed it on.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

It was just the add. I mean, I do have to say that her memoir is really great on the way that she portrays add and I do believe that that is the key to understanding Paris. You know, she has this ADD brain, which she says, you know, she quotes a. A doctor saying that it's like a Ferrari but with bicycle brakes. It's powerful but difficult to control. You know, you're losing your phone, you're losing your shoes. You know, she said to me, I'm the kind of person who, when I see a shooting star, I run to get all my friends because I want everybody to see it too. You know, you're like this intensely social, but also just sort of out of control person. Like, that's the way that she describes herself. And I think that's pretty fair. I do think that's the person that I personally met. And I think, you know, the fact that she's a girl and ADD is exhausting and exhilarating and also just like a spin cycle. I think it probably has a lot to do with how she was acting out when she was in her, you know, younger teens.

[Natalie Robomed]

And by the way, saying ADD here, but we should really be saying ADHD attention Deficit hyperactivity disorder. That's the updated term. Yeah. And I think there are some other things going on there as well, which we can talk about in a second. But I want to just read the very opening sentence of this profile, because I think 20 plus years on, I know you hate it when I say things like that, but 20 plus years on, it really does hold up. So you wrote what you think of Paris Hilton, what she thinks of herself and what she's really like are three entities so separate and distinct that if they were people, they wouldn't end up in the same room. You think, if you think of her at all, that Hilton, 22, is a stupid, spoiled, superficial socialite who dresses like a high class escort and given the recently disclosed pornographic video she made with an ex boyfriend, probably acts like one too. She thinks she's a pet lover who donates to charity, does not drink or do drugs, and hardly ever goes out. I'm not a party person, says Hilton, blinking her cat like royal blue eyes. Mostly I like to spend time with my dogs. And you go on to write that Hilton is strange, or at least not at all how you imagined her is immediately apparent. She's loopy, kooky, possessed of that vacant it girl quality wherein you're never supposed to know exactly what you're doing, but whatever you're doing is fabulous.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Which again, is like very much this ADHD brain thing, this idea that your frontal lobe is smaller because you don't have that impulse control, you don't have concentration, you know, you don't have inhibition. And, you know, you're always sort of reacting on instinct without some fear. You're just like, moving.

[Natalie Robomed]

The reason I think these early parts of your profile are so spot on, because you hit at this kind of ineffable quality about her and the sense that there's perhaps something else going on underneath and that who she is and who she's presenting to be are separate entities. And I think that's really come to fruition or shown to be true through her documentary and then her subsequent memoir where we've kind of found out that there was a lot more to Paris Hilton than the character of Paris that she was presenting.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Right? Like the character of Paris being the baby voice with the Chihuahua in the bag. And then, you know, is it a different Chihuahua because you lost the other Chihuahua? Like, you know, just sort of like this person who just doesn't really care about anybody but herself. And you know, what I think is so interesting from the Provo Canyon reporting is this idea that she decided she didn't want to be a Hilton, she wanted to be Paris. That she actually was really motivated by the Provo Canyon experience to try to make something of herself on her own, independently.

[Natalie Robomed]

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's all true, and we'll talk about Provo Canyon a little more in a minute. But I think the thing about Paris is that her life is happening on this grand scale. I mean, she is this celebutant. Even as a child. Her mom, Kathy Hilton, is kind of priming her by having her take etiquette classes and learning which way in to eat the cutlery at a fancy dinner and learning how to be the perfect host. I mean, Bethany Frankel is her babysitter. She's going to kind of society functions from a very young age. She's being taught to be the perfect young woman. And she gets a credit card at

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

9, and she, you know, went to a fancy private school in la, and then she was not asked to come back in seventh grade, so she transferred to Catholic school. She said that she started using the phrase that's hot in middle school, and she, like, made it happen, like, fetch, mean girls, you know. And she portrays her mom sort of critically, I would say. She says, you know, in her family, no problems are ever talked about. But at the same time, she catches her mom reading her diary. You know, her mom's meeting her diary to, like, Kyle Richards, and they're laughing about it. You know, that's a pretty horrible thing to have happen if it's true. When you're a middle schooler.

[Natalie Robomed]

Yeah. I mean, the documentary starts scratching the surface of some of this stuff. But in her memoir, Paris gets into what really happened in her teenage years and her childhood in detail. She talks about how when she was 14, she was going to this Catholic school in LA and she was in the eighth grade, and she is groomed by a teacher who she calls Mr. Abercrombie. In the book, and this is in Paris's telling, she says that he says to her, I've got a crush on you. He asks for her private phone number, tells her not to tell anyone, starts calling her every night and saying things to her like, Princess Diana was 13 years younger than Prince Charles and that Priscilla was her age when Elvis fell in love with her. So, you know, basically planting the seed for what was to come. And, you know, she says that he asks her every single night if her parents are home. And one night when it's just her nanny there and her parents are out, she sneaks out to meet him. He's waiting for her in his car outside, and he kisses her again. This is according to Paris's telling. And she says that her parents catch her. They see them, and they speed off.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

And Mr. Abercrombie, like, is almost crying, and he says, my life is over. What am I doing? Why did you make me do this? You know, like, it was her fault somehow, but somehow she gets back in her bed. She runs up to her room. She gets in her bed, and when her parents come in the room, and they're super furious and they're both screaming at her, she, like, blinks her eyes and just says in a dreamy baby voice, what. What have you been talking about? I've been sleeping. So you get the sense that, like, this is a family where there's a lot of lying going on, you know? And then suddenly she's sent to Palm Springs.

[Natalie Robomed]

Yeah, and I just want to go back to the Voice for a second. I mean, she emphasizes throughout her book and in her documentary that these different moments of the Voice are moments when she slips into character or is trying to kind of play a role. I mean, the documentary opens with her saying, this is Paris in different ways.

[Paris Hilton]

This is Paris. Paris Hilton. Paris. This is Paris Hilton.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

How many voices do I have?

[Natalie Robomed]

Her voice is really a symbol for her splintered sense of self.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Yeah, I agree.

[Natalie Robomed]

As you said, after this happens, I mean, she gets kicked out of Catholic school, and her parents sent her to Palm Springs to live with her grandma. And, you know. And in her memoir, Paris or her ghostwriter write really eloquently about the shame that came from being groomed at that age. And she talks about really relating to Marilyn Monroe, who wrote about having experienced a similar thing because the teacher was emphasizing to Paris how beautiful she was and essentially insinuating that it was her fault that he did what he did because she was so gorgeous. So Paris writes. It's infuriating to me now to think about how readily Marilyn and I both accepted that narrative about our physical appearance being the excuse for someone else's criminal behavior. But how could we not? We were given a choice. A, you were a stupid child who was deceived, used, and thrown away like garbage, or B, you are an irresistible siren whose beauty and allure have the power to change someone's mind, sway their soul, and alter their behavior. Given the choice between victim and influencer, and I think the word influence here is really important, Marilyn and I embraced our siren selves. So with that, Paris's family move back to New York And Paris is alone in Palm Springs living with her grandma.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Yeah. Sort of. Sent to stay with grandma because she's a troublemaker.

[Natalie Robomed]

Exactly.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

It seems like that. She says I could be mouthy, sometimes uncooperative and stubborn. In other words, I was 14. If your 14 year old kid walks around like a perfect angel all the time, they should probably be tested for Lyme disease. So, you know, she says, I didn't swear a lie much. I mean, okay, I had the kind of arguments teenage girls routinely have with their moms. You know, it just hurt me deeply to think about them all moving to New York and hanging out without me. And I cried a lot. She's with her grandma.

[Natalie Robomed]

Yeah. And she's lonely. She says during this time that she goes to the mall and she meets these guys there and she goes to hang out with them and she gets roofied and assaulted.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

I mean, she says she never told her grandmother. You know, she kept asking her, like, why are you so moody? I'm gonna change your name to Ms. Moody. And then she would just like, pretend to laugh.

[Natalie Robomed]

Yeah, it's really sad. I mean, and similarly, she's 15 and she has a boyfriend who's 18, almost 19, and the boyfriend's pressuring her to have sex, but she's freaked out from being roofied. And she says that she has to get drunk to lose her virginity. And there's just really early on this real disembodiment from Sex and Self.

[Hulu Narrator]

The Hulu original series Furious. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.

[Natalie Robomed]

Plus, there are three victims we know of.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

The suspect is female, white, late twenties. Female serial killers kill for power, control.

[Natalie Robomed]

I believe there's a deeper motivation here.

[Paris Hilton]

You have no idea who you're dealing with and you are going to end up dead.

[Natalie Robomed]

I've been waiting for you.

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[Natalie Robomed]

This is infamous from Campside Media. So all of this is going on in the background. I Mean, by the time she's 15 or so, she says she's been roofied and sexually assaulted and also groomed and kissed by a teacher. And she's stays in Palm Springs for about a year and then moves back to New York because her grandmother has breast cancer and can kind of no longer take care of her.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

I mean, and this is where she gets in more trouble with her mom. And her mom doesn't know what to do with her. And she's like up every night calling every nightclub, trying to figure out, you know, where is my daughter? They're living at the Waldorf, which is this hotel. You know, she's got a fake ID and paparazzi's are taking photographs of her. And she weirdly thinks, like, maybe this is keeping me safe because if there are photos, I won't get assaulted. I don't know what she means by that.

[Natalie Robomed]

That's not the exact phrasing. But it was more like, she's not alone. Someone knows where she is. You know, the paparazzi know where she is.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Okay, I see. And she gets this pet snake and it, you know, escapes the Waldorf.

[Natalie Robomed]

Yeah, she just has a really strange and extraordinary life. And obviously, you know, she's sneaking out and getting papped and her parents are both mortified, also worried about her.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

And then in 1997, you know, two men come in her room and they're there to kidnap her.

[Natalie Robomed]

Yeah. And they tell her, do you want to go the easy way or the hard way? And she is kicking and screaming and they grab her out of her room. And she writes about this moment really vividly of seeing her mom and dad standing in their bedroom door frame and kind of just realizing that they knew this was happening. What she sees as a sort of betrayal at the time, and she still has a hard time untangling their blame and their partonness, I think.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Yeah, I mean, she, you know, as we've described, she goes to different trouble teen facilities.

[Natalie Robomed]

First of all, she gets taken to this Sea Doo boarding school in San Bernardino, California. It's a pretty infamous institution. She's strip searched. She's given sweatpants and socks, no shoes, because shoes are a privilege you have to earn. She runs away from there and gets sent to an outdoor kind of wilderness boot camp program called Ascent, where they did manual labor and got yelled at. I mean, she writes, we spent our days hiking to and from places, hauling logs and digging holes, which to me reminded me of this book I read as a child, Holes by Louis Sacker, which wasn't Explicitly, I don't think at a Troubled Team facility, but was at a kind of internment camp with children. And it was made into a movie starring Shia LaBeouf. And it's just this story about these kids who have to dig holes endlessly, endlessly, endlessly. And it's just this really awful existence. And she runs away from Ascent. She says she gets beaten really badly for running away. And that's when she gets sent to the third place, Cascade, which you heard about earlier. And when she runs away from there and becomes Amber Taylor, this Persona she adopts in la, she's caught again and sent to Provo Canyon, which is the

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

worst of the worst, right? And she's, like, assigned a number instead of being called by her name. You know, she describes even, like, these invasive gynecological examinations that she got there that, you know, are happening without any sort of meaningful consent, you know, strict control of humiliation. Once she gets out of Provo, as we've discussed, she decides to make something of herself. Her and her bestie from growing up, Nicole Richie, get on the Simple Life. Obviously, there's the sex tape. She's got Kim Kardashian organizing her closet. That's a apocryphal story, or not. And she gets bigger and bigger. But there's a degree to which Paris hits a ceiling. Pop culture watchers will say Kim sort of stole her thunder. And there's a posing and an inauthenticity to Paris and the Paris Persona that I think really does hurt her. And throughout the 2000 and tens, basically, she's certainly doing stuff. She's certainly appearing places. But I really do think it takes until her documentary comes out where she talks a lot about this stuff publicly to turn the tide on Paris. And she's really having a renaissance now. I mean, now, you know, there's a huge amount of respect for her, which there definitely was not in the past. She's sliving, I guess, which is like her phrase, but she's. You know, she's writing her own story, whatever. She's got this great husband. The husband is sort of, in some ways, the business guy. She's the talent, but she also has a business brain. And he's really taken it upon himself to really blow up the Paris brand. And they've done an incredible job. But I do think it's a. A great story about a documentary where you told the truth and it actually worked. Right. It doesn't always work for important people, that documentary thing. But showing herself as she really was and talking about the Nightmares and the insomnia that she had from Provo and the way that she was abused in five different relationships, the way that these lines between tough love and abuse really blurred for her. You know, she says, like, I built stone, high stone walls around my heart, walls that nobody could break through or climb over for more than 20 years.

[Natalie Robomed]

I think it worked because it felt honest and real, you know, like, and I think it was also, at least for me, shocking. Like, I had no idea that Paris Hilton had gone through this. You kind of think, like, if it can happen to her, like somebody who is so rich and all this other stuff, like, what else is happening to all these other children, you know, all these other people who aren't famous, who maybe didn't survive and come out the other side. I mean, as you said, like in, in the documentary Paris Hilton talks about, you know, she said I was going to do everything in my power to be so successful that my parents could never control me again. And in some ways, like, what she went through became a real driving force. But I mean, I talked to Lara about this very often, as we've mentioned. Like, kids don't come out of this okay. I don't have the statistics, but at least anecdotally, a lot of people end up dying by suicide or addiction or any other number of awful ways. And I think there is surprisingly a real story of resilience and, and toughness in Paris Hilton that I wouldn't have expected. You know, I, I wouldn't have thought 20 years ago that I would be saying this now about Paris Hilton. And it's one of the most remarkable arcs for a pop culture figure that I can think of to have hidden in plain sight in the shell of a kind of dumb, blonde, silly woman who's pretending she doesn't know what Walmart is. When you've actually run away from so many awful institutions and been through some really, really rough stuff is just fascinating to me. It just says a lot about what we have to do to get by at different times.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Right. I still don't know if she was lying about Walmart, but.

[Natalie Robomed]

Well, actually in her documentary, one of the girls that she was in Provo with says, when I saw the symbol, Evan, I saw you saying, you don't know what Walmart is or you don't know how to mop a floor. I was like, yeah, you do. We had to mop floors and clean stuff all the time.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Yeah, but she lived this life sort of of lying, you know, I mean, it's interesting that she has Seen still not really talked about any sobriety issues. Right. Like, she still has not said, you know, these are the drugs I was taking. These are the drinking issues I had. She sort of just moved that stuff to the side. But she's been honest about so much else that I think she gets to keep some things to herself if she doesn't want to talk about them.

[Natalie Robomed]

Yeah, totally. And, I mean, I do think there are people who might take umbrage with the fact that she hasn't apologized for some of her controversies in the past for saying certain slurs. Like, she. She hasn't, as far as I know, taken any kind of accountability for that, either in the documentary or in her memoir. But as you said, you know, she's. She's come out and said a lot as far as celebrities go. She has.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

I mean, I think what's going to be really interesting is to see if she does take another cause up now that she's had some success with the troubled teens, you know, and now she's a mom. And so what exactly will she start talking about as a mom? I mean, she obviously feels that she has a bit of a platform to talk about, you know, more substantive issues than just, like, what I'm wearing today. So, yeah, I mean, I used to talk about her as, like, the Zsa Zsa Gabor of our generation, and now I think she's a lot more than that. But I do think she'll have that kind of staying power. Like, I do think she'll actually be with us when she starts looking quite ancient or not.

[Natalie Robomed]

She might never look ancient.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Right. She's very well preserved.

[Lara Marie Shaneholz]

Yeah.

[Natalie Robomed]

I mean, who knows? Will there be another voice? You know, will there be another shift, another character, another voice?

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Yeah. That's it for this week. Thank you, everybody, for joining us to talk more about Paris Hilton. And we will be back next week.

[Natalie Robomed]

If you enjoy the show, please leave us a rating and review. It really helps people find the podcast. For more updates and to get in touch, follow us on Instagram and TikTok at infamous pod. See you next week.