“We literally drove through Bel Air at like 100 miles an hour,” she recalls, still frightened at the memory. The teacher panicked and they embarked on a car chase with the Hiltons in pursuit. “We only kissed, but if my parents didn’t come, imagine what he would’ve tried to do?” she asks. One night, he lured her outside her home and into his car, before her parents drove up.

He would call me on the phone all the time, just flirting with me, trying to put in my mind that I was this mature woman.” “He took advantage of a young girl and that was something I blocked out as well, I didn’t remember it until years later. “I was just such a young girl and I got manipulated by my teacher,” she tells me quietly. “I just love kids’ food,” she says, peeling back one of the sandwiches to layer on more jelly as she settles on the sofa next to me, Ether in between us.įrom the word go, Paris is unflinchingly honest and not afraid to tackle the heavy stuff – of which there is a lot.ĭepending on your level of Paris Hilton expertise, the well-versed will know that three years ago, she first revealed details of her abusive past in her acclaimed 2020 YouTube documentary, This Is Paris.

We arrive in a suite high above Beverly Hills and the room is filled with pink roses, Diet Coke, herbal teas, bowls of crisps and a plate of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cut into circles, no crusts. Other guests are starting to twig and selfies are rapidly requested, to which the woman who invented the selfie, politely obliges (cue on-duty baby voice.) Paris admits she is nervous about the interview, and her hands are visibly shaking as she struggles to get the key card to work in the elevator. Paris wears dress, earrings, Saint Laurent, rings, Lilou, Jennifer Fisher She’s giving Cher from Clueless meets Audrey Hepburn vibes and it’s easy to see why she’s become a Y2K fashion icon to Gen-Z on TikTok – and why Donatella Versace chose her to close her show in Milan at Fashion Week last September. Paris arrives for our interview entirely on her own, bar Ether, her miniature white Pomeranian, who is literally the size of a guinea pig. “The real me is someone who is strong and resilient, brave, smart and fun.” A dark, secret past “I’m not a dumb blonde, I’m just very good at pretending to be one,” she tells me. As the woman whose name became universal shorthand for blonde, spoiled and rich in the early noughties, thanks to her hit reality TV show The Simple Life – which spawned the omnipotent cult of reality TV (never forget Kim Kardashian was once Paris’s assistant) and whose ‘That’s hot’ catchphrase is as famous as she was for being a “hot mess” in her twenties – it may be surprising to hear that Paris’s book tells a different story: one of female empowerment and survival.

Paris by Paris Hilton