EXCLUSIVE 'We wanted our babies to be safe. I'm grateful to the surrogates for making our dreams come true.' PARIS HILTON opens up about her IVF and medical trauma – and how she's found her happily ever after By Andrew Barker Published: 03:01 EDT, 31 August 2024 | Updated: 03:01 EDT, 31 August 2024 e-mail View comments We’ve definitely got power-couple vibes,’ says Paris Hilton of her and husband Carter Reum ’s three-year marriage.
‘We make the perfect team because we both love and support each other and we’re best friends. We love talking about business; success is something that drives us.’ Before meeting Reum, 43, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, who is the son of a family friend, Hilton hadn’t really been in love.
‘I never felt that way because I never trusted anyone before,’ she says. ‘I had never let anyone into my heart because I had been through so much pain that I just had a huge wall around it. Right away, when I met Carter, that wall just came crashing down.
’ The pair married in November 2021 at the Georgian-style Bel-Air mansion belonging to her paternal grandparents, which sold the same year for more than £47 million. Hilton wore two Oscar de la Renta dresses, Demi Lovato performed and there was a neon-carnival afterparty on the Santa Monica Pier. To some she’s the It-girl heiress who made her name as a dumb blonde on reality TV.
Andrew Barker meets a very different Paris Hilton – mother, wife, businesswoman and advocate for abused children Before our Zoom interview I wasn’t sure which version of Paris Hilton would turn up: the party-girl heiress, the airhead reality-TV star or the $1 million-plus-per-gig DJ? Or the memoirist, the advocate for institutionally abused teenagers or the loved-up wife and mother of two children under two? They all do. Over the course of our conversation, Hilton explains why each role has a place in her 43-year story so far; why ‘people are finally seeing me for the real me’. Richard and Kathy Hilton with Paris (right), seven, and Nicky, four, LA, 1988.
Its latest chapter begins four years ago with the release of This is Paris , a documentary revealing how she was sexually and physically abused at Provo Canyon School in Utah , a ‘psychiatric youth involuntary residential treatment centre’ with conditions Hilton describes as being akin to those of a Victorian asylum. In the documentary she tells of the prescription medication she was made to take, punitive solitary confinement and forced gynaecological check-ups. Then, in her 2023 autobiography, Paris: The Memoir , Hilton writes about how she was groomed by her high-school teacher and date-raped at 15, then had an abortion in her early 20s – secrets she’d buried for more than two decades, not telling her parents Richard and Kathy or siblings Nicky, Barron and Conrad.
These were ‘things that I never even wanted to think of again for myself, so I never fully processed all of it’, she tells me, in a voice a couple of octaves lower than expected. This chapter’s de facto soundtrack is Infinite Icon , Hilton’s new album of catchy pop bangers and electronic anthems, out this Friday and her first in 18 years. Songs such as ‘Chasin’’ with Grammy-winner Meghan Trainor bid farewell to toxic exes, while ‘I’m Free’ is a remix of the 1998 Ultra Naté song ‘Free’, which is acutely meaningful to Hilton.
She heard it on her first night out after being discharged, aged 18, from Provo Canyon, where she had been sent by her parents for 11 months against her will and where music was prohibited. Its powerful message of emancipation became her ‘life anthem..
. It was just very healing to me’. I never let anyone into my heart.
I'd been through so much pain that I had a huge wall around it Infinite Icon came about when Miley Cyrus asked Hilton to join her and singer/producer Sia on stage for the 2022 NBC special Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party , in Miami, to sing Hilton’s 2006 sleeper hit ‘Stars Are Blind’. Hilton was no stranger to the stage, having professionally DJed for over a decade, but singing live to millions of Americans planted a seed. On the private plane back to Los Angeles, Sia convinced her to do another album, agreeing to be its executive producer.
‘We’re like sisters now,’ says Hilton. ‘She really brought something out in me. It’s been amazing to work with my favourite artists and to put what I went through in my life personally in my music for other people.
Music is such a powerful tool.’ Summer holiday 2024 in the South of France with Carter and children Phoenix and London Hilton is the great-granddaughter of the hotel magnate Conrad Hilton. Her father Richard, who sells homes to fellow multimillionaires, is one of Conrad’s son Barron’s eight children.
Her mother Kathy, a former actress and model, was Michael Jackson’s childhood best friend and part of Andy Warhol’s set. (Warhol once told her mother of Paris: ‘This kid is going to be a huge star.’) Kathy is now a fixture on the TV show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alongside her half-sisters Kyle and Kim Richards.
Hilton’s sister Nicky, 40, is married to James Rothschild, a grandson of the 3rd Baron Rothschild, and lives in New York. Her brother Barron, 34, is married to an American-German countess, Tessa von Walderdorff, and the youngest, Conrad, 30, is unattached. A hero? Definitely.
An icon? Maybe. When she was 15, Hilton’s parents moved the family from LA to New York to live in an apartment in the Waldorf Astoria hotel. Nicky was enrolled in the Convent of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls Catholic school on the Upper East Side, but Paris had other ideas.
She jumped between schools, skipping classes and sneaking out of the hotel to experience the early 90s club scene. One night, when she was 16, her parents hired two men to forcibly remove her from her bed (while they looked on in tears) to escort her to California to attend a residential ‘behaviour modification programme’ facility. These do not exist in the UK but are big business in the USA, with children (estimated to number as many as 200,000) placed by their parents against their will every year.
All operate with very little scrutiny. After escape attempts and recaptures, Hilton was moved to institutions in Idaho, Montana and eventually Utah. We wanted our babies to be safe.
I'm grateful to the surrogates for making my dreams come true In the second season of her Kardashians-esque TV show Paris in Love , Kathy Hilton calls Paris as a teenager ‘a wild animal, an alien’ and ‘unusual’. In her memoir Hilton makes it clear that she forgives her parents because they didn’t know the horrors they were signing her up to. Before Reum she had relationships with models and Greek shipping heirs.
In 2004, one particularly toxic ex called Rick Salomon convinced Hilton to make a sex tape, which he released without her consent under the name 1 Night in Paris . Hilton sued and won, but her name was sullied, and her pride left in pieces. ‘It was just so extremely painful, because that was my first relationship, getting out of there, trusting someone, and then being taken advantage of like that.
And having the whole world assume I’m something I’m not, just based on one night with someone who I loved and trusted,’ she tells me. With Nicole Richie in reality TV show The Simple Life, 2003 In her 20s Hilton was diagnosed with ADHD, a condition she sees as a ‘superpower’ rather than an affliction. ‘My brain will go everywhere.
I might go in ten different places, but that’s just the way my brain works,’ she says. Her own empire has turned over $4 billion in revenue to date and Hilton is a bona fide multi-hyphenate: influencer, activist, DJ, designer, investor, recording artist, philanthropist, actress, model, author and now producer – her memoir will soon be adapted for television, having been optioned by A24 (the production company behind Everything, Everywhere, All at Once ), with Hilton as executive producer as well as Elle and Dakota Fanning on board to co-produce. At a press conference for her nonprofit organisation 11:11 Media Impact last April, Jamaica As well as all of the above, Paris in Love has already had two seasons.
There are podcasts, DJ gigs and licensing deals across fashion, beauty and homeware. Her bestselling products include a spray tan with Tan-Luxe and a cookware collection for supermarket giant Walmart. Her fragrance collection continues to be one of the most-purchased celebrity perfume ranges of all time (the 30th, as yet unnamed, will be launched later this year).
Keen to capitalise on her 26 million Instagram and nearly 11 million TikTok followers, Motorola, McLaren Formula 1, Absolut Vodka and Amazon have all had brand partnerships with Hilton this year and in 2022 she became a face of, you guessed it, Hilton Hotels, with whom she has a long-term deal. ‘I think that’s the biggest money I’ll ever get for being a Hilton,’ she writes in chapter one of Paris . (Allegedly her grandfather Barron left 97 per cent of his wealth to charity when he died in 2019, cutting her out of his will.
) Twenty-five people are employed by her companies and her nonprofit organisation 11:11 Media Impact, which seeks to improve regulation and oversight of the treatment of young people with supposed behavioural disorders, in particular the ‘troubled teen’ industry, which has seen some 350 recorded child deaths so far. There are her household staff, too, in the Beverly Hills mansion she shares with Reum and their children Phoenix, 20 months, and London, nine months, plus four dogs. Hilton and Reum endured several unsuccessful rounds of IVF before their son Phoenix was born to a surrogate in January 2023 and their daughter London later that year to another.
‘After what I went through as a teenager...
Even being in a hospital, getting IVs, just anything is extremely traumatising for me,’ she says of choosing the surrogacy route. The cover of her new album Infinite Icon ‘We wanted our babies to be safe, and I’m grateful to the surrogates for making my dreams come true because I’ve always wanted to be a mother.’ The couple documented their first encounter with a newborn Phoenix on an iPhone during season two of Paris in Love , keeping him a secret from their families and the production crew until he was eight days old.
London was born during the recording of Infinite Icon , with Hilton moving her studio to her home to be closer to her daughter’s nursery. (It joins Hilton’s own day spa, replete with hyperbaric oxygen therapy machine.) Charli XCX is so badass.
I'm proud of her and I'm loving this whole BRAT summer. It's such fun The reality TV show leads to an obvious comparison with Kim Kardashian, a lifelong friend, who once served as Hilton’s wardrobe assistant. Britney Spears, another long-serving supporter, acknowledged Hilton in her recent memoir.
But Hilton calls Nicole Richie, daughter of Motown great Lionel, her best friend, and the pair are also teaming up for a new reality TV show. Hilton promises the same mischievous energy and fish-out-of-water challenges seen in their first, The Simple Life , which ran for five seasons between 2003 and 2007. They will reunite with some of the characters introduced in the show, which garnered 13 million viewers at its peak, setting a new paradigm for reality TV as it brought out their inner Beverly Hills brats.
Pressing for youth care reform, Washington DC, 2021 The timing couldn’t be better, with Charli XCX’s brat summer (the ‘bad girl’ aesthetic inspired by her album Brat ) in full swing when we speak, and her song ‘Von Dutch’ ruling the downloads (named after Hilton and Richie’s favoured noughties brand, emblazoned on their baseball caps at the time). ‘When I’ve hung out with Charli she’s like, “You’ve always been my inspiration,” and that means so much to me. I think she is so badass and such an incredible artist, and I’m proud of her and I’m loving this whole brat summer.
It’s so much fun,’ Hilton says. ‘[Nicole and I] are definitely the original brats. It’s just about being unapologetic and confident; embracing it and having fun with it,’ she adds.
Aged seven, at a mother-daughter fashion show, Los Angeles, 1988 How will she reconcile the dumb blonde heiress role prescribed to her by producers 21 years ago – Richie, she says, was instructed to stir up trouble – with today’s empire builder and campaigner who is invited to appear before congressional committees in Washington DC? ‘Before, people thought that the character was really who I was, and now I still have fun with my persona a bit, but people can tell that I’m in on the joke and know exactly what I’m doing. I’m not a dumb blonde, I’m just good at pretending to be one.’ Indeed, this chapter has not just been about confronting demons and celebrating love.
It has been a chance to step away from the ‘dumb blonde’ persona she hid behind for 20 years, between leaving Provo Canyon School and making her documentary. ‘Building that persona was a trauma response. It was like a mask because I had been through so much; I wanted to create this Barbie-doll, perfect-life persona so I didn’t have to think about all the horrible things that I went through at those schools,’ which explains the higher-pitched voice she became known for on The Simple Life .
The documentary and memoir have given Hilton a platform as a leading advocate for the many thousands of children who fall victim to the ‘troubled teen’ industry in the USA. In April 2023 she championed the bipartisan Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act. She hopes it will become law this year, she says.
In June, she appeared at a US House of Representatives committee hearing to call for greater federal oversight of foster care and youth residential programmes. These therapeutic boarding schools and treatment facilities receive an estimated $23 billion of public funds annually to ‘treat’ vulnerable young people with supposed behavioural and psychological problems. Duetting with Miley Cyrus for her new year TV special, December 2022 Earlier this year 11:11 Media Impact was alerted to reports of eight American teenage boys having been starved, waterboarded and beaten unconscious at the Atlantis Leadership Academy in Jamaica.
‘It was heartbreaking that children are now being shipped internationally and essentially being warehoused,’ she says. ‘These facilities have the most horrible conditions. These boys had no lawyers, they had nothing.
And I just said to Carter, “Can we fly there to support them at their court case?” That was exactly what they did. ‘When I was a little girl, I had no one to be that hero for me. So now that I can do it for them is an incredible feeling.
’ A hero? Definitely. An icon? Maybe. One thing is for certain: Paris Hilton’s life now is anything but simple.
Infinite Icon is released on Friday 6 September Share or comment on this article: 'We wanted our babies to be safe. I'm grateful to the surrogates for making our dreams come true.' PARIS HILTON opens up about her IVF and medical trauma - and how she's found her happily ever after e-mail Add comment.
