In an excerpt from her upcoming memoir published in U.K. newspaper The Times, Paris Hilton candidly speaks about the traumatic experience behind her infamous sex tape.
The heiress and entrepreneur shares how she ended up participating in the tape with ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon, whom she does not name. Hilton, who was just 18 when she first met Salomon, says she doesn't remember much about the night he asked her to make the videotape but recalls that he "kept pushing" and told her that "nobody but themselves would ever see it."
Hilton, struggling to understand her sexuality at that age, was desperate to look mature in front of her older boyfriend and wanted "to feel like a woman who's comfortable in her own skin."
"He told me if I wouldn't do it, he could easily find someone who would, and that was the worst thing I could think of - to be dumped by this grown man because I was a stupid kid who didn't know how to play grown-up games," Hilton writes.
She also shared that she used alcohol and Quaaludes to let her guard down, feeling that she needed to prove something to herself and to him.
In 2003, long after the couple had split, Hilton learned that the tape had been leaked online. She reached out to Salomon, begging him to stop the release, but he refused, saying that it "had a lot of financial value" due to her burgeoning fame.
The video had a devastating impact on her family, and the star writes, "The world thinks of me as a sex symbol, and I'm here for that, because symbol literally means icon. But when people saw that sex tape, they didn't say 'icon,' they said 'slut.' They said 'whore.' And they weren't shy about it."
Hilton has also opened up about the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager and her experience at Utah's Provo Canyon School, where she faced emotional and physical abuse as a teen. She has gone on to serve as an advocate to shut down similar school programs and is proud of the change she has made.
"I feel that this is now my legacy and something that is my mission in life and something that really has deep meaning and that I'm going to continue fighting until change is made," she said.
