Paris Hilton revealed on Wednesday her nightmare experience at a Utah treatment center for trouble teens where she was sleep-deprived, overmedicated and forced to submit to random midnight gynecological exams while male staffers watched.
Hilton, 41, held a press conference in the morning calling for the passage of the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act which would increase reporting and oversight of these institutions and put an end to what she said was a ‘tragically overlooked children’s human rights crisis.’
The hotel heiress also penned an op-ed in USA Today that detailed some of the abusive treatment that she says she suffered at Provo Canyon School, in Utah where her parents sent her for a year in the 1990s to address her attention deficit disorder with the institution’s ‘tough love’ treatment.
‘On my first day, I was forced to remove all my clothes, squat and cough, and submit to a gynecological exam – all watched closely by male staff,’ she wrote in the opinion piece.
‘Although it was an extremely uncomfortable experience, I was led to believe it was legitimate, routine check for contraband.
‘But what I couldn’t understand as a 16-year-old why that internal exam would be don to me frequently during my time at Provo, and only in the middle of the night.’
Hilton detailed the ordeal she suffered in her 2020 documentary ‘This is Paris’ describing how her parents had been ‘conned’ into sending her to the facility.
She said routinely she was awaken in the night by the staff shining a flashlight in her face then taken to the ‘exam room’ where she was forced to lie on a padded table, spread her legs and submit to a pelvic exam.
‘I remember crying while they held me down,’ she said in her op-ed. ‘I kept saying ‘No!’ an asking ‘Why?’ They just said ‘Shut up. Be quiet. Stop struggling or you’ll go to Obs.’
Obs was another name for solitary confinement, a cold spare room with drain and a roll of toilet paper where she was held barely clothed. She said she would pace the floor in Obs until should couldn’t stand anymore.
The experience has left her with lasting emotional scars.
‘I’m still processing the trauma, doing the hard work it takes to tell the whole story in a memoir that will be published next year,’ she said.