Paris Hilton: Patron Bimbo of Using What You've Got

Content Warning: Rape, institutional child abuse, mentions of racism and antisemitism.

When I decided to read Paris: The Memoir, I joked with my friends, saying it was “for research.” Because in what world does the memoir of a forty year-old bimbo count as research material? I expected to learn about her business strategy, her brilliant brand-building, and her brains (and funny stories) behind the airhead heiress persona. But it actually was very very good research.

What did we say were some characteristics of the traditional bimbo? Blonde, check. Hot, check. Sexualized, check. Dumb, check. Paris also checks the slightly rarer bimbo box of infantilization – we have all heard the baby voice, right?

And remember that photo I mentioned in my first essay? The New York Post “Bimbo Summit” photo? The whole reason I’m doing this thing? Here’s what happened immediately before that photo was taken, from the perspective of Paris Hilton.

The Original Bimbo Summit

Paris Hilton and her close friend, Britney Spears¹ were at a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and they got bored.² They wanted to go back to Paris’s house. Even the party girl-est of party girls get sick of partying sometimes! But of course, since they were the party girls of the decade, no one wanted them to leave the party early. Paris and Brit didn’t want to be rude, so they used an old trick Paris had learned around ten years earlier. They escaped through the bathroom window.

They ran down an alley and were immediately met by a flock of paparazzi around the corner. The two girls ducked back into the alley and fixed each other up to look their best for the pictures that were sure to make headlines the next week. Once they were appropriately made up – hair: tweaked, lips: glossed – they stepped into the mob.

“Paris, is it true you and Lindsay [Lohan] got into an altercation last night?”

“Paris, Lindsay says you hit her!”

“Did you hit her?”

“Did you hit her?”

Paris, of course, did not hit Lindsay Lohan. 

Paris: No. Ask her. She’s right there.

Enter Lindsay Lohan.

Lindsay: Paris would never. She’s my friend. Everyone lies about everything. She’s a nice person. Please, leave us alone. We’re friends.

Suddenly, Lindsay needed an escape route as well, and what better way to escape and put the feud rumors to rest than hopping in the car with the girl who had allegedly hit her the previous night? 

Lindsay: She never did that. She’s a good girl. A nice person. I’ve known her since I was fifteen. Please.

Britney scooted onto the center console of the car, and Lindsay sat in the passenger seat. After pausing for the paps to snap some now-iconic pictures,³ the girls drove away. This, folks, is a quintessential bimbo tale: it has drama (real or fabricated, who cares!), hotties (obviously), parties (even though it was a boring one), and paps (fuckers).

Escaping through a small bathroom window is, believe it or not, a survival skill Paris learned at age 16. One of many.

Sweet Sixteen

In the fall of 1997, Paris Hilton awoke in the middle of the night to two men tearing the covers off her bed, dragging her off the mattress by her ankle, hands covering her mouth to block her from screaming. One man dangled a pair of handcuffs in front of her eyes.

“Do you want to go the easy way or the hard way?”

As Paris kicked and screamed, one man grabbed her torso and the other took her legs and carried her out of her bedroom into the hallway. Paris screams for her parents.

Their bedroom door is cracked open just enough for them to peek around the edge, faces streaked with tears. They press against each other and watch as two strangers drag me out the door into the darkness.

Let’s go back a few more years. At age 13, Paris was a favorite of a teacher at her middle school. The teacher told her that he had a crush on her and asked for her private phone number but told her not to tell anyone else. Now, this teacher just happened to be the young and hot teacher everyone at the school was crushing on, so who was Paris to turn him down? 

Mr. Abercrombie made me believe that I was rare and precious, and you know what? I was. Every eighth-grade girl is rare and precious. 

This teacher called Paris on the phone nightly to ask if her parents were home. Like any normal, well-adjusted adult would. One night, Paris finally told him her parents were out, that it was just the nanny home with the kids. He came over to her house and told her to meet him outside in his car. When she got in his car, he kissed her. They continued to kiss, and just as things seemed like they were about to escalate, Paris’s parents pulled into the driveway. The teacher pulled out of the driveway with Paris still in the car and sped away, driving around and crying “My life is over. What am I doing? Why did you make me do this?” Because, of course, this thirteen year old girl made him drive to her house, invite her out to his car, and kiss her. 

It took Paris decades to process what had happened to her, to actually speak the word pedophile in regards to her teacher and what he had done.

[I was] given a choice:

A: “You are a stupid child who was deceived, used, and thrown away like garbage.”

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.”

Why wouldn’t the thirteen year old choose to cast herself as the siren?

After this incident, along with generally poor performance in school due to her untreated ADHD, Paris was sent to live in Palm Springs with her grandmother. Her parents couldn’t handle her anymore. She moved around a bunch and continued to rebel in what I would call a low-stakes kind of way. Paris would sneak out at night to go dancing – and really, she was just dancing. She didn’t drink or do any drugs. She just loved to dance. It was like a little treat to her young ADHD brain. Her parents finally got so fed up with (and worried about) her that they decided to send her to CEDU.

What the fuck is CEDU?

CEDU is a private “therapeutic boarding school” that claimed to help students overcome “emotional difficulties” through “a rich curriculum of academics, performing and visual arts, outdoor education, recovery, and emotional growth.” Since Paris was known to sneak out of the house at night and was, as her parents said, “out of control,” there was of course no way to get her to this school other than abducting her in the middle of the night.⁴

“This wasn’t about a kid ditching school and talking back,” says Mom. “We did it to save your life.”

CEDU Educational Services, Inc. was founded in 1967 by a former member of the cult Synanon. Synanon⁵ was originally established in 1958 as a drug rehabilitation program by Charles E. Dederich. Though Dederich was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, he sought to create his own recovery program for those who suffered from addiction to illegal drugs, as those individuals were not always welcomed to AA. Synanon began as a two-year residential program divided into three stages: in the first, members provided manual labor within the community – housekeeping, cooking, etc. During the second stage, members worked outside of the community but were still required to reside within the community. And in the final stage, members were allowed to work and reside outside of the community while still attending regular meetings. For the first ten years, this was how the program functioned. But then the philosophy shifted, and Synanon became a “lifetime rehabilitation program,” claiming that drug addicts would never be fit to re-enter society.

Around the same time that this shift in the philosophy of Synanon was occurring, member Mel Wasserman decided to take those beliefs with him and create a similar program for youth – “troubled teens,” if you will. He named his company CEDU.⁶ At CEDU (and other similar programs), students were physically, emotionally, and sexually abused under the guise of a life-saving therapeutic program.

Sixteen-year-old Paris arrives at CEDU and is immediately thrown into the proverbial deep end. Upon arrival, she is forced to remove all of her clothing and receive a “cavity search” which begins with the classic, “bend over and cough,” but then goes a step further with a staff member physically feeling inside her body to “make sure you don’t have drugs or weapons hidden in there.” 

At this time, “digital rape,” wasn’t a term that was used or known, and it certainly wasn’t familiar to a sixteen year old. Until 2012, the legal definition of rape was limited to penile penetration of a vagina. So although Paris and thousands of other children at this school experienced what we now define as rape, the terminology didn’t exist for these victims to report or understand what had happened to them.

While the semantics may not seem relevant to everyone, I am of the firm belief that giving a name to things/events/actions is vital to understanding and processing what we have gone through. And, lucky for me, science backs this up! Naming is especially important for young, developing minds. According to the Science Museum of Virginia, “Naming is a way of placing order on our world by helping us differentiate between things. It also helps others know what we are referring to when having a conversation.” A vital piece of processing your own experience is sharing that experience with others – and if there is no prescribed name for the event you went through, the effort it takes to string together the correct words is sometimes more than an individual can handle.

Besides, the rest of the treatment these students experienced at the program was enough to keep them quiet about the various types of abuse they suffered.

After being strip-searched, Paris was given a pair of stained magenta sweats to change into (pinks, because she was a runner), and a pair of socks. No shoes.

“Shoes are a privilege you’ll have to earn.”

Not dehumanizing at all!

Now I’m going to familiarize you with some of the unique vocabulary words used to name some of CEDU’s practices, because we have just learned how important the practice of naming is.

Rap: This is a CEDU term for attack therapy. Students at CEDU had to attend Raps three times a week, and each session lasted around 3-4 hours. In these sessions, students were forced to verbally abuse each other, attacking each other’s deepest insecurities. Paris recounts that the only way to stop the verbal abuse was to confess or fake a confession. Students would often claim to have had some terrible thought or have done something terrible, like “raping a cousin, killing a dog, wanting to stab parents and strangle girlfriends.” Once a student getting blown away had sufficiently suffered, students would turn their attacks to another student. Students got attacked for not participating, incentivizing participation as a way to avoid being blown away yourself.

Blown away: This is what they call it when you are attacked at Rap.

Smoosh: Directly after berating each other at Rap, all students and staff gather close together and smoosh. Smooshing was forced group touching – hand holding, snuggling, hair petting, spooning, etc. Non-consensual touching – cool.

Bans: “Bans is like, you can’t talk to anyone, and no one can talk to you, or like, if you’re on boy bans, you can’t look at or talk to boys, and they can’t look at or talk to you.” If someone else talks to or looks at you when you’re on bans, who do you think gets punished? It’s you! Because it’s your fault if someone looks at you when they’re not supposed to. Obviously.

Propheet: Held every three months, Propheets were workshops that lasted for several days and employed sleep deprivation, forced emoting, re-enactments of trauma, exposure to the elements, etc. Propheets were based on Kahlil Gibran’s book, The Prophet, as well as Emerson and Thoreau’s writings, and attempted to instill in students certain values. You can access propheet scripts here. 

Creating a unique set of vocabulary is a common practice in cults used to muddy communication and force participants into subservience. As we know, the CEDU system was created based on the Synanon cult’s practices, so of course they function similarly to a cult. In Cultish by Amanda Montell, she discusses the many ways language is integral to the way cults function and take over people’s lives: 

Creating special language to influence people’s behavior and beliefs is so effective in part simply because speech is the first thing we’re willing to change about ourselves . . . and also the last thing we let go.

By creating a shared language among students at these schools, they are subconsciously sucked into their new world. And naming these practices normalizes them in a damaging way. 

You just spent hours sitting in a circle and yelling damaging things at your classmates? That’s just Rap. You are forbidden from talking to or looking at another person, and they are forbidden from talking to or looking at you? You’re just on bans. A staff member touched you in a way that felt inappropriate to you? It was just smooshing.

The language also serves to separate these children from their life pre-program. This set of language is completely new – these concepts don’t exist outside of this place. And it is just that much easier to leave who you were before behind and conform to the environment in which you are trapped. Again, from Amanda Montell:

A linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are.

Language was a foundational part of the mind-altering abuse these students experienced. 

Paris Hilton spent two years in CEDU and other similar programs – namely Ascent Wilderness Program, Cascade School, and Provo Canyon School. At the later, more intensive programs, Paris and others were forced to take medication that they did not need (and they were not told, even when they asked, what the medication was or was for). Each of these institutions was traumatizing in its own unique way, but they all shared the common disguise of a rehabilitation program for troubled teens. Some of these same programs are still operating today, and many more have cropped up under different names throughout the country. Within the two years she spent in the troubled teen industry, Paris breaks out of these institutions a number of times but is always sent back. When she is able to first escape and then get in contact with family or friends, they each turn her into either the police or directly back to the institution. Why wouldn’t they? They were brainwashed into believing that they were saving her life. 

Back to Reality (TV)

In 1999, a freshly 18-year-old Paris returns to her “normal” life and skyrockets to fame, but still lives with constant reminders of her time in the troubled teen industry. She can’t sleep without having flashbacks to the night in which she was abducted by CEDU transport staff, so she goes out and parties every night. She numbs herself with drugs and alcohol. 

She soon realizes that she can capitalize off of her party girl image. Before influencers were a thing we had a name for, Paris was getting sent free things by companies in the hopes that she would be photographed wearing them. Good for her. ⁷

But along with fame comes constant media attention. Being cornered by paparazzi at every turn would be an unsettling experience regardless of what trauma you had endured, but for Paris, it often triggered memories of Rap. She is shouted at from all directions by people she doesn’t know (or barely knows); she is pitted against her friends; she is pitted against people she doesn’t even know. 

Paris becomes a person that people love to hate. (One of) their favorite thing(s) to hate: the baby voice. Paris even admits that she hates the baby voice! But she physically can’t help it – when she gets anxious, her throat tightens and the pitch of her voice raises, and there’s little she can do to counteract that. And this actually proved to be an important survival skill during her time in the troubled teen industry. If she put on her baby voice, and acted as airheaded as everyone wanted her to be, the staff didn’t see her as a threat. 

The first time Paris ran from CEDU was during a “marathon mega-Rap” – a Rap that began in the evening, went straight through until the morning, and did not allow the students food, water, or bathroom breaks. However, Paris called upon her girlish charms⁸ and convinced two of the male enforcers to allow her to sneak off to the bathroom, where she climbed through a small window at the top of the wall and made a run for it. Once again, being a hot girl everyone assumes is a slut comes in super handy!

Although her escape attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, it just proves the point that Paris Hilton is a smart, strong woman who has been consistently underestimated her entire life. She knows how to get what she wants.

This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of the story I just described, but in a very basic sense, it’s true. Paris learned to use her sex appeal and her perceived stupidity, because those were the only things she had going for her in these schools. They wanted to believe she was a weak, dumb, babyish bimbo, so that’s what she made herself. She could evade a lot of criticism and attention by pretending to be exactly what everyone expected.

Paris also, of course, garnered a great deal of criticism for some actual bad choices she has made: using the n-word, the f-word (the homophobic one, not the fun one), making anti-semitic comments, etc. I’m not going to list specific examples here – if you’re curious, you can look them up yourself. She has done and said some objectively cruel things. And those things are not excusable. In Paris: The Memoir, Paris takes accountability: 

I don’t remember half the stuff people say I said when I was being a blacked-out idiot, but I’m not denying it, because coming out of the CEDU system, I had a severely damaged filter – except when I was buzzed and had no filter at all. My ability to trust people was systematically destroyed, so getting close to anyone made me feel vulnerable and raw. As a result, I said the worst things to and about the people I love most.

Again, the behavior is not excused, but we do understand that damaged people say and do extremely fucked up shit. We see very clearly in this case how the abuse that one person suffered went on to hurt countless others, and how institutional abuse just keeps on feeding racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and on and on and on.

Did you really think we weren’t going to talk about the sex tape?

Another thing people love to hate about Paris: her sexuality. Early in her fame, a sex tape of Paris and Rick Salomon was leaked (by Rick himself!). The tape was shot when Paris was 19 years old, and Rick, her boyfriend at the time, was 32. Paris has opened up, saying that she was not comfortable making the sex tape, but felt like she had to, to keep her boyfriend happy.

In addition to the pressure from Salomon to make the tape, Paris had been desensitized to nudity during her time in the CEDU system. CEDU students were forced to shower while staff members watched and commented. Paris had to turn off the part of herself that could feel shame or insecurity around her naked body, because that was the only way she could survive it. So when hundreds of people have seen, commented on, and berated your naked body, making a private sex tape with your boyfriend doesn’t seem too bad!

Until he adds a 9/11 dedication to the beginning of it (what the fuck?) and decides to release it months after you’ve broken up. And makes thousands of dollars off of it. 

The first and most important point here is: so what if Paris filmed a sex tape? Why does that automatically give everyone the right to hate her and label her as a slut? The tape was created within a committed relationship – and even if it wasn’t, why did the media and the public care this much about the sex life of a 19-year old⁹ girl?

The answer, I think, is more complicated than I understand so far, but it certainly has something to do with current society’s obsession with celebrity. That is a conversation for another substack – it requires more research to fully dive into, and I fear I’ve already surpassed my limit of how much I can fit into this one essay. Your bimbo brains probably already took one look at how small the scroll bar on the right of your screen was and gave up on this.

Behind the Baby Voice

Before I end this, I want to take a moment to share one of my favorite things about Paris Hilton, and the thing that made me feel the most connected to her. 

Paris Hilton is obsessed with animals. Same.¹⁰ In 2009, she built a $325,000 mini-mansion just for her pets. The house has heating and air conditioning, and is two stories with a balcony. Recently, one of her precious chihuahuas, Harajuku Bitch, died at age 23! So clearly, treating your pets this well pays off.¹¹

In the middle of recounting a traumatic story about her first moments at CEDU, Paris says: “I remember a room with two staffers: sort of a messy-looking hippie guy and a gross woman with a pointed weasel face. No offense, weasels. Love you.” She is funny! And also this is some shit I would say! 

That is very much not the point, but once again, Paris Hilton is a human being, and there is more to her than meets the eye. Just like you and me.

Fast forward to now, Paris has shed the baby voice (kind of) and is working with Breaking Code Silence to speak out against institutional child abuse. On February 8, 2021, Paris appeared before Utah State Legislature and testified about her experience at Provo Canyon School. Less than a month later, SB 127 was passed in the state of Utah. This bill states that congregate care facilities “may not use a cruel, severe, unusual, or unnecessary practice on a child, including: a strip search; a body cavity search; inducing pain to obtain compliance; hyperextending joints; peer restraints; discipline or punishment that is intended to frighten or humiliate.” This was the first time in over fifteen years that the government reviewed and reformed the standards of these facilities.

For the past two years, Paris has been working in support of the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, holding press conferences on Capitol Hill and spreading awareness any way she can. SICAA proposes to establish a bill of rights with protections for children in facilities like the ones Paris spent time in. 

Be honest: what did you think about Paris Hilton before you read this essay? Did you think she was dumb? Did you think she was a slut? Did you love her, like her, dislike her, hate her? What do you think about her now? What did you expect this essay to be about?

I hope, if nothing else, that you understand the human behind the bimbo a little bit more. And that, by taking a closer look into her humanity, you have a little more compassion for the mistakes she has made, the mistakes you have made, the mistakes those around you have made, and the mistakes those you don’t know have made. 

And sign this petition to support the movement to shut down Provo Canyon School.

1. Ever heard of her?

2. That is so me.

3. That they made thousands of dollars off of – the paparazzi, not Paris, Britney, and Lindsay.

4. An awesome thing to put your 16-year-old daughter through!

5. Though the name has no confirmed origin, it is thought to be a combination of the words “symposium” (what they called their meetings) and “anonymous” (mimicking Alcoholics Anonymous)

6.  Former students have claimed that CEDU stands for Charles E. Dederich University, although all marketing materials only referred to the program using its acronym, and playing off of the sound of the word it forms: “See Yourself As You Are and Do Something About It.”

7. Girlboss!

8. Being hot + baby voice

9. Paris was 22 when the tape was leaked, 19 when it was filmed.

10. See McKayla’s substack for more on this.

11. Also being filthy rich.