Paris Hilton Says Older Ex ‘Kept Pushing’ for Her to Make Infamous Sex Tape at 19

 

Paris Hilton has been reclaiming the larger narrative around her life in recent years — first as she released her 2020 documentary This is Paris and now with her forthcoming memoir Paris: The Memoir dropping on March 14. She unsurprisingly had a lot of lore to dig into, but one stand-out moment came in a recent excerpt published in U.K. publication The Times detailing the traumatic reality around the release of her now-infamous early-2000s sex tape.

To start, Hilton was still a teenager at the time (19) when the tape was made — and was involved with an older man, Rick Salomon, who was 31. She said that making the tape wasn’t something she wanted but instead was something she felt pressured to do in order to keep her relationship.

She said that her ex, who she did not name, “kept pushing” despite her not being about being filmed (fair!) but eventually said she agreed because she “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 wrote. She said she also used alcohol and Quaaludes to try and get herself to a place where she could go through with it.

“I needed to prove something to him and to myself, so I got hammered, and I did it.”

If that experience of feeling coerced at such a young age wasn’t enough, the tape leaking online in 2003 and Salomon’s plans to release it officially without her consent brought the trauma and shame she experienced right back around.