Paris Hilton says her teacher molested her as a teenager

Paris Hilton says she is still haunted by the pedophile who groomed her at high school.

Paris Hilton in Melbourne, Australia. Picture: Getty Images

Paris Hilton has revealed she was groomed and molested by a teacher as a teenager.

In an exclusive extract from her new book, Paris: The Memoir, published in the British newspaper The Times, the hotel heiress and reality TV star reveals the abuse at the hands of a teacher she calls “Mr Abercrombie”.

Hilton writes that Mr Abercrombie — a nickname she gave him because he resembled Abercrombie & Fitch model — was handsome and popular among students and the school’s nuns. “But he chose me,” she writes.

“He made me feel noticed in an important, grown-up way. He flattered and teased me and said that all the other girls were talking about me behind my back because they were jealous.”

Hilton says the teacher asked for her private phone number, warning her not to tell anyone. “It’s our secret,” he told her, according to the book. “I kept that secret like candy under my pillow.

“I never felt like I was being manipulated. I felt like I was being worshipped. Why wouldn’t I love this narrative? It was all about me, me, gorgeous little me. The focus was on my intoxicating beauty instead of his inappropriate behaviour.”

 

The teacher would call her almost every night, and ask if her parents were home, Hilton writes. “We talked for hours about how amazingly beautiful, and intelligent I was, how sensual, misunderstood, and special.”

The teacher would compare their relationship with other age-gap romances, such as Princess Diana and Prince Charles, as well as Priscilla and Elvis Presley.

One night when Hilton was left in the care of her nanny, the teacher drove to her house and beckoned for her to come outside.

“I threw on sneakers, climbed out my bedroom window, and slid down the drainpipe. I saw a late-model SUV idling at the top of the driveway. I climbed into the passenger seat. Teacher pulled me into his arms and kissed me.”

She writes that “the intensity of it stunned and delighted me,” and the kiss “seemed to be evolving into something more,” but was interrupted when her parents came home.

“I don’t know where he would have taken it if my parents hadn’t pulled into the driveway.”

“I glimpsed my dad’s stunned face. Teacher jammed his key in the ignition and peeled out. I clutched the edge of the seat as we fishtailed down the driveway. He sped like a maniac through the posh streets of Bel Air and Westwood, reeling around corners, freaking out the whole time.”

Paris Hilton with her parents, Kathy and Richard Hilton in 1996. Picture: Getty Images

“‘F..k! F..k! F..k!’ Mr Abercrombie sounded like he was crying. ‘My life is over. What am I doing? Why did you make me do this?’”

The teacher eventually dropped her home, Hilton writes. Her parents never mentioned it again, but she was sent away a short time later.

Her parents, unable to cope, called in CEDU — a now-defunct chain of “emotional growth” boarding schools — and Hilton was sent to Provo Canyon School in Utah, an institution where she was sexually and emotionally abused, which she detailed in her YouTube documentary This Is Paris.

“CEDU and other facilities like it were a trending solution for the upper-class problem child.”

It took decades for Hilton to come to terms with what happened. “Casting him in the role of child molester meant casting myself in the role of victim, and I just couldn’t go there,” she writes.

“I couldn’t accept that all his praises — all those affirmations an eighth-grade girl desperately needs to hear — came from a place of malevolence, and I was stupid and vain enough to buy it.”

For 25 years, she framed the episode as her first kiss. “I never allowed myself to talk or even think about what it really was or why I climbed out the window to kiss that stupid pedophile.

“It was like dreaming about a lover’s gentle touch but then waking up to realise it was actually a roach crawling on you. I couldn’t reconcile the fact that I had enjoyed something that was, in reality, utterly vile. I feel physically ill now, seeing it in that perspective.”

Hilton says she still carries the shame of the abuse. “Even now, knowing in my grown-up mind that no child is ever to blame for inappropriate adult behaviour, my face is literally burning as I sit here telling you this terrible secret. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully shake it off.”

Paris: the Memoir is released in Australia on March 14.