Paris Hilton has recently been reckoning with her past and trying to regain agency over her life and image following many years of being branded with nasty, sex-shaming names, largely over the fallout of the sex tape that was leaked against her wishes. In the past few months, she has revealed hidden truths about her sexuality and called out multiple celebrities in regards to how they have treated her in the past.
The latest target is the musician known as Pink, who famously wrote and performed the song “Stupid Girls,” which has been criticized in recent years for being its own form of misogyny — the “I’m not like those other girls” trope. Pink directly referenced the Hilton-Salomon sex tape in the music video for this song, referring to “porno paparazzi girls” and doing a brief parody of the tape itself.
In her new book, Paris: The Memoir, Hilton says she was and remains hurt by this dig from Pink, and the details around how she felt about the sex tape to begin with help explain why.
It’s now widely known that Hilton did not want the tape to be released, stating outright that she “never, ever thought these things would become public.” Her ex-boyfriend, Rick Salomon, who was also in the tape but never called names about it, sued her over these remarks after distributing the tape for money a year after the leak, but lost and got successfully counter-sued by Hilton.
Now she reveals that Salomon coerced her into doing the sex tape in the first place, threatening to leave her and do one with other women if she refused. This triggered a deep fear within Hilton to the point that she got herself drunk and high just to push through her own reservations and allow him to film the act.
“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.
Hilton has also recently spoken out about how the staff at the boarding school she was sent to sexually abused her as a teenage girl, and hinted that this resulted in a reluctance to have sex with people as an adult, which made her feel immature and broken. She wasn’t able to comfortably approach her own sexuality until she found a man she could feel safe with — her current husband.
So when Pink referenced her and the tape in a song about “stupid girls,” you can see how this would also re-trigger that same fear that she was childish and wrong and that it was all her fault. In reality, the blame lies with the adults in her life who used and abused her.
“The whole video is a not-at-all-subtle send-up of ‘porno paparazzi girls’ in general and, specifically, me, in a parody of my infamous sex tape,” Hilton wrote in her memoir.
“When everyone was buzzing about a sex tape of a certain teenage girl from a soon-to-be-hit TV show — a girl who said emphatically over and over that she did not want the tape out there — the takeaway was ‘Stupid Girl.'”
Hilton originally confronted Pink about the song long before the book came about. In 2017, the singer revealed on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen that Hilton had told her directly about how she felt about being mocked for a sex tape leak that wasn’t her fault and that she was explicitly against. Pink was unmoved.
“Paris was upset with me,” she said. “She said, ‘I just want you to know that I get it, I’m not dumb, I just play like I’m dumb.’ And I was like, ‘That’s kind of my point… I’m gonna go, good to see ya.’”
Six years later, Hilton seems to have found a deeper connection to her true feelings around what happened to her and is able to articulate that Pink wasn’t just wrong about her, but that her words were hurtful. The truth is that Hilton doesn’t mind being in the public eye, but it hurt that so many people labeled her with terms that didn’t fit her when she in fact felt just like the girls that Pink said she wanted to see in the world.
“Pink sang about ‘outcasts and girls with ambition.’ That’s what I wanna see. But she chose not to see it in me.”
Next up, Hilton might consider reckoning with her history of racist and homophobic statements.
