One Night in Paris, and What It Cost Her

1 Night in Paris arrived in 2004 and became, for a lot of people, one of the first real brushes with celebrity pornography. Paris Hilton, the hotel heiress, filmed with her then-boyfriend Rick Salomon while she was eighteen and he was thirty-three. She didn’t consent to its release. Salomon began selling it online anyway. They sued each other, settled out of court, and the tape just existed in the culture from that point forward—calcified into the story of who Paris Hilton was.

Now she’s talking about it for the first time, in an interview with journalist Irin Carmon for Marie Claire. The first thing she wants to correct is the assumption that the tape made her famous and rich. That’s one of the things that really pisses me off to hear, she told Carmon. I never made a single dollar from that video.

For months after the release she couldn’t leave her house. I was so depressed and humiliated. I didn’t want anyone to see me out there like that. She’d spent her life admiring women like Princess Diana—the grace, the composure, the sense of earned dignity—and felt like Salomon had taken all of that from her permanently. I wish I had never met Rick. That is something I truly regret. I wish I had never met that man.

She cried while she said it. And I believe her, even though the easy narrative—that Paris engineered the leak to launch her career alongside The Simple Life—has been repeated so many times it’s calcified into received wisdom. The timing was convenient; the damage was real. Both things can be true without canceling each other out.

The next time I’m about to get off to leaked celebrity photos or some private footage that ended up on a forum, maybe I’ll sit with that for a second. Real people, real years spent unable to walk out the front door, real things taken without asking. Doesn’t fix anything. But the pause is probably worth it.