What Paris Lost

She was eighteen when Rick Salomon filmed them together. He was thirty-three. She never consented to him making the tape, and she definitely never consented to him leaking it. But in 2004, 1 Night in Paris hit the internet, and the whole thing became inextricable from her brand. The public story was simple: the tape made Paris Hilton famous. It was the thing that launched her into the stratosphere. Except that’s not what happened. She never made a cent from it. Never wanted it out there. When she finally talked about it publicly, she was still furious about this part—the myth that she’d somehow benefited. I never made a dollar off that video, she said. That’s one of the things that really pisses me off when I hear it.

What gets me is how completely we missed the actual damage. We saw the tape and saw Paris Hilton, and we connected them as cause and effect. Made her famous. Gave her a brand. But that’s not what it did. It took away the possibility of being anyone else. She’d spent her whole life admiring certain women—Princess Diana especially, that version of elegance and control. She thought she could be like that. One video from Rick Salomon changed the equation forever. Now she was the girl in that video. That was the only story.

Afterward, she was trapped. Depression flattened her. She couldn’t go outside for months, couldn’t bear the thought of people seeing her, knowing what they’d seen, thinking what they were probably thinking. The violation doesn’t look like much once enough time passes—just a leak, just a scandal, just a thing that happened. But in the immediate aftermath, it was total. She felt annihilated. When asked about Rick Salomon, she said she regretted ever meeting him. I believe her.