Celebrity Paris Hilton on Wednesday publicly shared for the first time how she says she was sexually abused while at a teen treatment program in Utah in the 1990s.
As she stood near the U.S. Capitol, surrounded by a crowd of other former residents of treatment programs, Hilton’s voice broke with emotion as she said she wasn’t ready to say the words out loud.
She wrote them down, she said, in an op-ed published Wednesday in USA Today.
She wrote that when she arrived at Provo Canyon School, she was forced to take off her clothes, squat and cough, and participate in a gynecological exam while male staffers watched. She said she was told this was routine to check for contraband.
Hilton wrote that those invasive exams continued during her stay, with staffers pulling her from her bed in the middle of the night and taking her to an “exam room.”
“Sleep-deprived and heavily medicated, I didn’t understand what was happening,” she wrote. “I was forced to lie on a padded table, spread my legs and submit to gynecological exams. I remember crying while they held me down.”
Hilton wrote that she asked why this was happening. She was told to be quiet or she would be sent to solitary confinement.
The celebrity said in the Wednesday op-ed that she didn’t understand as a teenager what was happening. But, as an adult, she recognizes that these unnecessary examinations were sexual assault.
Hilton spoke Wednesday about what she says happened to her at Provo Canyon School to raise awareness for upcoming federal legislation aimed at bringing national oversight to the hundreds of youth treatment centers across the country.
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