Hotel heiress Paris Hilton counted herself among the victims of disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s predatory sexual abuse as she alleged multiple advances that only ended when security “literally carried him away.”
Earlier this week, Weinstein’s Los Angeles rape and sexual assault trial concluded with a sentencing of 16 years in prison on top of the 23 years his 2020 New York trial had awarded him. While doing a feature interview with Glamour for their February issue, the 42-year-old celebrity detailed her own encounter with the man when she was a teenager attending the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.
“It scared me and freaked me out,” she explained to the outlet after having two separate run-ins with the man she contended she knew was a threat.
“He came up to the table and was like, ‘Oh, you want to be an actress?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I really want to be in a movie.’” she recalled of a lunch she had the day before a gala event. “I was a teenager, so I was impressed by him. I was like, ‘Oh my god, Harvey Weinstein is so cool!’ and he said, ‘Well, we should have a meeting. You can come up to my room and read scripts’…and I just didn’t want to go, so I never went.”
The following night was the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) gala, and it was there that Hilton claimed Weinstein followed her into a restroom screaming, “Ya wanna be a star?”
“I went into the bathroom and then he followed me. He tried to open the door, he was hammering on the door, banging on it. And I wouldn’t open it, because I was like, ‘I’m in a stall, why do you want to come in here?’ And I just wouldn’t open it,” she recalled. “And security came and literally carried him away and he was like [shouting], ‘This is my party,’ going nuts. It scared me and freaked me out.”
The outlet wondered if Hilton was familiar with the producer’s reputation of sexual abuse and she contended, “Yeah, and it was just someone so powerful in Hollywood who everyone was terrified of. I didn’t even want to say anything about it because I was like, ‘I don’t want people getting mad at me for saying anything,’ because it was just a known thing. He was just like that and people were like, ‘OK, just turn a blind eye.’”
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