Paris Hilton opens up about her childhood trauma in the trailer of a new documentary: This Is Paris.
Hilton, 39, is sharing stories from her life that no one has ever heard before in a new YouTube Originals documentary series. The socialite has always been known for her glamorous life being one of the heirs to her great-grandfather’s fortune from Hilton Hotels.
Hilton has starred in several movies, created a successful fragrance line, and garnered an even bigger fanbase with her hit reality series “A Simple Life.” But life hasn’t always been so simple, she says. “I feel like the whole world thinks they know me. No one really knows who I am. … I don’t even know who I am sometimes. I didn’t used to be that way.” She continued: “I’m so used to like, playing a character, that it’s hard for me be normal.”
The trailer features several clips, including the socialite fighting with someone backstage at one of her DJ sets, as well as footage of her when she was a child. According to PEOPLE, scenes also show her getting dropped off at boarding school in Utah as a teenager. Her mother, Kathy, and her sister, Nicky, will also be in the docuseries. “Something happened in my childhood that I’ve never talked about with anyone,” Paris reveals. “I just heard screaming bloody murder,” Nicky says.
“But I couldn’t tell you guys because every time I tried, I would get punished by them,” Paris explains. “I still have nightmares about it. The only thing that saved my sanity was thinking about who I wanted to become when I got out of there. I just created this brand and this persona and this character, and I’ve been stuck with her ever since.”
“They say [with] trauma, the mind may forget, but the body never forgets. It’s trapped in you, and it can come out whenever,” says Nicky. Emmy-winning director Alexandra Dean will direct the series. The project says it will “uncover the hidden past of the international icon,” and Paris will confront “the heartbreaking trauma that forged who she is today,” the description of the series reads. Paris says participating in the documentary was “almost therapeutic.”
“I’m excited, but I’m also very nervous given the topics discussed in this film,” she said last month during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! “It’s things I’ve never talked about before, really personal and traumatic experiences, so to talk about that publicly is obviously very hard.”
“Obviously I’m used to be on camera from being on camera for so long. But I’ve always been a very naturally shy person, so I loved just inventing this character and playing that character. To actually be myself was a completely different experience, but also almost therapeutic in some way, where I learned so much about myself. I had no idea why I am the way I am, and now I understand myself so much more,” she said. The series will debut on Hilton’s YouTube channel on Sept. 14.
