After playing a character for decades, Paris Hilton is opening up about who she really is. The famous heiress is sharing some painful memories from her past in a new YouTube documentary about her life, titled This Is Paris. While we know her as a carefree party girl and the star of The Simple Life, her new film shows a more authentic side of the 39-year-old DJ as she confronts the trauma of her early years.
In the newly released trailer for This Is Paris, Hilton admits that she’s been putting on a persona for the public that’s different from her true self, a disguise she created to move on from the pain of her past. “Sorry, I’m so used to, like, playing a character that it’s, like, hard for me to be normal,” she says, adding, “I’ve just created this brand and this persona and this character, and I’ve been stuck with her ever since.”
Hilton opens up to her younger sister, Nicky Hilton, in an emotional conversation about the trauma she’s repressed for years. “Something happened in my childhood that I’ve never talked about with anyone,” Hilton says. Nicky shares her own memories, recalling, “I just heard screaming bloody murder.”
While the This Is Paris trailer doesn’t reveal details about when it occurred or where the trauma stemmed from, it does include brief footage of Hilton at what appears to be her boarding school.
“I couldn’t tell you guys because every time I tried, I’d get punished by them,” Hilton tells her parents. “I still have nightmares about it. And the only thing that saved my sanity was thinking about who I wanted to become when I got out of there.”
Hilton has opened up about her past before, sharing the anxiety and helplessness she felt after her 2003 sex tape with ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon was publicly distributed against her will. “I didn’t want to be known as that. And now when people look at me they think that I’m something I’m not, just because of one incident, one night with someone who I was in love with,” Hilton told Piers Morgan in 2011. “People assume, ‘Oh, she’s a slut’ just because of one thing that happened to me, and it’s hard because I’ll have to live with that the rest of my life and explain it to my children. It’s something that’s changed my life forever, and I’ll never be able to erase it.”
This Is Paris premieres on YouTube Sept. 14. Watch the full trailer in the video above.
