Paris: The Memoir(75)
Before I had a chance to respond, the website went up and got 1.2 million hits in the first forty hours. My private medical history—including bills and statements pertaining to the pregnancy years earlier—was available for people to judge and gossip about. I guess this was the scene where I was supposed to explain a miscarriage or justify an abortion, and I was like, Fuck that. No woman, famous or not, should be forced to discuss her reproductive health with strangers. Robbing a woman of her right to privacy is a physical and psychological assault. People who do this kind of thing don’t want to think of themselves as rapists, but that’s what they are. Rape isn’t about sex; it’s about power. Sexualizing an assault is the most effective way to make a woman feel like rest of the world is judging and condemning her—which is usually the case.
I’ve survived it over and over again in different forms: the man who roofied me, the orderlies who molested me, the ex who released the sex tape, and every person who watched it. And this. Those people overpowered me and chained me down with shame and humiliation that rightfully belonged to them. It took me a long time to figure it out, and I’m still working on it, but when I place the shame where it belongs—on the people who hurt me—they lose their power, and I’m free.
Elliot rode in on his metaphorical white horse and chased the bastard down. He spared me most of the details, but my understanding is that it was like the situation that played out with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee and their infamous sex tape back in the day: someone got hold of my private stuff and tried to sell it, and because he was a buffoon, other people stole it from him and made money off it.
The situation went on and on for a couple of years until late one night, Elliot had a long come-to-Jesus conversation with this guy who’d made his living marketing sleaze and blackmailing celebrities, including me, Tom Cruise, and several others. Elliot felt he’d made some headway and arranged to meet with the guy, who seemed exhausted by his creepy life’s work and genuinely interested in finding some form of redemption. Before the meeting could take place, the scandalmonger hanged himself in the shower.
Karma’s a bitch.
18
Maybe I should have organized this book as the story of my life in telephones, starting with the private line in my bedroom when I was a kid. I thought it was cutting edge because there was no curly cord; you could roam all over the house and out to the backyard without dropping the call. As a nonstop working model, I carried a beeper in the 1990s and upgraded to a flip phone in 2001, which I loved because it was easy to BeDazzle. I perfected the art of pretending to be on a call to dodge unwelcome conversations.
In 2002, I had a cute little clamshell. Most people used a dorky phone holster; I clipped mine like a barrette on the low waist of my pink velour track pants, a nice little pop of shine against a bare midriff below a Von Dutch crop top. In 2003, I rocked a rhinestone-encrusted Nokia with the tallest hair of my life. My 2004 Formula One flag girl look: flip phone with a high tech (at the time) LCD screen, pigtails, and tennis skirt. So cute.
The T-Mobile Sidekick II launch event in 2004 was like the It Girl Armageddon. I went with Nicky (this was her flawlessly sultry brunette phase) and partied with Nicole, Fergie, Bijou, Lindsay, Elisha Cuthbert, and others. That Sidekick was everything—phone, camera, messaging, email—and there was a hot pink Juicy Couture Limited Edition. This might be the flashpoint that began the smartphone era. Snoop Dogg and I became the faces of Sidekick, doing launches all over the world. Those events were epic, and we had so much fun shooting commercials.
Unfortunately, my Sidekick got hacked in 2005, and all my private contacts and pictures gushed out onto the internet. All these blah blah blah messages—that endless stream of thumb-typing in your phone—sites published them as if they were a new Gospel.
new yrs eve special big $
geoffrey coming in on 6th
hive movie Miramax
if u wanna leave ill pretend i hsve to pee u wait 3 mins come by urslf to back entrance
right on olive right on alameda 3 mi
party at rumi
It went on and on like this. I don’t know why anyone thought that was newsworthy. I mean, maybe if you need an alternative to Ambien, then sure, try scrolling the random text messages of a person with ADHD, otherwise—no. The invasion of my privacy was annoying, but I was more upset for my friends whose numbers got leaked than I was for myself. Honestly, I was numb to it by that time.
The next few years saw a flurry of cutting-edge smartphones. I tried BlackBerry and Razr and kept a couple fresh flip phones in the repertoire. I did another big launch event for the Sidekick 3 in LA and yet another for the Razr rollout in Japan. This tech wave was all about sexy, all about color, all about functionality that took users seamlessly into a whole new mode of social and commercial interaction.
My ADHD was diagnosed sometime in my early twenties. I don’t remember that much about it, because I didn’t realize it was that big a deal. The doctor must have given me a brochure or something, but I don’t remember him talking to me about it that much. He wrote me a prescription for Adderall, and I took it. It did help sometimes, but I hated it for a lot of reasons. (Dr. Hallowell put me on Vyvanse in 2022, and it was life changing.)
Over the years, as I learned more about how ADHD rewires the brain, it made perfect sense with my tech obsession. I was always onto the next thing, onto the next thing, onto the next thing. Finally, the rest of the world seemed to be catching up. It was thrilling to discover tools that kept pace with my personal rhythm—tools that instantly adapted to the hands they were in. Apps were developing. AI was learning. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the next new thing, and I had the money to get it. With my laptop and a high-speed internet connection, I was never alone in my bed at night. Somewhere in the world, someone was up, doing something interesting.