Paris: The Memoir(78)
The lawyer threw Elliot under the bus, and Elliot blamed himself, but I was a grown woman driving around in a five-hundred-thousand-dollar vehicle. It was my responsibility to handle myself. I should have read the fine print in the paperwork instead of depending on someone else to tell me what I could or couldn’t do. And even in the brightly lit street, I should have had my lights on. I deserved a ticket for that, just like anyone else would get. The miscommunication about the suspension took it to another level. Now I was looking at going to jail, and that terrified me.
My parents were heartsick, but they were with me. My family closed ranks around me and loved me. All the grace I could have asked of Mom and Dad when I was a teenager—it was here for me in this moment. Mom could see how scared I was, and she let me cling to her like a little tree frog.
Elliot tried to step up and testify that he had told me it was okay for me to drive to and from work, but the judge wasn’t having it. He was literally days from retirement and seemed to relish this last big moment, his fifteen minutes of fame. He sentenced me to forty-five days in jail and specified that I had to spend that time in county correctional—maximum security for violent offenders—not the “glamour slammer” for nonviolent offenders or on house arrest like most people would in a similar situation. I was to be the example for all the dangerous party girls out there. The tabloids ate that up. Elliot told me that when the judge arrived at church the following Sunday, the congregation gave him a standing ovation.
My lawyer appealed on the grounds that this sentence was far outside the norm. Elliot put out a public statement saying what he wasn’t allowed to say in court, taking it on the chin when the tabloids made it sound like I’d fired him in a rage. The fact is I was really pissed off at him, the lawyer, the judge, the tabloids—I was mad at everyone in the whole goddamn world, starting with myself.
I called Elliot the next night, and we talked for a long time. If there was ever a moment when I needed him on my side, this was it. He put out another statement, saying he was my publicist again, and when a reporter commented on the revolving-door turnaround, he said the most Elliot thing I ever heard him say: “I don’t choose to revisit that which is divisive. I’m only interested in that which is healing.”
When I said I wanted to be the most famous person in the world, I knew what I was signing up for. I knew every mistake I made would be on full display. I never expected anyone to cut me any slack; I’d seen what happened when Martha Stewart went to jail a few years earlier. Comedy gold. I get it. I could handle that part of it. What killed me was how vividly everything came rushing back. Strip searches. Solitary confinement. Cement walls and metal doors. The sound of footsteps and screaming down the hall.
The nightmares had never left me. Now I was awake. It was real, and I couldn’t tell anyone why this wasn’t like Martha Stewart making the best of a bad situation. People weren’t talking about being “triggered” back then. PTSD was something we associated with war zones. I had no words to express the gut-deep anxiety I felt.
There were endless conversations about how and when I should turn myself in. It occurred to me that the transporters had been right; if I’d known they were coming, I would have run. The urge to run now was overwhelming. I felt it like an acid in my leg muscles. But where could I go? I’d gotten my wish. I would be recognized anywhere in the world.
My team theorized that, because paparazzi would be expecting me to turn myself in at the last possible moment on June 5, I should go to the MTV Awards on June 3 and then go to jail after. Every photographer in town would be focused on the after-parties, and they’d expect me to be there. This was my best opportunity to do what I had to do without the paparazzi crawling all over it.
I got dressed up. Hair. Makeup. The whole thing. I did the red carpet, smiling for cameras, signing autographs, putting on my breathy baby voice for one interview after another.
Make a mad face.
Make a happy face.
Make a face with no emotion.
In her opening monologue that night, Sarah Silverman made some jokes about me that she herself later described as “hard core,” and the material landed just like any comedian would hope.
“Paris Hilton is going to jail,” she said, and a chorus of cheering and hooting went up. So many of these people regularly partied at my house. Now they were laughing and celebrating my humiliation. I felt the Rap closing in around me. I sat there, trying to maintain my mannequin face—the protective shell Pigface could never crack—but I was dying inside as the bit went on with an oblique reference to the sex tape. I’m not going to repeat the whole thing here.
I don’t choose to revisit that which is divisive.
I’m only interested in that which is healing.
When I was younger, I thought “rise above it” meant swallowing negative feelings, pretending nothing was happening. That was the way my parents operated, but now I see how buried pain and anger can damage your soul; the only way to resolve it is exposing it to air and sunlight.
In 2021, fourteen years after that MTV Awards show, Nicky was on my This Is Paris podcast, and we got on the topic of the New York Times documentary Framing Britney, which sparked a long-overdue conversation about the demeaning way Brit and I and other young female celebrities were treated by the media back in the aughts.
This led to an unpleasant memory of David Letterman drilling down on the jail thing after promising not to talk about it. I’d been on the show many times, and he’d always had fun at my expense, but he’d never been actively cruel like that. Nicky remembered waiting in the wings as I came off the set crying and shaking.