Paris: The Memoir(84)

I took control of the cannon and blasted lemon-scented suds all over the crowd below. People went crazy, bobbing around like rubber duckies in a bubble bath. Kim and I couldn’t stop laughing. Our faces lit up with the kind of joy you see when little kids come down a waterslide. That electrifying happiness—that’s what I wanted people to feel when they came to the Foam and Diamonds party I hosted for five years at Amnesia. I wanted them to leave like we did, exhausted and elated, squinting in the early-morning sun.

I wanted to go back to the hotel and sleep, but Kim wanted to experience the day life in Ibiza, so we made our way to the beach and lay on the white sand.

Kim shaded her eyes with her arm and laughed. “That was lit.”

“That DJ’s hot,” I said. “One day I’m going to be up there.”

“A girl can dream.”

“It says in The Secret, ‘Life is not happening to you. You are creating it.’ I’m going to create that.”

“You and The Secret,” said Kim. “You’re obsessed.”

“For real, though.”

“I believe in you.” She was half asleep but sounded like she meant it.

I said, “I believe in you too, babe.”

The water was cool and intensely blue. Caroline and I linked arms, floating on inflatable rafts, so tired from dancing all night that we fell asleep and woke up half a mile offshore.

It was years before I actually started DJing, but this is definitely when it clicked. I was still in my teens when I discovered I could get paid to show up at a party, and I learned a lot, going to the best parties and the best clubs all over the world. People would show up to see celebrities, but only a great DJ could create the electrifying experience we saw in Ibiza that night. I knew if I applied myself to learning the technology, I could do both.

The first thing I learned was that it’s a lot harder than it looks, but still—I’m smart enough to ask questions instead of pretending to know everything. A brilliant guy named Mike Henderson, aka DJ Endo, taught me the basics of the hardware and software. Over the next few years, between a million other things I was doing, I spent hundreds of hours learning everything there was to know about DJing, teaching myself all the tricks I could find on YouTube, and inventing a few new tricks of my own. I went to every big festival—Burning Man, Coachella, Ultra, Tomorrowland—observing, absorbing, feeling the energy, learning how to keep people jumping and raging.

Like any woman in an overwhelmingly male-dominated business, I met with some knee-jerk resistance. When I started playing gigs, some people didn’t want to believe it was really me. I couldn’t make space in my head for that. I worked harder, proved myself, and made my way up. I was booking major music festivals and megaclubs in the US, China, Europe, and the Middle East. And then, I finally made it back to Ibiza.

During my five-year residency at Amnesia, family, friends, and thousands of fans—so many of my Little Hiltons—so many fun, beautiful people came from all over the world, and it was everything I envisioned. It wasn’t easy for me to carve out several weeks every summer, so I knew the closing party in 2017 would be my last visit to Ibiza for a while. I loved being there, but business was booming.

My fragrances had brought in almost three billion dollars, and I was working nineteen other lifestyle brands including skin care, shoes, clothes, bags, lipstick, lighting, home décor, pet fashions, and anything else I could bounce off a mood board. My real estate holdings included spas and nightclubs, and I even followed in my great-grandfather’s footsteps, opening hotels of my own. I was writing and recording music, and I was always up to shoot a movie or make an appearance in the right place for the right price.

For twenty years, while every inch of my skin was laid bare to the world, I kept certain things hidden. The effort left me lean and detached, strong enough to survive head-spinning success, soul-crushing betrayals, and staggering amounts of my own bullshit.

But sooner or later, everyone leaves Ibiza.

Amnesia never lasted long enough for me. No matter how hard I worked, no matter how hard I played, eventually I had to sleep, and in my nightmares, I remembered. It was as if the time I spent in jail opened a basement door that I’d kept locked a long time. The nightmares had never left me, but going to jail for twenty-three days took them to a new level. It was real again. Immediate. Physical. Dangerous. I didn’t just wake up screaming; I woke up struggling for air as if I were trapped on the bottom of a muddy river.

Sometimes I got up and pulled my laptop into bed with me. It was not a healthy habit. The first time I googled “Provo Canyon School,” I was stunned to see that it still existed. After all these years. No one had done a damn thing about it. Including me. The guilt was like the sting of a wasp. Because this is what pedophiles and abusers and rapists do: They make you complicit in their wrongdoing by giving you the one thing that threatens them: Now you know. You could stop them. If you do nothing, the next one’s on you. Of course, this is absolute bullshit, unfair and untrue, but I know I’m not the only one who carried that burden. So many survivors have shared their stories and cried with me, both of us heavy with regret for every child who suffered while we tried to leave that place behind. Our sanity—sometimes our very survival—hinged on forgetting that place and creating a life in which we’d never have to think about it again.

With the dawn of Reddit and other forums, survivors of Provo and CEDU began to piece together a terrible history of abandonment and abuse. The extent of the wreckage was heartbreaking: addiction, PTSD, suicide, shattered sleep, ruined families. And the mass of the money—so much money it took my breath away. Billions flowed into these facilities via private and public funding. It was so fucking wrong the way they continually changed corporate entities to dodge lawsuits and accusations. CEDU Education had been sold to Brown Schools in 1998. They declared bankruptcy in 2005 and were taken over by United Health Service, Inc. They disappeared and reappeared like Whac-A-Mole. Some efforts had been made to hold them accountable, but no one was able to pin anything on them.