Paris: The Memoir(89)
Quietly, completely, my walls came crashing down.
For the next few months, Carter and I saw a lot of each other. I made room for that, made it a priority, turning down every invitation to go clubbing or jet-setting. My friends kept asking me if I was okay, and I told them, “I’m fine. I just don’t want to blow it with this nice guy.”
A few months later, in March 2020, the COVID pandemic shut everything down, and my noisy world became quiet. I couldn’t remember the last time I was home for so many days in a row. This was something I always thought would make me crazy. But I liked it. Carter and I retreated into a world of our own. We cooked and cleaned and took care of each other. He was gentle with my newly opened heart. This was a new thing for me: a truly grown-up relationship with a man who is my equal. He returned me to the joy I knew as a child and made me feel ready for children of my own.
We knew this was forever. We knew we were a family. We started IVF with big dreams of our cutesy crew and life we’d build around them.
For Carter and me, quarantine was an oasis, but it was terrifying to see the death toll rise. So many of my fans endured loss and tragedy. So many of the people we love were especially vulnerable. I felt guilty to be so blessed and lucky in the middle of such suffering.
I was heartbroken for Alexandra when the premiere of This Is Paris was swept off the table, but for me, it felt like mercy. I was grateful that it came in that extraordinary moment of mandatory shelter. I didn’t know how it would be received by the public or—more important—by my family. There was no way to predict how it would affect every facet of my business and personal life.
This Is Paris was released on YouTube on September 14, 2020, and was viewed more than sixteen million times in the first thirty days. The immediate impact was beyond anything I could have imagined, but it was painful for my family to finally confront the truth about what happened. The healing is an ongoing process, which is probably the case in every family.
Since the release of This Is Paris, I’ve made multiple trips to Washington, DC, to meet with legislators and White House staff about the desperately needed changes in laws pertaining to regulation and oversight in the troubled-teen industry. With Carter’s full support, I brought the impact producer Rebecca Mellinger into my staff. Her job is translating outrage into action: organizing protests and press conferences, managing position papers, and hosting our podcast Trapped in Treatment with Caroline Cole, who’s also a survivor of the troubled-teen industry. Rebecca and I went through a legislative-action training course that opened my eyes to how much power we—as in We the People—truly have. My goal is to shut down every facility with a track record of abuse and to make sure that every child has access to proper care.
We want kids trapped in treatment to know: We’re here for you.
And we want institutional abusers to know: We’re coming for you.
The bills we’ve helped pass and the laws we’ve helped codify are the greatest achievement of my career, the thing I’m most proud of. I wish Papa and Nanu and Gram Cracker were here to see it. I kinda wish Conrad Hilton was here to see it! And I get evil delight from knowing that the people who harmed me and so many other children are seeing it. I hope they’re scared shitless.
I finally showed up—for myself and for someone else—and it feels so powerful. I sleep at night, knowing that I’m doing everything I can to help kids caught in that spiderweb of lies, abuse, and silence.
Carter has been incredibly supportive of my efforts to raise awareness and bring meaningful change to the troubled-teen industry. He loves that I’m a warrior woman and an activist and a creator tycoon who lies next to him in bed working out a mood board or going over P&Ls while he works on a product pipeline or acquisitions paperwork. I can honestly say that exactly zero men ever have loved me the way Carter does, for all the reasons he does. I didn’t even know a relationship could make you feel protected and empowered at the same time.
In February 2021, I testified before a Senate subcommittee urging them to pass Senate Bill 127, which was later passed by the House of Representatives, compelling regulation and oversight of youth facilities by the Department of Health and Human Services. Two weeks later, on my fortieth birthday, Carter asked me to marry him, and I said yes.
Our fairytale 11/11 wedding was documented (obviously) in the Peacock series, Paris in Love, so I won’t go into all the details here. The show covers all the craziness that went into planning the wedding plus the incredible progress we made with advocacy, and a few baby steps forward in my relationship with my mom during that time. The wedding itself was three days of unmitigated bliss. The guest list was limited by the lingering effects of the pandemic, but Carter and I were surrounded by love and submerged in joy.
After three years together, we’re a comfortable married couple. We love our Saturday mornings when we go to the farmers’ market for fresh eggs, fruit, and veggies, which we haul home so I can cook an elaborate brunch, and then we sit there and eat and eat and talk about exquisitely nerdy things like cross-collateralization and negative pickup. We laugh a lot and take time to wonder and be grateful. We love our work, our homes, our jobs, and we adore our dogs.
The Hilton pets have their own social media platform and have been cast in a number of commercials. Diamond Baby stole the show in a series of Hilton commercials. Carter and I joke about Slivington refusing to lift his leg for less than a quarter mil. In addition to being their stage mom, I’m juggling product lines, developing my media conglomerate and metaverse world, and managing a full calendar of events. The opportunities that come my way on a daily basis are so extraordinary, I have a hard time saying no, but I’m learning. Carter and I are both keenly aware that money is a lot of fun, but the most precious natural resource we have is time.