Paris Hilton’s fight against child abuse: an urgent appeal to US politicians

Paris Hilton (43) continues to campaign vehemently for a new US law against child abuse. The former It Girl published an open letter to the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday (December 16), urging members to make passing the bill a top priority and not delay it until after Christmas. “Silence doesn’t heal – it protects the people who caused the harm,” she writes in the comment to the post.

There she also makes an urgent appeal to the House of Representatives: “Think of the children who cannot speak for themselves. They are counting on you. Let us turn pain into a goal and protect the most vulnerable among us.” In the accompanying open letter, she speaks openly about her own experiences with abuse as a teenager.

“For most of my life, I have carried a deep, unspoken pain,” said Hilton, now a mother of two. “I thought if I kept quiet and pushed it away enough, maybe I could convince myself that it didn’t happen.” Speaking out about what happened was the hardest thing she had ever done, but also the most powerful.

As a teenager, she was sent to a youth home where she had to endure abuse that no child should ever experience. “I was physically restrained, sexually abused, isolated, over-medicated and stripped of my dignity. I was told I was unimportant, that I was the problem and that no one would believe me if I said anything – not even my family.” She lived with the burden of this trauma, nightmares and shame for years. “It wasn’t until I found my voice that I began to heal.”

Hilton had already said in August 2020 that the eleven months she spent as a 17-year-old in the Provo Canyon School, a psychiatric facility for young people, were “ongoing torture”. She was harassed and mistreated by the staff there.

On Wednesday (December 11), the US Senate passed the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act. After years of lobbying for this bill, this was “one of the best moments” of her life, Hilton said. “But the journey is not over. I can’t celebrate until this bill becomes law and now it’s up to the U.S. House of Representatives to finish what the Senate started.”