In a dark auditorium at the Arizona Biltmore Luxury Resort in Phoenix, Paris Hilton is holding a microphone bedazzled with rhinestones and speaking to a spellbound audience at a behavioral health conference. She wears a white lace dress and her face is cast half in light and half in shadow. In a low, steady voice she describes the abuse she faced at four different residential programs for troubled teens. Every seat is filled, and people are standing packed three deep against the walls, yet everyone is still. Next to me, a man sobs.
Hilton is not typical fodder for a behavioral health conference, but her story is part of the broader theme of the event. As a teenager, Hilton had undiagnosed ADHD. By day, school felt like a cage. She lived for the nights where she snuck out and could dance her way through New York’s glittering clubs and lose herself to the throbbing music. Desperate, her parents sent her away to boarding schools that promised to reform her.
“Reform,” she asserts, was a euphemism for torture. The list of abuses is long, but for Hilton include being subject to strip and cavity searches, made to shower in front of male teachers, force-fed medications, physically restrained, beaten, and thrown into solitary confinement. She was not allowed to make contact with outsiders. “They took everything from me,” Hilton tells the audience. “They took my things, my voice, and my name. I was no longer Paris. I was number 127.”
Every year an estimated 200,000 young people are sent to some type of correctional institution, which receive $23 billion in public funding according to the American Bar Association (ABA). The ABA estimates one such school, Sequel, has an annual revenue of over $200 million and receives up to $800 a day per child. Many of these institutions have been accused of abuse, but are largely unregulated and continue to receive public funding.
Provo Canyon School, one of the schools Hilton was sent to, charges between $12,000-$15,000 a month. (Provo Canyon still faces a number of abuse allegations. As recently as September of this year, an employee at Provo was arrested for punching a student.) Provo Canyon declined to comment, but emailed over a statement discussing its commitment to student safety and high student satisfaction rate.
“One of the biggest problems is we don’t know the size of the problem,” says Maia Szalavitz, an author and journalist who wrote one of the first books about the troubled teen industry. “No one keeps track. No one knows how many kids are there at one time and no one knows how many kids have died.”
Today, Hilton is tackling the undefinable problem head on. In 2021, she started 11:11 Media with Bruce Gersh to house her sprawling personal brand, which encompasses everything from consumer products to media and entertainment projects. The company, which is projected to earn $50 million this year, has partnerships with brands such as Crocs and Motorola, and launched a cookware line at Walmart in the wake of Hilton’s Netflix show Cooking with Paris. It also funds an Impact team that has been focused on legislation—including the recent Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, which passed the Senate unanimously on Dec. 12. As the bill has progressed, Hilton has been a regular presence on Capitol Hill, lobbying lawmakers to adopt the measure that adds financial oversight regulations over residential programs.
“When I was a little girl at these programs I was told you’re never going to amount to anything,” Hilton says. “It’s difficult to relive all of my trauma publicly, but then I think of all the people I’m helping and I keep going.”
—
When Hilton recounts the abuse she suffered at the various programs, she talks about how she survived by dreaming about the life she’d lead once she got out—a glamorous carnival of endless parties filled with art and music. She would run far away from her past.
And for years, she did.
In the early 2000s, Hilton developed a reputation as a party girl—a ditzy socialite who showed up on TV touring rural America with Nicole Richie on The Simple Life. More than ditzy, Hilton often came across as bigoted, dropping racial and homophobic slurs and tropes as recently as 2012. In her 2023 memoir, she ties that behavior to the trauma she experienced as a teen. “Sometimes I was just wasted and being a fucking moron,” Hilton writes. “I don’t remember half the stuff people say I said when I was being a blacked-out idiot, but I’m not denying it because coming out of [that] system, I had a severely damaged filter—except when I was buzzed and had no filter at all.”
Hilton admits in the memoir, “Saying I drank to dull the pain—that’s an explanation, not an excuse,” and the past four years have also marked a shift in her public persona, beginning with the 2020 documentary This is Paris, in which she discussed the abuse she faced as a teenager for the first time. It was a difficult decision: She was filled with shame over her past, she tells the audience at the Biltmore. For a moment, she stalls. “Sorry, this is still hard to talk about.”
After the documentary came out, she received a flood of correspondence from other survivors. “I literally had thousands of people writing me letters, reaching out to me on social media, emailing me,” Hilton tells Fast Company. “I began to see that this wasn’t something that only happened to me. This was happening to people all around the world—and for many decades.”
That was why, when she launched 11:11, Hilton’s second hire was Rebecca Mellinger Grone as the company’s head of impact. In that role, Grone leads a nonprofit supported by the media company and the Edward Charles Foundation, focused on protecting vulnerable youth through increased oversight on residential programs like the ones Hilton attended.
The first step Hilton and Grone took was organizing a rally in 2020, protesting Provo Canyon School, one of the institutions Hilton attended. There, they met Caroline Cole, another survivor of a correctional institution, who became strategic advocacy lead for 11:11’s impact arm. The three joined the 12-week accelerator program, Rise Justice Labs, which trains people in legislative advocacy including lessons on how to draft bills.
The legislation the team drafted as homework for Rise Justice Labs went on to become the foundation for their federal bill for stopping institutional child abuse. During the program, they also passed their first law: legislation in Utah in 2021 that limits the use of restraints, and bans isolation rooms and allows youth to communicate with their families and report abuse. It was the first reform bill to pass in over 15 years in Utah.
Grone and Cole are two of four employees on the 11:11 impact team, which has already had a chain of victories. Besides the bill that passed the Senate last week, the team has drafted legislation that has become law in 10 states (including Utah), which they estimate has protected some 13 million children.
“Hilton’s impact has been enormous,” Szalavitz says. “She’s able to get Congress to do something. We’ve had hearings on this before, but regulation hasn’t passed.”
Its efforts haven’t all been in the U.S., either. In Ireland, 11:11 Impact pushed for a bill that banned the use of physical restraints in schools. Hilton has lobbied for banning physical restraints in Northern Ireland. She and her team also flew to Jamaica in April of this year to help a group of American boys abused at a residential treatment program return home safely
A large part of the team’s domestic success has come from courting bipartisan support. “We focus on kids, not politics,” Hilton says. In practice, this means understanding what each legislator cares about and finding common ground.
“In nonprofit spaces it’s easy to get very idealistic about having partners where you agree on every aspect of ideology,” Cole says. “We are willing to work with anyone who cares about the issue, and that’s how we get a lot done.”
The team also focuses on incremental change. Part of this means accepting compromise. “We have very big goals, but we’re very practical,” Grone says. “We know we’re not going to be able to accomplish everything in one fell swoop.”
Part of incremental change means focusing on passing legislation that improves reporting. A lot of the data about what’s going on inside residential institutions is difficult to come by, and as such, it’s difficult to understand the full scope of the problem. The 11:11 team recently lobbied for a bill in California that requires institutions to report each time they use restraints and seclusion and make this information publicly available.
“We know there have been horrific instances of restraint and seclusion, and that’s something we want to address in the future,” Grone says. “But to start, we had to pass a law that increased reporting, so we had accurate and transparent information when we came to the table.”
Szalavitz notes in the long term, more and stronger legislation is needed to end the abuse, but also points out that getting public support has been challenging. “If we were talking about 3-year-olds, people would be storming these schools and shutting them down,” she says. “But America has a problem with teenagers. Paris Hilton has been able to get people to pay attention to the problem.”
For the past two years, Hilton has visited legislators in D.C. every six months to advocate for institutional reform. “She’s met with over 200 federal legislators to share her personal story and educate them on the issue,” Grone says. “When Paris initially came to D.C., lawmakers assumed she’d make a splash, but they didn’t think she’d come back to Congress every six months to move our issue forward.”
Going forward, Hilton is focusing on passing legislation in all 50 states. Her long-term goal is better preventative care for children. The best interventions for troubled teens are ones that involve staying at home, according to Szalavitz. Residential care should only be used as a last resort such as cases of suicidal or homicidal behavior and even then, should be within driving distance of a teen’s home.
However, youth are ending up in institutions because the system is broken in several different ways. For example, mental health conditions are poorly understood and misdiagnosed. Waitlists to see therapists are long, which means oftentimes children and teens don’t get preventative help. Meanwhile, several states make it difficult for extended families to adopt children. While foster parents receive a stipend for taking in kids, a child’s extended family won’t receive funding for taking them, which means several children who could be staying with family end up in the system, putting them at risk of being shunted off into residential programs.
Hilton also wants to focus on addressing the root cause of the problem by changing the narrative around youth mental health and provide more support for children and women with neurodiversity. “One of the biggest reasons I was sent to the troubled teen industry was due to undiagnosed ADHD,” she says.
While Hilton still finds it difficult to speak about her past, she credits her advocacy work with helping heal her trauma. I’ve been able to turn my pain into purpose,” she says.
After her talk at the Biltmore, it takes Hilton half an hour to walk off stage: people want selfies, want to say thank you, some even share their own stories with her. Though Hilton is booked to meet with a string of philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and reporters (including this one), she makes time for each person who wants a moment—she trying not to leave anyone behind.
