The first few months of 2025 have been a sobering time for Paris Hilton. Her Malibu house was destroyed in the January California wildfires.
“We didn’t even know until we saw it on the live news,” says Hilton. Her husband, entrepreneur Carter Reum, noticed a blue door among the rubble. “It was completely shocking.”
Hilton posted a short video tour on TikTok of the remains of the home, with the gorgeous Malibu sun setting in the background. It’s a devastating 20 seconds of film.
“What breaks my heart even more is knowing that this isn’t just my story,” she wrote. “So many people have lost everything. … And yet, in this pain, I know I’m incredibly lucky. My loved ones, my babies, my pets are safe.”
It was particularly thoughtful and moving, a sentiment that only grew as Hilton took actual action. Her “immediate instinct,” she says, was to harness her celebrity and social media reach to help out the community. She contacted Rebecca Grone, the head of impact at her company, 11:11 Media. “She helps me with all the advocacy work and philanthropic efforts,” says Hilton. Hilton and her media company, which she founded in 2021, started lending a hand to animal shelters as well as charities like Baby2Baby, which provides necessities for families in poverty, and FireAid.
“I said, ‘Let’s just see what we can do to support,’” Hilton says. “That’s been the silver lining, seeing people coming together.” On her own, she fostered Zuzu the dog, posting a video reuniting the animal with his family later in January. She went to Pasadena to work with the Humane Society. “So many animals were coming in all burned,” she says. She helped put people up in hotels, visiting them, and “bringing surprises,” she says.
“And I’ve been trying to do whatever I can to raise funds.” In total, as of late January, her efforts have raised over a million dollars for Los Angeles fire emergency relief efforts. (It’s particularly important to Hilton that people know what charities they can trust.)
“I had created this kind of Barbie doll, perfect life character to be like a mask.”
In a way, all the work, both on the ground and on Instagram, has helped Hilton shift focus away from her own legitimate sadness about the recent turn of events in her city and, of course, at her own home.
“I don’t know if it’ll ever be the same again,” she says of her home city. “It’s like something out of a scary movie.”
On a more micro level, the Malibu house was a place where “we were going to build all these memories together,” explains Hilton. Every once in a while she’ll recall something else destroyed and lost to the ashes. “My notebooks where I wrote my songs. My art room with the art that [two-year-old son] Phoenix made. Every day, I’m looking at old videos and photos, remembering things we lost that I didn’t even think about before.”
Phoenix and his sister, one-year-old London, “have been so confused,” she adds. “Uprooting them from their homes is hard for them. Just the act of rushing out of the house. We had to evacuate twice.”
The kids, like their parents, need to get used to a new normal. “Usually every day we get a walk in the park, and Phoenix keeps asking, ‘Why can’t we go outside?’” Hilton recounts, but she is particularly concerned about her kids spending a lot of, if any, time outside, because of the poor air quality from the burning of asbestos and chemicals.
She and Reum are doing what they can. “We have lots of air purifiers and masks for when we go outside, and we take precautions to keep them safe,” she says. “We’ll just pray that we’ll continue to get rain.” But they’re concerned about the potential long-term effects of the fires.
The “toxic air,” as she calls it, “is the one thing that has made me consider” leaving Los Angeles, Hilton explains. “But I don’t think I could. All my family and work is here. I love it here so much, and I can’t see myself living anywhere else.”
Hilton’s serious and mature attitude in these terrible circumstances feels like a far cry from the Paris Hilton we used to know. Now 43, when she first caught the attention of the media 25 years ago, she was depicted as an unrelenting party girl with little substance, out every night since the age of 13. She was something of a punching bag, and it would be hard to find an article or news piece from those days that didn’t make fun of her even a little bit or demean her as a spoiled heiress. In a lot of ways, she played along, she says.
“I had created this kind of Barbie doll, perfect life character to be like a mask,” Hilton says. “I didn’t want to talk about certain things. That way I wouldn’t have to let anyone in.”
“People wouldn’t even think to ask any traumatizing questions. It was this whole protection over the pain.”
Hilton insists she was always herself with her close friends and family. But “with the public, I had this character:” a blonde, sometimes ignorant airhead. It was a persona cemented by five seasons of the hit reality show A Simple Life, in which she starred opposite her good friend Nicole Richie.
Hilton explains now that it was fun to play that character, the Paris Hilton with “the higher voice” who overused expressions like “That’s hot” and “Loves it.”
“I was playing with my playful side,” she explains now, in our long interview. “I don’t know if it was easier [to be that Paris], but I guess it made it easier.” In effect, it also helped put up a Marilyn Monroe–like wall where she was as much a creation of the media as of herself. Interviews could remain surface. So could interactions out and about.
“People wouldn’t even think to ask any traumatizing questions,” she says. “It was this whole protection over the pain.”
Choosing to be the more authentic Paris has its own complications. “It’s maybe harder now to do interviews. I’m naturally a very shy person,” she says. But it’s also enabled her to find her real voice, one that comes from her heart and soul. She can speak her truth, and the world still watches. They haven’t changed the channel, and they don’t seem to be doing so anytime soon.
“I get stronger and stronger every day,” Hilton says. “I’m being a voice for people.”
The genuine turning point came during the filming of her documentary, the 2020 movie This Is Paris. The intention of the movie was to show a different side of Hilton, to try to reclaim the person she’d lost to those hundreds of posts on TMZ and, well, Perez Hilton. “I had been misunderstood and underestimated for so long,” she says, especially by a media that focused on her nighttime escapades, her teenage transgressions, and that leaked sex tape. She wanted to show that she had worked to be the person she was, and she’d created an internationally recognized brand with tentacles in all sorts of genres.
“Enough was enough,” Hilton says.
While filming during a trip to South Korea, “I was emotionally exhausted,” she says. She started opening up to director Alexandra Dean about a severe nightmare she was having, about being kidnapped in the middle of the night. That led to the pair discussing her experience as a teenager. At 16, she’d been tanking in school, and her parents were worried. They decided to send her to a private youth facility in Utah, which started with her being taken from home in her sleep. By Hilton’s accounts, the place was its own daily nightmare. She was thrown in solitary confinement, force-fed medication, and sexually and physically abused.
“I just couldn’t keep silent anymore,” Hilton says. “And it started me on this journey of self-discovery and healing and catharsis. It made me feel very strong that I had survived something so horrific.”
She went into more detail in a memoir, Paris, published in 2023. She remembers recording the audiobook with four strangers “who I’d never met in my life” in the room, and “they were in shock” by the book’s content. “They were expecting some happy book about some heiress.”
She spent lots of time in Washington, D.C., openly and autobiographically speaking to congressional committees about the “troubled teen” industry and its abuses of power. Both the House and the Senate passed the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act in December 2024, with President Biden signing the bill into law on Christmas Eve.
“In D.C., they’d never seen something pass so fast. I’m just really proud that I kept going back and telling my story. No one has done anything to protect these kids,” she says. “It’s not over yet. I’m going to continue this fight because there’s so much more to do. I hope that’s why people call me iconic.”
While she sheds the skins of that Barbie character—though, let’s face it, thanks to Margot Robbie, Barbie is kind of a hero herself these days—what else should we know about the “real” Paris?
The real Paris Hilton is a “huge tomboy,” she says. “I love doing things with no makeup and being natural and myself.”
The real Paris Hilton, she continues, is a “huge undercover nerd. I love anything to do with technology, gadgets, and sci-fi.” When prodded, she admits that Alien is one of her favorite movies. Lately she’s been enjoying Paradise on Hulu, and she misses Westworld on HBO.
She’s an audiobook fiend. She likes to listen to memoirs, like Pamela Anderson’s, which she found she could relate to “so much,” as well as inspirational books, business books, books about troubled teens, and books about ADHD. “I love ADHD books,” she says, rattling off titles such as ADHD for Smart Ass Women, ADHD 2.0 and ADHD is Awesome.
When she opens a book, it’s usually nightly and to her kids. “I read a lot of bedtime stories,” she says. They all love Clifford the Big Red Dog, especially an interactive edition with fake fur.
Of course, life has changed a lot for Hilton now that she’s a mom of two. She spends downtime making collages and painting with Phoenix and London. “I have an art room at our house,” she says. “We make little statues out of Play-Doh. We love being creative together.”
Every week, their friends and cousins come over for music class. “They love singing and dancing,” Hilton says. “And they love ‘Stars Are Blind.’ They like it more than ‘Baby Shark.’” She’s referring to the 2006 hit song that came out of her first studio album Paris and remains, well, a surprisingly iconic classic. (It popped back into the cultural consciousness with a particularly romantic scene in a drugstore in Emerald Fennell’s 2020 Promising Young Woman.) Phoenix, she adds, often asks his teacher at school to play his mom’s song “Chasin,’” a collaboration with Meghan Trainor from Hilton’s more recent album, last year’s Infinite Icon. “They all dance to it.”
In the blink of an eye, Phoenix and London will be able to start raising some hell like, well, their mom did when she was younger.
“I get scared about thinking about them as teenagers and how fast the world is moving,” Hilton says. “It also makes me nervous to think about them sneaking out. I know how dangerous the world can be. I’m thinking I’ll make a house so much fun that they won’t even ever want to go out.” She also hopes they won’t sneak out because she’s going to raise them “to be good human beings and love sports and music and to be super busy in school.”
Even though she’s a woman with a media content company and has produced innumerable hours of social media content, when it comes to her kids, screens, she says, are off-limits. “I’m very strict about that. I’m doing so much research on kids and screens and how horrible it is.” They don’t watch cartoons, she adds, specifically singling out her negative feelings about Cocomelon, the hugely successful animated YouTube channel, which is definitely not allowed. “We do have movie nights,” she says. “Last weekend we watched the original Little Mermaid. The look in their eyes was so cute. We watched it twice. It’s now their favorite movie.”
Would she want them to experience anything close to the level of fame and attention she has? “I wouldn’t,” Hilton responds. “I’m not going to tell them not to do something, but I’m hoping they don’t want to be so much in this because it’s a lot. It’s a difficult thing to go through, but I can make it through anything. I hope that they’ll take after me [in business],” and, she hopes, stay as much as they can behind the scenes.
“I’m going to continue this fight because there’s so much more to do. I hope that’s why people call me iconic.”
To that end, Hilton says she’s starting their business education early. She takes most of her meetings at home with London and Phoenix regularly in earshot. “I would love for my kids to create their own brands,” she says.
Hilton is already at work on a children’s brand they can possibly take over soon enough, one that includes children’s books and cartoons that, she says, “are good for children’s brains.”
It’s just another thing to add to Hilton’s ever-growing list of hyphenates and conquests. She’s already at work on a third album. It helps to have a recording studio at home, she says, so producers can come to her.
This April, she’ll release her 30th fragrance, which means, she explains, there’s a different smell for every day of the month. “It’s an art. I’m the best at doing them,” she says of her coterie of scents. “They’re all like my babies.” This new one is called “Iconic.” Do you sense a theme here? In some ways, though, Hilton says it’s an homage to her grandfather Aaron who told her, I’m so proud of you. You’ve accomplished more than any woman I’ve ever met. You’re iconic.
In May, she’ll release a skincare line called Parivie. “I have to do it myself. It has real results and real science,” she explains. “I’m obsessed with skincare, and I figured everyone is always asking my beauty secrets.”
Hilton credits her ADHD as a kind of superpower. She believes it helps her handle so many different types of projects, to move with ease from one to the next. “I’ve done music, building products, singing, acting, writing, and doing art and everything that I love,” she explains. “It is a lot to balance being a mom and a businesswoman and now being a pop star.”
Sure. But is there anything even left to do?
“I haven’t gone to space yet,” Hilton says. “I’m kind of scared to go, though. I don’t want the rocket to get stuck, and I don’t want to be bored.”
She pauses. “I think I’ll stay on Earth.”
Photography by Daniella Midenge, Styling by J. Errico
Hair by Preston Wada, Makeup by Melissa Hurkman
Photo Coordination by Kimberly Hunt, Styling Assistance by Darryl Anderson
This story first appeared on GRAZIA USA.
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