Do we like Paris Hilton?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Years of campaigning for others and LGBTQ+ causes outweigh old slurs she has apologised for, which stop her at 8.
Paris Hilton is the hotel heiress who became the original famous-for-being-famous reality star. But the formative bit is what happened before the fame: she spent almost a year at Provo Canyon School in Utah in the late 1990s. In her 2023 memoir she described isolation rooms and night-time exams that staff called medical checks.
The scandals are mostly of the 2000s. She was sentenced to jail in 2007 for violating probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case, and she declined a cushier option, saying she wanted to be treated like everyone else. She served time behind bars, and it's the sort of story that made her a tabloid staple.
Since then the direction is clear. She has told Out she wouldn't be who she is without the LGBTQ+ community, and her nonprofit pledged donations to Rainbow Railroad for videos made with her remixes. On Trump, she said after the 2016 election that she'd voted for him, then admitted in her memoir she didn't vote at all and wouldn't repeat the choice.
One loose end: British writer Christopher Mason alleged in a 2020 Lifetime documentary that Ghislaine Maxwell spotted Hilton at a party around 2000. The Daily Beast reported in 2025 that she had addressed the claim, but the part we could read didn't show her answer. Nothing in that story accuses Hilton of anything.
So where does that leave us? She's a flawed person who's done a lot of repair work in public, and the work has benefited kids and survivors. She says she has grown more open since, and her recent projects, a documentary and music, don't link her to anyone pushing harm.