Paris Hilton Says She Has PTSD From Her Ex Leaking Their Sex Tape Without Her Consent

Paris Hilton says she’s still suffering from trauma as the result of her ex-boyfriend, Rick Salomon, leaking their sex tape together almost two decades ago.

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Hilton said the video, which was released without her permission in 2004, is something that will “hurt [her] for the rest of her life.”

“It’s always there in the back of my mind,” she said. “When it happened, people were so mean about it to me. The way that I was spoken about on nightly talk shows and the media, to see things with my family was just heartbreaking. I would be in tears every single day, I didn’t want to leave my house, I felt like my life was over.”

She continued:

“It was a private experience between two people. You love someone, you trust someone and to have your trust betrayed like that and for the whole world to be watching and laughing … It was even more hurtful to me to have these people think that I did this on purpose — that killed me … It still gives me post-traumatic stress disorder to talk about it. …

“I’m again happy that things have changed and that people are realizing that is just, the woman in the situation who is the victim should not be treated like that or spoken about like that.”

Hilton most recently discussed the leak in This Is Paris, where she likened the experience of the sex tape to “being electronically raped.”

As Jezebel’s Rich Juzwiak pointed out in his review of the doc, had Hilton’s “sex tape” been released today, it would likely be termed revenge porn instead and discussed much differently by the media, as Hilton herself suggests. Salomon reportedly made $10 million off the tape in the first year of its release.