“He tried to open the door, he was hammering on the door, banging on it,” she recalls of the encounter at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.
Paris Hilton has spoken up about a terrifying incident with convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein.
The media personality alleged that the struggling film producer followed her into a bathroom at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival when she was 19 years old after she met him the day before while having lunch with a friend.
The event occurred at Weinstein’s annual amfAR gala for AIDS research that evening, and it terrified Hilton.
“I was at lunch with my girlfriend and he came up to the table and was like, ‘Oh, you want to be an actress?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I really want to be in a movie,'” Hilton recalled to Glamour UK.
“I was a teenager, so I was impressed by him. I was like, ‘Oh my god, Harvey Weinstein is so cool!’ and he said, ‘Well, we should have a meeting. You can come up to my room and read scripts’ … and I just didn’t want to go, so I never went.”
At the gala the following day, Weinstein became aggressive. “I went into the bathroom and then he followed me. He tried to open the door, he was hammering on the door, banging on it,” Hilton said.
“And I wouldn’t open it, because I was like, ‘I’m in a stall, why do you want to come in here?’ And security came and literally carried him away and he was like [shouting], ‘This is my party,’ going nuts. It scared me and freaked me out.”
Hilton had known of Weinstein’s reputation at the time, she said. “It was just someone so powerful in Hollywood who everyone was terrified of.
I didn’t even want to say anything about it because I was like, ‘I don’t want people getting mad at me for saying anything,’ because it was just a known thing. He was just like that and people were like, ‘OK, just turn a blind eye.'”
When contacted by the publication, a spokesperson for Weinstein denied the claims.
Weinstein, who is already serving a 23-year term for rape and sexual assault after being convicted in 2020, was sentenced to an additional 16 years in prison for his crimes last week.
During the 1990s, over 80 women accused the producer of sexual assault and misconduct. Weinstein has maintained on his innocence, telling a judge before his latest sentencing that the claims are “about money and coming after me.”
