“It scared me”: Paris Hilton opens up about Harvey Weinstein encounter amid sentencing

American media personality Paris Hilton recently opened up about her "scary" experience with producer Harvey Weinstein.

In an interview with Glamour UK published on February 23, the 42-year-old personality revealed an uncomfortable experience with the 70-year-old s*x offender when she was just 19 at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival:

"It scared me and freaked me out.”

Mike Sington's tweet on Harvey Weinstein (Image via Twitter)

Paris Hilton was at the film festival to attend the yearly amfAR gala that Harvey Weinstein was emceeing that year. She shared that she met the producer a day before the event when she was having lunch with a friend:

“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.’ 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.”

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Harvey Weinstein once followed Paris Hilton to the bathroom

In the same interview, Paris Hilton revealed that things allegedly took a turn the next evening when Harvey Weinstein followed her to the bathroom, asking:

"You wanna be a star?"

She continued:

“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. And I wouldn’t open it, because I was like, ‘I’m in a stall, why do you want to come in here?’ And I just wouldn’t open it. 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.”

Speaking about the rumors surrounding Weinstein's predatory behavior before meeting him at the Cannes Film Festival, Hilton shared that everyone knew what he was like but spoke against it:

“Yeah, and 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.’”

Hilton's interview comes on the same day when Harvey was ordered 16 years of jail time after he was convicted of three charges of r*pe and s*xual abuse in Los Angeles.

The former film producer was already serving a 23-year term in New York after being found guilty of r*pe and s*xual abuse in that state during a 2020 criminal hearing. He was ordered to spend both his New York and Los Angeles sentences back-to-back, which means he will be spending the rest of his life behind bars.

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Paris Hilton is all set to release her new book, Paris: The Memoir, on March 2.