GRAZIA USA Spring Cover Star: We’ll Always Have Paris Hilton

Celebrity

By Ava Gilchrist

GRAZIA USA Spring Cover Star: We’ll Always Have Paris Hilton

Words by Marshall Heyman

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.)

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.”