Paris Hilton has come a long way since her days of being the media’s favorite party girl. These days she’s working to bring attention to the rampant abuse of children at reform schools – something she personally experienced growing up. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Paris Hilton has come a long way since her days of being media’s favorite party girl. These days, she’s working to bring attention to rampant abuse of children at reform schools. Something she’s personally experienced growing up. This is a compelling story. I had invited her to Vegas and I interviewed her for about an hour, about 2000 lawyers in there. I have been doing those interviews with everything from Matthew McConaughey to Sting to Fogerty, you name it, we’ve done huge interviews, but I’ve never had an interview where the group has stood up and given her a standing ovation twice. Never had it happen. But she did that. You were there. What was your take?
Farron Cousins: Her story, you gotta get past this whole media creation of Paris Hilton in the early 2000s and into the 2010s. Her story of what she experienced growing up as a teenager is beyond horrific, and she’s now written about it in a book. There is the documentary out there. But most importantly, she was recently at Congress lobbying them, telling her story, and telling the stories of countless others that have experienced this horrific abuse, sexual abuse, torture at these so-called reform schools all over the country. And it’s really, unfortunately, very rampant in the foster care system.
Mike Papantonio: Well, what I did, and what I wanted to do in Las Vegas, I had 2000 of some of the best lawyers in the country in the room in Vegas. We do that program twice a year. I’ve done it for 25 years, twice a year. And so we’re always looking at what are the things on the horizon that we really should pay attention to? What are the social issues? Opioids, tobacco, PFAS, you name it. That’s where all of that begins, is those meetings we have in Vegas. So I invited her out because we’re now gonna be involved with handling these cases all over the country. The story she told about force fed medications, sexual abuse, being woken up in the middle of the night, stripped naked, and doing a vaginal check to see does she have anything in her vagina, gynecological exams regular in the middle of the night. Well, we know, all it was was sexual abuse.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: She was put in solitary confinement. She ran away several times. But everybody has this picture of Paris Hilton that I suppose they must have developed with her, she had a program called Simple Life, which was, you know, if you ask her about it, she says, those are my clown years. This is a woman who built a billion dollar industry on her own. Didn’t have anything to do with the Hilton money. On her own built a billion dollar industry by the time she was 30 years old. And so you talk about credibility. What she’s saying is it’s gotten so bad that the system, most states don’t even have a system to keep up with the number of abuse cases. They don’t have any way of knowing what are these facilities that are doing this horrible, horrible stuff. And they’re all over the country controlled by three corporations. And so we’re handling that litigation right now. The stories range from suicide to just rank murder, where the guards, the undertrained guards are murdering kids. Saying, well, we had to do this. We had to. One child was suffocated when four guards sat on the child. That was all about the child threw a biscuit across the room and they killed that child. Those stories are all over the place, and they’re surfacing like crazy right now.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And you bring up a really good point there about the companies that own these, because another thing that happens is a little bit of the shell game, right? If this school gets in trouble because, oh, you’ve been abusing kids. Well, we actually didn’t do that. The old people who ran the school and they owned the school. But now, look, it’s a new school. We put a new name on the outside. We are not responsible for any of that. It’s the same people just changing hands trying to make it seem like, oh, okay, the bad folks are gone. Now give us your kids and we’re gonna continue the cycle of abuse.
Mike Papantonio: Farron, it’s the same people that run the adult prisons all over the country. They’ve actually caught some of these organizations where judges have gone to prison for taking kickbacks to send children to the kind of facilities that she’s in front of Congress talking about.
Farron Cousins: Kids for Cash.
Mike Papantonio: Kids for Cash. And this is what she’s speaking out about. And I just, like I say, I’ve been doing this for years, interviewing the biggest names.
Farron Cousins: Al Pacino.
Mike Papantonio: Al Pacino, Al Pacino didn’t get a standing ovation. The point being, when she speaks, she speaks from truth and experience and it’s really scary stuff.
Farron Cousins: It is.
