Los Angeles, Feb 25 (IANS) Socialite Paris Hilton shared that she had an unsavoury incident with disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival when she was only 19 years old.
Hilton was at the festival to attend the annual amfAR gala for AIDS research, which Weinstein was hosting that year.
She said she met Weinstein the day before the gala, reports ‘Variety’.
“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 said.
“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.”
Hilton said Weinstein got aggressive with her at the gala the next evening.
She said that Weinstein followed her to the ladies bathroom and yelled at her, “Ya wanna be a star?”
“I went into the bathroom and then he followed me,” Hilton said.
“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.”
When asked by Glamour UK if she had heard rumours about Weinstein’s behaviour before meeting him at Cannes, Hilton replied: “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 with Glamour UK published on the same day Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in prison after being convicted in Los Angeles on three counts of rape and sexual assault.
The former film producer was already serving a 23-year sentence in New York after being convicted of rape and sexual assault in that jurisdiction in a 2020 criminal trial.
The Los Angeles judge ordered Weinstein to serve his LA sentence consecutively after New York, effectively ensuring he will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
–IANS
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