A 55-year-old school in Utah was recently ordered to close, and some, including Paris Hilton, are celebrating online. Local news announced Monday that the Utah Department of Health and Human Services has revoked the license of Provo Canyon School’s Springville campus.The school was cited for numerous violations including failing to maintain health and safety, reporting serious incidents and using aggressive physical contact. Her license was already on a conditional basis due to a previous citation and now, she will have to cease all operations by August 6. At a news conference Tuesday, Shannon Thoman Black of the Utah Department of Health and Human Services said school owners “may not reapply for a new license for five years,” and in the meantime, the department will monitor the facility as “those children are removed to safe locations.”
““We disagree with the state’s decision to revoke the license of Provo Canyon School’s Springville campus and are evaluating all available legal and administrative options, including an appeal,” Provo Canyon School CEO Tim Marshall said in a statement, adding that “our priority remains providing safe, high-quality care and support to teens and their families.”Amid the back and forth, one thing was established. Paris Hilton, the American heiress and media personality, is celebrating the decision she has demanded for years.
On Tuesday, she took to X to share a post celebrating the news. She wrote that she had “waited years” to announce this news. “The place that hurt me, and countless children before and after me, will no longer be allowed to operate,” she said.
“The dream I had of protecting future generations from the abuse I endured has finally come true.”
Trauma from the past
Hilton’s relationship with the school goes back a long way. She was forcibly enrolled in school for 11 months in 1997, when she was 17 years old.
While she remained quiet for years, in 2020 she began speaking out about the ordeals she faced at the institution in interviews and her documentary “This is Paris.” She wrote in her Washington op-ed that she arrived at the school after a parent-sanctioned kidnapping, where she was awakened by “two men in handcuffs” who “asked her if she wanted to take the ‘easy way out or the hard way’” as they allegedly carried her screaming from her home.
She said her parents did this to help curb her “rebellious” behaviour.“I had no idea why or where I was being taken against my will. I soon learned that I would be sent to hell,” she wrote, adding that staff had “monitored and censored” her communications with the outside world, preventing the possibility of seeking help. Hilton asserted that she was subjected to solitary confinement “in a room whose walls were covered in scratch marks and bloodstains,” according to her op-ed, and was regularly berated by staff who allegedly beat and choked minors in their care.In another case, she said she was sexually assaulted as a teenager by staff at the school. In a New York Times interview, she alleged that male employees took her and other female students into a room “very late at night” and digitally penetrated them under the guise of performing cervical exams. “This wasn’t even a doctor,” Hilton told the Times. “It was with a couple of different employees where they were putting us on the table and putting their fingers inside us.
“I don’t even know what they were doing, but he definitely wasn’t a doctor and it was really scary.”In X’s post, she wrote that she was “sleep deprived and receiving intense therapy” during exams and “didn’t understand what was happening” at the time. “I was forced to lie on a padded table, spread my legs and submit…I cried as they held me down,” she wrote.She also said she experienced similar abuse at three other facilities in her youth, writing that she received treatment without diagnosis and was “suffocated, slapped in the face, spied on in the shower, and deprived of sleep.”
Hilton’s allegations inspired other former residents to file similar complaints.
The troubled teen industry
In October 2021, the National Network for the Rights of People with Disabilities released a damning report on the for-profit residential treatment industry, which was spurred by the 2020 death of a 16-year-old Michigan Youth Academy youth who choked to death after staff piled on top of him to restrain him. The report cataloged rampant abuses at for-profit facilities across the country, “ranging from broken bones, fight clubs, and sexual assault by trusted staff, to forced seclusion, defamation, and the complete failure by some facilities to provide the mental health treatment that prompted placement in the first place,” to name a few.According to a 2022 report in The Times, the troubled teen industry receives billions in annual funding and provides inadequate medical care to patients, exposing them to assault, drugging, physical restraint, and incarceration. The facilities have traditionally been operated without any federal oversight. An estimated 86 children reportedly died in these places from 2000 to 2015.Hilton previously described it as a $50 billion industry that includes therapeutic boarding schools, military-style boot camps, juvenile justice facilities and behavior modification programs.Thus, Hilton lobbied Congress to push for tighter regulations and increased funding for government oversight in these areas. At the time, she called on then-US President Joe Biden and federal lawmakers to “enact a basic federal bill of rights for youth in congregate care.” Finally, in 2024, Biden signed the bipartisan Stop Institutionalized Child Abuse Act.With Provo Canyon’s license revoked, at least one enterprise in the industry will no longer be allowed to operate to harm and abuse children, and for Hilton and other former attendees, that’s good news.
