Forced medications, lost childhood — but today everyone knows her name

A Teenager in Crisis
As she entered her teenage years, Paris began to push back against the rigid boundaries of her upbringing. She skipped school, snuck out at night, and sought the freedom she felt had been denied to her at home. At just 14 years old, she found herself in a deeply inappropriate and harmful situation involving an adult authority figure — something that would leave lasting emotional scars.

Her parents, struggling to understand their daughter’s increasingly rebellious behavior, made a decision that would change the course of her life. They enrolled her in a residential program for troubled youth in Utah — one of many such facilities operating across the United States at the time with little oversight or regulation.

The Program That Changed Everything

What Paris experienced inside that facility, she would not speak about publicly for many years. When she finally did — in a 2020 documentary titled This Is Paris — the details she shared were deeply unsettling.

She described the environment as one of the most traumatic experiences of her life. Students, she said, were subjected to emotional and psychological mistreatment on a daily basis. They were reportedly required to take unidentified medications that left them feeling disoriented and exhausted. Staff members, she alleged, were often harsh and degrading toward the young residents in their care.

“You’re sitting on a chair staring at a wall all day long,” she recalled. “It felt like I was going crazy.”

Perhaps most distressing was the culture of silence that surrounded the facility. When Paris considered speaking out, a staff member reportedly warned her that no one would believe her — that any complaint she made would be dismissed, and her parents would be told she was fabricating stories. Terrified and isolated, she stayed silent.

She carried that silence for two decades.

Twenty Years of Nightmares
The effects of her time at that program followed Paris into adulthood in ways that deeply affected her quality of life. She has openly shared that, for more than 20 years, she suffered from recurring nightmares — sleeping only a few hours each night, reliving the fear and helplessness she felt as a teenager.

“For the past 20 years, I’ve had a recurring nightmare where I’m kidnapped in the middle of the night by two strangers, and locked in a facility,” she revealed in interviews promoting her documentary.

Years later, Paris was also diagnosed with ADHD — a condition that, had it been identified during her childhood, might have changed everything. The characteristics that made her seem “difficult” or “out of control” as a teenager were, in hindsight, symptoms of an undiagnosed neurodevelopmental condition that simply wasn’t well understood at the time.

“My childhood would have been very different if I’d been diagnosed,” she told The Guardian in 2023. “I definitely wouldn’t have been sent away.”

The Persona as a Shield