Perez Hilton hospitalized after harming himself on live stream

Perez Hilton, the celebrity blogger, was hospitalized Tuesday after live-streaming himself committing acts of self-harm on TikTok, according to a statement from police that didn’t name Hilton but was sent in response to a question about him.

The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office confirmed in the statement that officers attended to the home of a man “livestreaming acts of self-harm on social media.” After confirming that the man was inside alone, deputies spoke to family members on the scene before he was transported to a hospital, according to the agency.

The Miami-Dade County Police Department said it received several calls about the live stream. Hilton’s TikTok account was suspended Tuesday night, but footage that appeared to show Hilton, 48, covered in blood spread around social media.

Jessica L. Hamilton, an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University at New Brunswick who directs a program on teen social media and suicide prevention, said that teen exposure to celebrity self-harm acts can have adverse effects.

“In our research, we have found that when teens see self-harm content on social media, they are 8 times more likely to engage in self-harm,” she wrote in an email. She added that when people react negatively to self-harm behavior, it can exacerbate the stigma around it and reduce a teen’s willingness to seek help.

Hamilton said social media platforms should assign moderators to live streams, knowing that the risk of graphic content is high and the effects can be harmful. “If your platform cannot figure out how to do this quickly, safely and effectively, then [live-streaming] should not be a feature that is available on your platform,” she wrote.

Jess Rauchberg, an incoming lecturer of media communication at the University of Leeds, said she’s worried about what happens when such painful health episodes happen online. “The live-streamed aspects renders a painful health moment into a form of entertainment,” she said, “something for the audience to consume, ogle at, and watch. Self-harm can be amusement or mockery. It’s content for the audience to consume. And because TikTok is so popular, it feels like we are in the gladiator’s arena watching someone get tortured for our own amusement.”

Rauchberg also worries that audiences will become more “desensitized” to mental health episodes. “A lot of these attitudes are tied to long-standing ideas in Western culture that mental illness is bad, wrong and shouldn’t be seen in public,” and many critical responses can make people more dismissive of people’s struggles.

Hilton’s manager, Dante Rusciolelli, told The Washington Post in a statement: “Our focus remains on Perez’s health, recovery and the privacy of both him and his family during this incredibly difficult time. We are grateful for the outpouring of concern and support from fans, friends and members of the media. We respectfully ask that everyone continue to honor his privacy while he receives the care he needs.”

A TikTok spokesperson said the platform’s moderation system flagged the live stream within minutes and routed it to a moderation team for review; however, a moderator error caused a delay in the removal of the video. The spokesperson rebutted reporting that the stream went on for 30 minutes, adding that it was about half that time, and said that TikTok closed several subsequent streams within 90 seconds and banned Hilton’s account. TikTok alerted law enforcement about the situation, according to the spokesperson.

Hilton, born Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., became famous in the early 2000s when he started PerezHilton.com, a gossip blog that relentlessly skewered celebrities and attracted millions of readers. Hilton mocked people’s weight and substance abuse, drawing crude scribbles over their photos, and received extreme backlash for outing several stars. Hilton, who is gay, said he considered such posts as “reporting the truth.”

In 2007, three years after the blog launched, Hilton wrote an essay for the Mail on Sunday in which he said he had been called “the most hated man in Hollywood” and his blog was deemed “the nastiest site on the internet.” He wrote that he started the site after a failed attempt to become an actor and then burned out at a magazine writing job; he became depressed and suicidal, he said, but “the website saved me.”

At the time, Hilton said that he had no regrets about what he wrote, but he changed his mind a few years later after a series of headline-making cases of bullied LGBTQ+ teenagers who died by suicide. Ever since, Hilton has been on an apology tour, toning down his rhetoric and expressing regret to some of his past targets, such as Britney Spears and Mischa Barton.

“I knew it was wrong in the past what I was doing. I was still doing it even though I knew it was wrong,” Hilton told Barton on a “The Hills” reboot episode in 2019 where the two appeared for an on-screen confrontation. “I say this on my kids’ life. I swear. If I could go back in time and do things differently, I would.”

Hilton has since appeared in several reality shows and has hosted a podcast. In 2020, he was temporarily banned from TikTok for violating community guidelines, which a manager at the app described at the time as being a result of Hilton posting content that included bullying, slurs and sexual content.

Earlier this year, Hilton posted a video in which he said he was extremely sick with the flu. About a month later, in March, he published an emotional dispatch, saying that he took his flu medication without eating food, which resulted in an ulcer that led to sepsis, and he was hospitalized for three weeks. He said that the experience led to a religious awakening, and that despite growing up Catholic, he had never been a believer until now, when “God presented himself to me.”

Hilton has since spoken regularly of his newfound faith, including when he announced this summer that he was moving with his mother and three children from Las Vegas to Miami, where he was born and raised. The city held some traumatic memories for him, he said, because it was where he witnessed the death of his grandfather and father a week apart when he was a teenager, and where he struggled in school because he had been closeted and felt isolated from his peers. But the Holy Spirit spoke to him, he told viewers, and inspired the move to Florida.

In another video this spring, Hilton again apologized for the “selfish” behavior of his past, when he said he cared only about page views and money.

“God has forgiven me, and almost more importantly, I have forgiven myself. And I know there still are people out there who want to see me suffer and want to see me pay for the mistakes and the bad decisions and the hurt that I caused in the past,” he said. “And they’re entitled to that opinion. It is valid. I earned those thoughts. But I forgive myself. What matters is today, how I behave today, how I behave tomorrow.”

If you or someone you know needs help, visit 988lifeline.org or call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.