Perez Hilton has expressed deep regret, particularly for stirring panic and fear among Hollywood celebrities through his popular blogsite. In an effort to make amends, he even reached out to figures such as Britney Spears, Neil Patrick Harris and others to offer apologies.
“I live with that, you know. Like I’ve made amends or tried to with a lot of people,” Hilton told Sean Hannity in a July 14 interview on Fox News Media’s Hang Out With Sean Hannity podcast that took place before his alarming livestreaming and hospitalization this week.
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Asked how his exchange with Spears went, the celebrity blogger told Hannity: “Well, according to the intermediary that relayed what I wrote to her … I reached out to Khloé Kardashian, and she responded back. She was very kind. Some people don’t respond back, and that’s fine,” he said.
The podcast interview took place before Hilton was hospitalized this week and began receiving medical care after the celebrity gossip blogger appeared to be harming himself on a TikTok livestream on Tuesday night. In graphic clips reposted on social media, Hilton appeared manic and could be seen in the livestream covered in blood and using an object to cut himself repeatedly.
Hilton’s TikTok account was later banned, and the livestream has since been taken down. In the wake of that medical emergency, Hilton is revealed to have told Hannity that among his other regrets is having become an attention-seeker with his blog site, to the extent that he became reliant on the adrenaline rushes it provided.
“It’s hard to have people really accept this, but if you like attention, attention is like a drug. I was definitely an attention addict back then. I mean, I still am, but I think now I do a better job of keeping it in check. When you’re an addict, you don’t care if you’re hurting people. You’ll steal from your roommate or do something bad to a family member just so you can get money to buy your drugs or alcohol, or whatever your addiction is,” Hilton explained on the podcast.
He said speculating about a celebrity’s sexuality and mocking their bodies or appearances caused him his own inner turmoil. “Because I realized what I was doing was wrong. I realized I could still be funny, but I didn’t have to be so cheap, and I didn’t have to be so cruel. It was cruel. It’s something that I carry with me. It’s like my scarlet letter, and it’s very heavy baggage,” he said.
As an openly gay man, Hilton said outing celebrities who also were gay has come to weigh heavily on him. “That’s why it’s hard being me now, because I would say a lot of gay men — most, probably — don’t like me because of a lot of the mistakes I made in my past that are very public,” he added.
Hilton had a better response when he reached out to Harris to offer an apology for making the How I Met Your Motherstar a target. “I made amends with him, and he asked me to write something in his memoir. So I wrote a little something in there, and he was very, very gracious,” he recalled.
That’s after Hilton went far across a red line when looking to out Harris. “Gosh, on my site, I remember it was like a witch hunt. I was trying to track down people he dated. I viewed it as entertainment, but it’s their lives. That’s what I told Jennifer Aniston when I met her randomly in a parking garage in Los Angeles. I said, ‘I never thought I’d meet you. You’re just like a soap opera character to me.’ She said, ‘No, I’m a real person.’ I was hard on her. I gave her a nickname that I regret. It was very childish. Some of it was funny,” Hilton recounted.
He also talked about a recent hospitalization to battle sepsis, which took place before this week’s medical emergency. “I was in the hospital for 21 days, so I thought I was going to die … Especially because the first few days they couldn’t find where the perforation was. Then I had all of these other issues. My body just started breaking down. I had fluid in my lungs. I went into A-fib. My heart issues … Just everything that could go wrong went wrong,” he recalled.
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