Perez Hilton has only fragments of what happened on August 4.
The celebrity blogger recalls being inside his home in Miami’s Westchester neighborhood, followed by brief, bloodied flashes of a terrifying incident.
His next clear memory is waking up in a hospital bed, scarred and confused, trying to understand what had put him there.
Two weeks later, memories of the disturbing episode — in which the 48-year-old livestreamed himself injuring his naked body with a knife — have begun returning, leaving him deeply ashamed and shaken, Our News Outlet has learned.
“It’s really getting to him. Why did he go live? Why did he do it so publicly? That’s the worst thing,” said a source who has known Hilton for nearly 20 years.
“He remembers being in the ambulance, the blood on the floor, a feeling of dread. That type of thing.
“But he doesn’t remember the whole process yet of finding a knife, setting up the video, and going live. There are a lot of gaps in his memory.”
When Hilton first regained consciousness in the hospital, he reportedly thought he must have been involved in a horrific accident, given the extent of the cuts across his body.
It was only after several days that doctors gently told the truth: that he had taken a butcher knife and harmed himself dozens of times, while livestreaming everything on TikTok for his tens of thousands of followers, telling them that he wanted to die.
Bloody memories of Perez Hilton’s livestream are returning, according to a close family friend
Hilton, 48, has been hospitalized since August 4 after a TikTok livestream showed him seemingly covered in blood, holding a large knife and appearing to harm himself
The incident dragged on for a tortuous 15 minutes before the social media platform brought down the live feed.
When emergency service arrived at his home, Hilton (real name Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr) was hospitalized under under Florida’s Baker Act, which allows for the temporary and involuntary detention of individuals in mental crisis. He has not since had access to his phone or the Internet. And, as Our News Outlet reported last week, he could be held for up to six months.
‘He was horrified and embarrassed,’ our insider said of Hilton when he was told the full extent of the incident.
‘He decided to make his breakdown this huge spectacle. As bad as it is, it’s a million times worse that he did it publicly like that. How do you even come back from that?’
Indeed, as Hilton continues to recover physically after receiving ‘hundreds’ of stitches, his small team is trying to decide what his future professionally may one day look like.
‘I know for a fact that he’s humiliated. Like 20 years ago he made a big deal of Britney [Spears] shaving her head and acting crazy, and that pales in comparison,’ a family friend said.
‘He can no longer ever be snarky publicly. Not even a little bit. That part of his brand is gone. How could he possibly return to any sort of snark at all? That brand is done.
‘He’s been humbled a lot, and it will be interesting to see where he goes from here.’
Hilton found huge fame in the 2000s for his controversial, tabloid-style gossip blog dubbed ‘Hollywood’s most-hated website’. In recent years, with a dip in popularity, the site has pivoted toward more family-friendly content.
With time has also come three children – Mario, 13, Mia, 11, and Mayte, eight – born via surrogate. All three kids were quickly removed from Hilton’s home by his sister when it became apparent that he was experiencing a severe mental health crisis on August 4.
Hilton pictured in happier times alongside his three children, Mayte, Mario, and Mia
His mother, Teresita Lavandeira, filed for temporary legal custody of his children on August 7, in a Miami family court.
The motion was granted, and Our News Outlet has learned that the children are with her and ‘doing fine,’ according to a source, ‘but they miss their dad.’
‘They are being given age-appropriate updates on his condition. The family is making sure that they are very well supported during this time,’ the source said.
On Thursday, we reported how Hilton will need ‘psychiatric clearance’ before his children can visit him.
In the meantime, those close to him are taking special care to reconsider Hilton’s professional brand for when he might eventually return to work. Certainly, Hilton’s well-known trademark of harsh gossip is believed to be dead and gone.
‘There’s no high ground there anymore. That door is closed to him,’ a source said.
The Daily Mail has previously reported that, before the livestream incident, Hilton was low on money and had been struggling to find lucrative work, and that reality show pitches to production companies had not survived past initial stages.
While Hilton was said to have recently signed a deal with a TV production company to host a show about cyberbullying, it is understood that he had not been paid and that bosses were still trying to make a role for him.
Hilton, pictured with Katy Perry, had endured a difficult time before his harrowing livestream
Huge questions remain for how the future will one day look for Hilton on his road to recovery
Traffic to Hilton’s website, his largest source of revenue, had initially spiked after the knife incident, but soon cratered with no new content being posted online.
Earlier this week, his team began again to post stories – breaking news and celebrity gossip – but it is too soon yet to tell if the site’s Internet traffic will recover.
‘If you don’t know Mario, you don’t know that he does have the capacity for shame,’ says an insider.
‘He does have what it takes to be self-aware. And it won’t be lost on him that if another celebrity had done what he did that night, he’d be covering it nonstop, and maybe not always as sensitively as he could be.’
For now, Hilton is primarily focused on his recovery while his team takes care of business.
‘So as he’s trying to focus on his mental recovery, his physical recovery, this is definitely something on everyone’s mind – where does he go from here? How does he make a living? What does he do? I know that’s something that his entire team is thinking about. Like, what is next,’ said the insider.
The insider also said that Hilton is anxious to get back home to his family.
‘I think he’s very determined to get himself better. He wants to be home, to see his family, to be around his things and the people he loves. That’s what he wants the most.
‘Everything else will come. But he will have to grieve the loss of a lot of things before this happened. His life will be divided into before and after, and we have no idea what after will be.’
