Perez Hilton Video: The Horrific Truth Is Worse Than We Feared

Los Angeles is facing a different kind of emergency.

Hollywood, it seems, has suddenly run out of sympathy.

To be fair, the entertainment industry has endured a bruising stretch of devastating losses.

Hayden Panettiere’s death at 36 prompted an outpouring of grief across Hollywood. Viola Davis, the acclaimed EGOT winner, praised her former co-star as “an amazing talent.” Derek Hough, who worked alongside Panettiere on Nashville, remembered her warmth, sweetness and kindness. Bethany Joy Lenz offered one of the most intimate tributes, writing: “I’m crushed. I knew the wild little blonde. Was she nine? Ten? I was eighteen.”

Before Panettiere, there had already been waves of sorrow surrounding James Van Der Beek, Michelle Trachtenberg, Eric Dane and many more familiar names.

Whether the cause is illness, addiction or something darker, these losses are undeniably heartbreaking. I do not question the sincerity of anyone’s grief. But one particular tribute made a glaring double standard impossible to ignore.

In her message honoring Panettiere, Blake Lively wrote: “Be. Kind. You never know what others are going through.”

I agree, Blake. So where, exactly, is that compassion for Perez Hilton?

I am not attempting to rewrite Perez’s history, excuse his abominable behavior or pretend that he was a saint. He wasn’t. I know because I witnessed it while working in celebrity public relations during the height of Hilton’s Hollywood power.

One post on PerezHilton.com could send a star into panic and turn a publicity campaign into a five-alarm fire.

He mocked people’s misfortune, outed them and said wrote things that should never have been published.

After Heath Ledger’s death in 2008, Hilton sold T-shirts showing Ledger’s image alongside the caption, ‘Why couldn’t it be Britney?’

Hilton relentlessly attacked my former client Ashlee Simpson after she was accused of lip-syncing on Saturday Night Live in 2004. The story was fair game, but there is a line at which it becomes vicious. I remember repeatedly calling Hilton to ask that he move on. He laughed. Then doubled down.

I know exactly who Perez Hilton was, but in recent years, as his star power faded, –needless to say – he has apologized. Now that he is recovering from a horrific mental health incident, it’s fair to ask Hollywood: Is he beyond your capacity for kindness?

He is a broken person with three children and devastated family. After watching that livestream video of Hilton committing unthinkable acts of self-harm, the blood, the lifeless stare, who doesn’t feel some pity?

Yet hardly anyone is expressing it and those that do face backlash.

Actor Jared Padalecki took down his post expressing what seemed to me to be a universal appeal for humanity. ‘I hope you are trying as best as you can to be kind to yourself right now. Please surround yourself with the love and support that all humans deserve,’ he wrote to Hilton.

Padalecki deleted then that, writing: ‘I didn’t know. It’s been brought to my attention. I’m sorry.’

Sorry for what?

Let me be clear: I am not telling Hollywood to ‘be kind’. I am simply pointing out the selective list of those deemed worthy of their sympathies.

‘If Hollywood really believes its own lectures about kindness, empathy and compassion, why does that philosophy seem to disappear when the person suffering is someone Hollywood doesn’t like?’ an A-list publicist asked when confronted with this reality.

Maybe it’s understandable that those who feel Hilton bullied them are struggling to feel empathetic, but what about those whose careers Hilton helped?

He was there when Stefani Germanotta was becoming Lady Gaga. Hilton wrote about her constantly, further fueling obsessive attention over her rise.

Katy Perry was another major name in his orbit, part of a generation of stars whose careers exploded with Perez’s help. What about Taylor Swift? Rihanna?

‘If someone helped amplify your career and was once part of your world, shouldn’t compassion survive the fact that you later fell out?’ a casting director friend of Perez asks me.

Apparently not. Now that Perez is the one who needs something, the silence is deafening.

A Hilton family friend told Our News Outlet: ‘All the ones he wanted to reach out, all the celebrities who he has mended fences with, all the ones who said he’s their friend – none of them are doing anything.’

Hollywood loves telling the public to be kind. Be kind to people struggling with addiction. Battling depression. Fighting disease. But they never say that the reach of their sympathy stops at the hospital bed of those they detest.

Then the rules change. The past becomes permanent. Compassion becomes controversial. The big names who normally rush to post beautiful tributes suddenly have nothing to say.

‘Look at what happens when someone beloved dies,’ a top Hollywood agent tells me. ‘Suddenly everyone remembers the good times. Old friends become best friends. Former colleagues become family. People who haven’t spoken in years post photographs and paragraphs about how much someone meant to them.’

Death has a strange way of making Hollywood generous when the person on the receiving end can’t answer back, disappoint or offend. They are frozen in memory. 

But Perez Hilton is still alive and he quite obviously has more need of sympathy than those who have no use for it anymore.

‘Hayden was complicated. Perez is complicated. Almost everyone is. You can mourn Hayden without pretending her life was perfect,’ a director, who had met both, told me. ‘You can acknowledge Perez’s terrible behavior without pretending he deserves to be ignored.’

Rob’s latest exclusives and insider reporting can be found at robshuter.substack.com

His best-selling novel is It Started With A Whisper