Paris Hilton glams up Capitol Hill as she exposes devastating child abuse stories including her own

By Morgan Phillips, Congress Reporter On Capitol Hill For Dailymail.Com 15:33 26 Jun 2024, updated 22:09 26 Jun 2024

• READ MORE: First Squad member Jamaal Bowman ousted from Congress

Paris Hilton testified on Capitol Hill about the devastating experience she suffered in a youth rehabilitation facility as she advocated for sweeping reforms to the foster and youth rehab system. 

'When I was 16 years old, I was ripped from my bed in the middle of night and transported across state lines to the first of four residential facilities,' Hilton told the House Ways and Means Committee Wednesday. 

'For two years I was force-fed medications and sexually abused by the staff. I was violently restrained ... stripped naked, thrown in solitary confinement,' the Hilton hotels heiress went on. 

She said her parents had been 'completely manipulated' by the facilities and were unaware of the treatment she was enduring. In the past she's said her parents had been 'conned' into believe her ADD could be fixed with 'tough love.' 

'This $23 billion-a-year industry sees this population as dollar signs and operates without meaningful oversight,' Hilton said. 

The blonde bombshell and mother of two has had a whirlwind few days - just one night earlier she was in New York City to promote her partnership with Motorola Razr, where DJ'd the launch event.

Days earlier she attended Cannes Lions. 

The hearing centered on modernizing child welfare programs. Hilton focused her testimony on eradicating abuse in youth treatment facilities. 

She urged for the reauthorization and reform of Title IV-B - which offers funding to states for community-based, prevention-oriented programs to support family reunification and permanency for children in foster care.

The program expired in 2021 and the Ways and Means Committee has been looking at ways to modernize it.  

Hilton highlighted the story of 16-year-old Cornelius Fredericks, who entered youth facility Lakeside Academy after his mother died and his dad was in prison. Fredericks died after he was pinned down by facility workers for throwing a sandwich in April 2020. Two workers were convicted of involuntary manslaughter over the incident. 

'The state could have prevented this,' Hilton said.  

Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., meanwhile, pushed for the need to reform the foster system - and to keep more kids at home with their families. 'Poverty should not be the sole reason a child is removed [from the home],' said Smith. 

For Smith, the matter is personal. He represents one of the poorest districts in the nation and as a lawyer, volunteered as a court-appointed special advocate for kids with abuse and neglect cases. 

And while much of Ways and Means' focus has been on a sprawling tax bill, Smith told DailyMail.com in an interview he expects the House to vote on legislation to reauthorize Title IV-B before the end of this Congress in January.  

'We're viewed as a tax writing committee, but we have six subcommittees. One is working on welfare. That's why I made it a priority to make sure that we can walk and chew gum.' 

The chairman told a story of a Missouri mother and three children who had been living in a shed with no electricity or running water when her children were taken into foster custody.

'Three years passed between the time the children were removed from their home and the time the court deemed mom's living arrangements insufficient,' said Smith. 

'Even though she had made substantive, substantial improvement to both her housing and transportation situation, the court deemed a one bedroom apartment too small and a three bedroom house with her boyfriend children, this resulted in termination of our parental rights.'

Smith told DailyMail.com: 'Right now, it's so broad, there's no definition of neglect. 

He said it costs $30,000 per year to keep a child in the foster system in Missouri, and this particular case cost the state $360,000. 

'Spending even a fraction of those fines at the front end could have provided this family, with adequate housing, laundry, and bathroom facilities and assistance in obtaining and maintaining employment. It also would affect the children with their mother and spare them trauma caused by separation.'

In 2022 some 369,000 American children were in foster care. 

Smith laid out a handful of priorities for reforming the Title IV-B system: the first being focus on on 'interventions' that prevent child abuse and neglect rather than forcing children into the foster system and placing children in 'kinship care' with family members rather into the homes off strangers or facilities. 

The committee is also pushing to elevate the role of courts and speed up adjudication of such cases and cut down on the time children spend away from their families, and improve oversight of youth residential treatment facilities and address the 'caseworker crisis' - the child welfare workforce has a high turnover rate of 30 percent. 

'We need to make sure that the appropriate oversight is there. Unfortunately, bad actors might be attracted to employment in these facilities, because they know who's vulnerable,' Smith said. 'We need to make sure that there's proper screening , and proper monitoring.' 

He also called on Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan to address the court backlog of child neglect cases.

'This hearing was about making sure we gave the visibility of the problem and how we need to address this. And so I'm challenging the 43 members of this committee to figure it out. This program has been expired for three years. Let's get it done.'