He Spent Years Calling Out Women’s “Cottage Cheese Thighs”—and Worse. He Says He’s Sorry. I Met Him to Discover the Truth.

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Fame

Perez Hilton’s Las Vegas Afterlife

He’s moved. He’s found God. Is it all just his “latest grift”?

June 18, 2026 5:40 AM

I’m at my desk in Las Vegas waiting for Perez Hilton to enter the Zoom, and I’m thinking about the last time I threw up from drinking. It was Sept. 9, 2023, at the Palms Casino Resort. Technically, I threw up after I left the Palms, after I lost my phone and then found it again, after I sent one text that said “lovvve you” and another that said “p b at hmm,” after I got in the pool with my clothes on, after I insisted my friends drive me to a strip club, after I announced when we were almost there that actually I was going to be sick and needed to go home. And as I threw up and cried for the first time since living in a dorm, it occurred to me how fitting it was that I’d just been at a party co-hosted by one of the central figures from my millennial college years: Perez Hilton.

From what I remember of the event, a benefit supporting Aid for AIDS of Nevada, I was in a booth at a nightclub and Hilton was onstage. He wore a red suit, like a character in a movie playing a stylish version of the devil. The crowd cheered as if he was as famous as he’d been in the early aughts, and I wondered if I’d time-traveled back there. I was, after all, at the same hotel that had hosted the 2002 season of MTV’s The Real World where Trishelle, Steven, and Brynn hooked up in a hot tub in the first episode, and I was about to go to a VIP afterparty at early-2000s nightlife destination Ghostbar. But no, I was not in a time warp; I was just in Vegas, where I live, and where Perez Hilton does, too. He’d become a Vegas local earlier that year, making the move with his three children and his mother after 20 years in Los Angeles. He cited the warm reception he received in 2018 during a two-month guest-hosting gig for Chippendales as a motivating factor. In a YouTube video filmed shortly after his move , Hilton spoke from the kind of sand-colored living room that is ubiquitous in Las Vegas tract homes. He talked about familiar Vegas topics—adjusting to the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s irrigation restrictions, the appointment-based DMV system—and praised the “sense of community here that Los Angeles doesn’t have.”

I’ve never heard anyone say that about our transient city, but I can see why he felt that way. His arrival was met with a fawning article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal , a video of the showgirl cast of VEGAS! THE SHOW welcoming him to town , the cover of local LGBTQ+ magazine QVegas , and a flood of followers to his new Instagram account, @lasvegasperez, where he documented meals at local restaurants and weighed in on a feud between two Las Vegas influencers .

Before he was a local Las Vegas celebrity—a curious group that includes Carrot Top, Pauly Shore, Floyd Mayweather, and, for the last years of his life, O.J. Simpson—Hilton was one of the most powerful people in celebrity media. Born in Miami to Cuban immigrants, Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. created his Perez Hilton identity shortly after moving to Los Angeles. In his memoir TMI: My Life in Scandal , which is one of four books he’s written (there are two other nonfiction books and a children’s book), he explains how he chose the name: “The ‘Perez’ in me was the outsider, the Latino guy, the homosexual, the person who stuck out, and the ‘Hilton’ referred to Hollywood, the mainstream.”

His eponymous website, which launched in 2004, was originally called “PageSixSixSix” until the New York Post—home of Page Six— filed a lawsuit . PerezHilton.com quickly became synonymous with the cruel style of celebrity gossip that dominated the pop-culture landscape in those days. This was the era when a stolen recording of an inebriated 19-year-old Paris Hilton having sex with her 31-year-old boyfriend became a bestselling adult video . This was the era when you couldn’t go to the grocery store without a magazine cover demanding that you look at the 72 best and worst beach bodies .

Hilton was relentless during these years. He scrutinized famous women’s bodies, attempted to out closeted men, mocked child stars with drug addictions, and drew crude doodles on paparazzi photos. If you are a millennial, you already know this, but if you didn’t or you blocked it out, here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of the worst things Hilton posted in the early aughts: a topless image of Jennifer Aniston (who he called “ Maniston “), an upskirt photo of a then-underage Miley Cyrus , an upskirt photo of a then-underage Taylor Momsen showing her tampon string, a link to Colin Farrell’s sex tape, a photo of Vanessa Hudgens that he’d drawn ejaculate on accompanied by mocking coverage of her leaked nude photos, numerous photos of Lindsay Lohan with crude drawings…