Paris Hilton’s Pre-Y2k Era: Part 2
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What is the purpose of this episode and who are the hosts and guest?
Hello, it's Elizabeth Day from How To Fail here. My next guest is the actual Prime Minister, Andy Burnham.
I have to be careful here, this does make me quite emotional. Of course it does. She said, we all knew kind of what time you might be coming up Downing Street. So we got Roy and we got the telly right in front of him and six of us stood around him and all said, look, Roy, look, look. Momentarily, they said, we thought he knew.
Listen to How To Fail wherever you get your podcasts.
Campsite Media.
From Sony Music Entertainment and Campsite Media, this is Infamous. I'm Natalie Robomud. And I'm Vanessa Grigoriadis. So last episode, we heard about how Paris Hilton's former school, Provo Canyon, was ordered to shut down amid a litany of abuse allegations. And we spoke to author Maya Salovitz about how the troubled teen industry began, springing out of a California cult called Synanon.
But after last episode, there was more we wanted to explore, both about Paris and the troubled teen industry as a whole. So we're going to start by talking to someone who actually went to one of those schools, an institution, actually, that Paris Hilton was also sent to before she went to Provo Canyon, sort of a not quite as harsh Provo Canyon.
I believe it was the last place that she was before she was at Provo. She ran away from Cascade and then ended up in Provo.
Laura Marie Shanehals is a New York Times bestselling writer and podcaster who co-hosts and created one of my favorite reality TV podcasts, Sex Unique Podcast. And in the early 2000s, she spent two years at the Cascade School, a so-called therapeutic boarding school in Northern California.
You start out in Reading, which is a really depressing town. You drive and drive, you drive into rolling hills of farmland and then the terrain starts getting mountainous and you're kind of on just a winding mountain road for miles. You hit Whitmore, which is a town of maybe like 3,000 people. It has a post office and a general store. You drive seven more miles up a mountain road. And then at the end of the road, there's a school.
Here's Paris describing it in her memoir.
We stopped briefly at a set of big iron gates. There was a big rock emblazoned with gold letters. Cascade School.
Cascade's campus is anchored by a stately lodge-like building overlooking a green lawn. It's rural, which is part of the point.
It's not like an easy place to run away from.
Because some of these kids at Cascade, including Paris Hilton, who attended in the late 90s, were not there willingly. In fact, Cascade was actually the third institution Paris was taken to, after running away from a brutal wilderness program in Idaho and a facility founded by a Synanon disciple called Seedoo. Now, Cascade was not as bad as some of these other institutions, especially not Provo, which was considered the worst of the worst.
There was a girl who had been at Provo and then she transferred to Cascade. So she would tell us about how horrible it was at Provo. It was like, you get locked in rooms, you get hit by staff. They had staff that was sexually assaulting kids. At Cascade, staff cannot physically touch you. They're not allowed to restrain you or lay hands on you.
Still, Cascade wasn't a normal school. When Lara went there, there was an intense dress code, rules around what music you could listen to or even talk about, and very limited contact with the outside world.
You were allowed to call your parents every two weeks. A counselor would be listening to your phone calls. And so if you started to ask your parents if you could come home or like begging them to leave, they would just hang up the phone.
But probably the strangest thing about Cascade was something called the forum.
Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays, they would have forums, which were essentially group therapy sessions where if you had a conflict with another student, you were encouraged to request them in a forum.
At forums, kids were encouraged to get up and air out their grievances with other students.
If I had a problem with you, let's say like we're sitting next to each other in the forum, I would have to get up and cross the room so that I'm facing you.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the purpose of this episode and who are the hosts and guest?
0:00–6:19
2
How did Lara Marie Schoenhals describe the location and atmosphere of the Cascade School?
6:19–13:39
3
What were the rules, dress code, and “forum” therapy sessions at Cascade?
13:39–19:50
4
How did Paris Hilton’s experience at Cascade compare to her time at Provo Canyon?
19:50–25:16
5
What traumatic events did Paris recount from her teenage years (grooming, roofies, kidnappings)?
25:16–30:23
6
How did the 2022 documentary and memoir change public perception of Paris Hilton?
30:23–35:11
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Infamous
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