Utah revoked another campus license on Friday for the boarding school where Paris Hilton said she was abused as a teenager, marking a major victory in the hotel heiress’ yearslong effort to get the school shut down.
The Utah Department of Health and Human Services' decision cites a multitude of noncompliance citations in 2026 for the Provo Canyon School’s Provo campus, including not protecting "a client from potential harm or acts of violence,” and "using cruel and unnecessary practice on a child." More than a dozen of the citations were noted on Friday.
"No child should be hurt in a program that is meant to protect them; particularly programmes that require the authorization of the state to operate,” Shannon Thoman-Black, director of the division of licensing and background checks at the health and human services department, said in a statement.
Earlier this month, the state revoked the license for the Provo Canyon School’s other campus in Utah, saying the school has "failed to provide applicable health and safety services for clients.”
Hilton, the media personality who spent almost a year at the school in the late 1990s, said the latest announcement means she finally feels a sense of "peace.”
"This horrific chapter of abuse, neglect, and trauma has finally come to an end,” she said in a statement.
The school, which is described on its website as a psychiatric residential treatment facility for youth ages 12 to 18, has until Aug 15 to stop providing services at its Provo campus. In the interim, Utah officials will be monitoring the facility at least once a week, according to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.
Staci Bradley, the school’s director of business development, said in a statement that they do not agree with the state’s decision and "are carefully reviewing all available legal and administrative avenues, including the appeals process.”
The facility has 15 days to request a hearing before the department.
Hilton alleges that school staff members beat her, watched her shower, fed her unknown pills and locked her in solitary confinement without clothing.
"Today means no child will ever have to endure what we did at Provo Canyon School again,” she said.
She has testified about her experiences there in Congress and state legislatures around the United States, helping pass laws to protect teens in Utah and more than a dozen other states. Utah has long played an outsized role in the troubled teen industry, a network of private, for-profit residential centres for children with behavioral issues.
In June, Hilton returned to the Provo Canyon School to support two families who filed lawsuits alleging that their children were mistreated at the school.
The school is under new ownership, and the administration has said it can’t comment on anything that came before the change, including Hilton’s time there. - AP
