In her first public interview, Perez Hilton’s sister opened up about discovering her brother during his self-harm incident, revealed he had been grappling with depression and offered thoughts about his long road to recovery.
Barbara Lavandeira told the New York Post’s Page Six that Aug. 4 “will forever be one of the darkest days my family and I have ever experienced.”
That was the evening Hilton, who rose to fame in the early 2000s as a celebrity gossip blogger, appeared to engage in self-harm during a livestream.
Police responded to his Miami home, and Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, was hospitalized for treatment.
Lavandeira was staying with her brother at the time and noticed his bedroom door was closed and locked, which she said “wasn’t like him,” Lavandeira told the outlet.
She called out to him, but he stopped responding.
“When I knocked, he said he was fine, but I could barely hear him,” she said. “After I knocked a few more times and asked him to open the door, he stopped responding. I tried calling his cellphone in case he couldn’t hear me, but he wouldn’t answer. Something just felt wrong.”
She said that she unlocked the bedroom door and saw he was inside the bathroom and that when he didn’t answer, she unlocked that door, too.
“When I opened the door, my nightmare became a reality,” she told Page Six. “Mario was standing in front of the shower, naked, cut up, covered in blood, with a box cutter in his hand.”
“What I can say with certainty is that I didn’t recognize my brother when I looked at him. I saw it in his eyes. They didn’t look the same. Then, a split second later, he smiled at me. It felt like I was staring at someone else,” she continued.
Lavandeira said she left the bathroom and corralled her daughter and Hilton’s three children out of the home, put them in the car and called 911.
“The first call I made was to the police. Then I messaged my best friend, who lives nearby, while I was on with dispatch, and asked her to please come get the kids and take them away from the scene,” Lavandeira said.
With the kids safe, she tended to her brother.
“Eventually, I was able to go back into the house while I waited for the ambulance and place towels over Mario to help stop the bleeding. He had already lost a significant amount of blood, yet he was somehow still able to speak, although his voice was very faint,” she said.
Finally, an ambulance arrived and took him to a hospital.
