- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Celebrity and wealth has something to do with it.
The reason she went to jail was a plea bargain -- she was pulled for drunk driving in September, and had her license suspended by the CA DMV as a result (or for some other drunk driving incident.) In any event her lawyers managed to get her to plead it down to reckless driving, for which she was paroled. Her parol had a number of conditions (14+ I think), including inter alia that she would not drive without a valid license and that she would attend an alcohol awareness course (for what that is worth.) now a plea is a deal with the court -- "judge I'm very sorry, I'll be good in future and I wont do this list a bad things and this one or two good things." When you make a plea deal you are supposed to keep it.
After the plea deal she did not attend over a period of 9 months the promised alcohol awareness class. one top of that she was pulled in by the police driving -- that time they warned her that she was not to drive and made a friend drive her home. Obviously, she though she was special because she went out, got a brand new Bentley (retail price say $250000-$500,000) and drove it at night, with the headlights off and was pulled in by the police doing 70 mph in a 35 mph zone.
Now any way you see it, this is an "up yours" three times to the court. And when someone effectively does that to a judge, they tend to get kinda peeved. So Paris was not in jail for drunk driving, she was in jail for violating the terms of her parol.
Is she in jail because she is a rich celebrity -- well yes, probably. First, because she is surrounded by sycophants who presumably were unwilling to say "nope, you can't do that" and "Ms. Hilton, you have to take the class and sit in the plastic seats at the unpleasant ed place." More to the point, she had a good lawyer who got her a deal that other DUIs probably would not have got, but it involved probation -- the deal with the court, and probably she had that lawyer because she was a rich celebrity.
But it is also because she is a rich celebrity that things went wrong. I would not be the least bit surprised to discover that what here lawyers managed to do -- spring her to home detention -- is something they pull off regularly, for those who can pay their fees (and since I am possibly more expensive I won't criticize that.) And usually it works because the judge does not find out, or is disinclined to get into a turf war with the Sheriff about it -- but because we are dealing with the celebrity trollop, the press saw what happened and it became public. Ensue the disaster.
But I suppose in the end a lot of this comes down to her and her family being so rich and spoiled that they simply lack any judgment or sense, and are unwilling to listen to people who had to learn and work for a living. I have no doubt that Ms. Hilton was repeatedly warned by her lawyers that she was going to get into trouble, but though it could not happen to her.
One last point on wealth -- this is a young woman who could easily have afforded a car service 24/7 while her license was suspended . . . why the hell did she drive. I would have more sympathy if this was someone who needed to drive to do their job and could not afford a car service or cab . . .
