Utah revoked another campus license on Friday for the Provo Canyon School, the boarding school where Paris Hilton said she was abused as a teenager, and the state said the Provo campus had racked up a string of 2026 noncompliance citations that included not protecting “a client from potential harm or acts of violence” and “using cruel and unnecessary practice on a child.”
The decision lands like a late, bureaucratic admission that the apparatus meant to supervise this place had been looking at a locked door and calling it care. More than a dozen of the citations were noted on Friday. The Utah Department of Health and Human Services said the school’s Provo campus failed on basic safety, the kind of failure that leaves children trapped inside institutions that answer upward to the state and downward to no one.
Who Gets Hurt First
“No child should be hurt in a program that is meant to protect them; particularly programs 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. That line cuts straight through the usual language of oversight. The state authorized the program. The state licensed it. The state now says the program should not have been hurting children in the first place.
Earlier this month, Utah 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.” 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 meantime, Utah officials will be monitoring the facility at least once a week, according to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. The watchful eye arrives after the damage, as these things so often do.
What Survivors Said
Paris 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. Hilton alleges that school staff members beat her, watched her shower, fed her unknown pills and locked her in solitary confinement without clothing. Those are not abstract complaints. They are the details of what happens when a closed institution gets to define discipline for children who can’t walk out.
Hilton has testified about her experiences there in Congress and state legislatures around the U.S., helping pass laws to protect teens in Utah and more than a dozen other states. That route runs through the same political machinery that keeps promising protection after the fact. Laws get written, hearings get held, and the people who survived the place still have to carry the memory of what the system allowed.
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. That’s what direct action looks like when the official channels move at their own pace: survivors showing up, families filing suit, and pressure building from below while the institution tries to keep its story intact.
The School Fights Back Through Procedure
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. That’s the language of institutional self-defense: legal avenues, administrative avenues, appeals. The machinery of delay.
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. New owners, old harm. Different paperwork, same locked gates. The state says the Provo campus must stop operating by Aug. 15, and Utah officials say they’ll keep checking in at least once a week until then. For now, the record is plain: the license is gone, the citations are stacked, and the people who lived through the place are still the ones forcing the truth into the open.