Perez Hilton has long road to recovery, had struggled with depression before self-harm, sister says - NBC News

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.

She said Hilton had checked himself into a hospital for “severe depression” shortly before the Aug. 4 incident. That came on the heels of “an extremely difficult year” of health issues, she said.

About two weeks earlier, Hilton approached her and their mother and opened up about his mental health.

“He told us that a few days earlier, he had felt empty, hopeless and like he was a burden on everyone. He then admitted that one night when he couldn’t sleep, he had taken the remaining painkillers from his surgery in March. He said he just wanted to sleep,” she told Page Six.

Lavandeira told her brother he needed “proper psychiatric help.” Hilton agreed, and she took him to the hospital that same day, she said.

“He went voluntarily,” she said. “After several days of evaluation and treatment, the facility determined that he could be discharged.”

Hilton seemed to be on the up, spending time with the family and using coping mechanisms and grounding techniques he learned at the hospital, she said.

On Aug. 3, Hilton returned to his regular therapy sessions, and the next day he “completed an intake call for an intensive outpatient program and was supposed to begin outpatient group therapy the following week,” his sister said.

“Later that same afternoon, our lives changed forever,” she added.

In March, Hilton said in a series of posts that he had been hospitalized for three weeks with an ulcer and sepsis. He said in a YouTube video addressing his hospitalization that his condition was a result of taking medication without eating.

“He was hospitalized for close to a month. Doctors initially didn’t know what was wrong. His body became septic, he coded and he nearly died several times,” Lavandeira said.

“He underwent abdominal surgery, had fluid drained from around his lungs twice and then had to recover from surgery and begin physical therapy,” she said.

Hilton was back in a hospital a few weeks later for deep vein thrombosis, he said in an interview with NBC South Florida last month.