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Perez Hilton Spent 20 Years Destroying Celebrities Online; Now We’re All Wondering Whether He’s Owed Any Empathy

Updated 1 week ago, August 8, 2026

Perez Hilton built a career mocking celebrities’ worst moments, drawing on their faces and inventing cruel nicknames. Now he’s in a hospital after harming himself on a livestream, and the people he hurt are the ones being asked to feel for him.

Hilton went on TikTok Live from his Miami home Tuesday night and broadcast instances of self-harm during an apparent mental health crisis, some of it watched by followers who’d tracked him for more than 20 years. The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office says he was “safely recovered” and taken to a local hospital.

The reactions split along the fault line he spent two decades creating. “I hope his kids are safe and I hope they are shut off from this, but I simply do not have empathy for him,” entertainment writer Meecham Meriweather told USA TODAY, calling some of what Hilton did “so vile and so awful that there just is no coming back from it.”

Perez Hilton and his mom at the Michael Jackson THE IMMORTAL World Tour premiere at Staples Center in Los Angeles — At Staples Center in Los Angeles on January 27, 2012, Perez Hilton and his mom were on hand for the Michael Jackson THE IMMORTAL World Tour premiere. Photo by Mark Davis / Getty Images.

Ireland Baldwin, 30, wrote on Instagram that he’d “humiliated my family for years” and “sexualized me from a young age, commented on my weight and body (as a child),” before adding, “But his children deserve better and a healthy father and I am so sad for all of them. I hope he gets the help he needs and heals.”

Gillian Sheldon, a founding TMZ producer who’s known him more than 20 years, argued for holding both truths. “You can be conflicted about him and his place in culture, having drawn on people’s faces and called people names, and also have empathy for a human being who’s a father of three kids, who’s a son, who’s a brother, who’s an uncle, and who’s a friend.”

Perez Hilton and his mother Teresita at his 30th birthday party at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel — Perez Hilton poses with his mother Teresita at his 30th birthday celebration, held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills on March 22, 2008. Photo by Noel Vasquez / Getty Images.

Hilton, whose real name is Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., seemed to anticipate this moment. In a 2024 interview he said he was “fully resigned” to being confronted by his past forever: “I know that most probably when I’m dead people will celebrate that. People will say the world is a better place without him.”

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