Perez Hilton Published an Upskirt Photo of 16-Year-Old Taylor Momsen With a Slut-Shaming Headline
Taylor Momsen was 16, playing a show in a dress, when a photographer shot up her skirt and the frame ended up on Perez Hilton’s homepage. He ran it with a headline calling her trashy.
Taylor Momsen was 16 and onstage at Vans Warped Tour in the summer of 2010 when a photographer knelt in front of her and shot up her dress. Her tampon string was visible in the frame. “Taylor Momsen’s tampon string” became a breakout search term tied to her name, the image surfacing on Google whenever fans looked her up for years after.
She’d landed Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl at 14, signed with Interscope, and was touring with her band The Pretty Reckless by 16, the same age she was upskirted onstage. Perez Hilton put the image on his homepage under a slut-shaming headline she says she doesn’t remember word for word, only that it ran along the lines of “What a slut. Look how trashy Taylor is.”
On his own site on June 28, 2010, Hilton acknowledged the photos were out there, writing that “more grotesque pictures from this event” showed “a tampon string tangling from down there” and claiming in that post he’d spare readers by not running them. Momsen’s memory is that the image did land on his homepage with a shaming headline.
She broke it down on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy in November 2025. “A) I’m underage. The violation. And the headline was very negative,” she said. “That kind of concept is so invasive and I laugh about it now and I laughed about it probably a week later because there’s nothing you can do about it, but that’s the kind of press that we’re talking about.”
She’d revisited the ordeal earlier on the podcast Podcrushed as well, calling it “embarrassing.” The photo is no longer on Hilton’s site, and he’s since called the incident “gross” and “unfortunate.”
The story is resurfacing this week alongside Hilton’s own crisis: a recent TikTok livestream involving self-harm that ended with him hospitalized, prompting a wider reckoning online with how his site covered underage female stars in the 2000s and 2010s.
Momsen is not the only one revisiting that era. Ireland Baldwin, the 30-year-old daughter of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, was one of the many people Hilton skewered after he rose to fame as a celebrity blogger in the 2000s. She wrote on Instagram that he “sexualized me from a young age, commented on my weight and body (as a child),” and “drew jizz coming out of my mom & friend’s mouths.”
Even so, she added: “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.”
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