When Perez Hilton Blamed “America’s Dirty Imagination” for His Miley Cyrus Upskirt Photo
In 2010, Perez Hilton posted a revealing paparazzi photo of 17-year-old Miley Cyrus, faced a huge backlash, and said he had no regrets.
The photo showed 17-year-old Miley Cyrus climbing out of a car in a short white dress. Hilton linked it to his roughly 2 million Twitter followers with the note “truly not for the easily offended.”
Miley Cyrus was 17 when Perez Hilton pointed his roughly 2 million Twitter followers at a paparazzi shot of her getting out of a car in a short white dress in June 2010. Because she was a minor, the framing set off a wave of criticism and open speculation about whether the post crossed into child pornography.
Hilton was already known for running upskirt and crotch-focused shots of adult celebrities like Britney Spears, and had previously mocked Cyrus in sexualized terms. He linked to the photo via Twitter rather than hosting it on his site, later saying he didn’t have a licensing deal with the photo agency.
He pulled the link as the backlash grew and posted a video response wearing a faux fur coat with no trousers, legs crossed, insisting Cyrus “was clearly wearing underwear” and that he’d never have posted it otherwise. He called the controversy “fake,” said he picked the image to flag her “very unladylike” way of exiting the car, and noted she was aware paparazzi were at the public video shoot.
ABC yanked its View advertising from his site, a pointed hit given the network’s Disney ties to Hannah Montana. Prosecutors in Los Angeles said there was no criminal investigation, and no charges were ever filed.
On HLN’s The Joy Behar Show, Hilton blamed “America’s dirty imagination,” said he had no regrets, and said he would do the same thing again.
The two have been photographed together twice that’s on the record: at the Elton John AIDS Foundation Oscar party on March 7, 2010, about three months before the photo went up, and backstage at Jeremy Scott’s MADE Fashion Week show on September 10, 2014, where Cyrus posed next to him with her tongue out. In between, by Hilton’s own 2020 memoir, she confronted him at a movie theater and yelled “what the f–k were you thinking?” and in 2013 she told him on Twitter to stay out of her relationship after he pushed cheating rumors about her and Liam Hemsworth. Hilton later called himself “Team Miley”; she never reciprocated.
Cyrus brushed it off in a Ryan Seacrest radio interview as “some idiot being an idiot,” noting the negativity landed right as she was rolling out her Can’t Be Tamed album.
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