Perez Hilton‘s sister is speaking out about the moment last week when she found her celebrity blogger brother in the bathroom of his Miami home covered in blood after cutting himself repeatedly while streaming the self-harm and possible suicide attempt live online.
“Aug. 4 will forever be one of the darkest days my family and I have ever experienced,” Barbara Lavandeira, the sister of the star blogger, whose real name is Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., told Page Six this week.
Lavandeira is referring to the date that her older brother was found livestreaming himself on TikTok from his home, making suicidal threats and using an object to cut himself repeatedly. The stream of the bloody incident was reportedly live for 30 minutes. As of Thursday, Hilton remained hospitalized in Miami and had allowed his mother to begin legal proceedings to take over temporary custody of his three kids.
Lavandeira was at the Miami home where her brother moved from Las Vegas with his three kids, all of whom were born via surrogacy, earlier this year. She told Page Six that she walked into the house to find Hilton’s bedroom door shut — which she said was odd, as he always left it open. She soon discovered that he was in the bathroom of his bedroom.
“When I knocked, he said he was fine, but I could barely hear him,” she told the outlet. “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.”
Soon after he stopped responding to her, she told her brother, with whom Page Six said she shares a tight bond, that she would be coming into the bathroom. When she unlocked the door and her big brother locked eyes with her, she came face to face with an unimaginable horror.
“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 told the outlet.
Lavandeira said that her first instinct was to get his three kids and her daughter out of the house and to someplace safe, which ended up being her car, until a nearby friend she called was able to take them away from the property. After this, she called 911.
“I left the room, grabbed the car keys and yelled for the kids to run to the car. Thankfully, our mom wasn’t home at the time, and I was able to get everyone out quickly,” she said.
After placing the call for help, she got back into the house and came to her brother’s aid, placing towels over him to stop the bleeding from the many cuts on his body. Lavandeira opted, while speaking about the incident, to leave out many of the details because “they’re too painful, graphic and overwhelming.”
Lavandeira also defended her brother, who in the early aughts burst onto the internet’s celebrity culture and gossip scene with shocking headlines and often lewd doodles over celeb images. As his fame grew, even surpassing that of some of the celebs he covered, backlash against his blunt and often cruel approach to celebrities and their trials and tribulations grew. Now, some are calling his incident last week comeuppance.
His sister addressed this to Page Six in their phone interview this week, also explaining that she reluctantly decided to speak out to clear up any rumors circulating online.
“I’m talking now for everyone who cares about him and has been sending their best wishes, but also because of all the rumors, false reporting, fake exclusives and made-up quotes going around,” she said. “I can only share what I personally witnessed and experienced, but I want people to hear directly from someone who was actually there.”
Amid the chatter about comeuppance, the celebrity blogger’s sister said that her brother is a good person who has expressed regret over the tone of some of his early-career scandals.
“Mario has publicly acknowledged the harm he caused earlier in his career,” she said. “In 2010, he went on network television and admitted that the outings, doodles and other things he did were wrong, and he has apologized repeatedly.”
Page Six, which also broke the custody news on Wednesday, reports that Hilton has been struggling since his family moved to Miami. The blogger was hospitalized in March after taking flu medicine on an empty stomach, which later led him to develop an ulcer, perforation and sepsis. The three-week hospital stay landed him with mounting hospital bills.
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