Perez Hilton’s Sister Says the People Calling His Hospitalization “Karma” Are Punishing His Three Innocent Kids
· Thought Catalog
Updated 10 minutes ago, August 14, 2026
The word Perez Hilton‘s family says has hurt the most is “karma.”
In the days since his August 4 hospitalization, a familiar chorus rose up online: that a man who built a career on other people’s pain was finally getting his. His younger sister, Barbara Lavandeira, has heard all of it — and in an exclusive interview with Page Six, she says the framing of his crisis as payback has been “especially painful.” Not for Mario, as she calls her brother. For the people around him who did nothing to earn it.
“Whatever anyone thinks about Mario, his children and our mother are innocent,” she said. “They shouldn’t be punished or tormented because of how people feel about him.”
Lavandeira is the one who found him. She unlocked his bedroom door, then the bathroom door, and saw him standing naked and cut up with a box cutter. “I didn’t recognize my brother when I looked at him,” she said. What followed was the kind of triage no sibling should have to run on instinct: she grabbed the car keys, yelled for the kids to run, called the police, and later went back inside to press towels over him while he waited for the ambulance.
The crisis didn’t come from nowhere. This past March, while living in Las Vegas, Hilton spent close to a month in the hospital after his body went septic and he coded several times — a brush with death that would leave a mark on anyone. He moved to Miami in June with his mother and children, hoping a new city might function as a fresh start. Almost as soon as he arrived, he started doubting the decision.
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The warning signs were there, and the family was watching for them. Roughly two weeks before August 4, Hilton told his mother and sister he’d taken leftover painkillers one night just to sleep. Lavandeira checked him into the hospital that same day. He was, by every outward measure, trying: he’d completed an intake call for an intensive outpatient program the very morning of the incident.
None of this is a request to rewrite the record. Lavandeira isn’t asking anyone to forget her brother’s 20 years of tabloid cruelty, the sneering headlines and doodled-on photos that made him famous and made him hated — cruelty he apologized for on network television back in 2010. She’s saying cruelty aimed at a struggling man may feel like justice to the people typing it. But it doesn’t land on him alone. It lands on three kids and a grandmother who were never part of the story people think they’re punishing.
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