Cocaine not mine, Hilton tells police
Paris Hilton told police who arrested her for cocaine possession that rolling papers, $1,300 and several credit cards were hers – but not the purse they were in nor the bag of white powder that fell out of it, it emerged today.
Believing it to be cocaine, an officer asked the socialite who it belonged to.
“She said she had not seen it but now thought it was gum,” Lt Dennis Flynn of Las Vegas police wrote in a report.
Hilton, 29, told police the purse belonged to a friend. The friend was not identified.
Hilton, who was charged with cocaine possession, was freed without bail before dawn on Saturday after spending less than three hours handcuffed on a jail booking room bench.
Her lawyer, David Chesnoff, said he would not comment on the police report, adding: “The facts of the situation will be tested in a courtroom.”
Lt Flynn said Hilton acknowledged also owning a broken tablet of the prescription asthma medication Albuterol found in the purse she took with her into a security room at the Wynn Las Vegas resort.
He said she had asked to be allowed to go into the hotel after her boyfriend, Las Vegas nightclub mogul Cy Waits, 34, failed field sobriety tests given by a motorcycle officer.
The couple had been stopped in a black Cadillac Escalade after the officer smelled a “vapour trail” of marijuana smoke. Police have not said whether marijuana was found in the vehicle.
Lt Flynn said Hilton denied owning a small plastic “bindle” containing 0.8 grams of cocaine that he said fell out when she opened the purse to get a tube of lip balm.
Lt Flynn said that while Hilton was in the Escalade, she told him she was “extremely embarrassed, due to all the people taking pictures of her”, and asked to go inside the Wynn resort to use a bathroom.
The officer estimated the crowd at about 100 people.
Several photos apparently snapped with mobile phone cameras have been posted on at least one internet site showing Hilton with police at the Escalade on the neon-splashed Strip.
Las Vegas police do not have cameras on patrol vehicle dashboards.
Lt Flynn said Hilton was taken to a security holding room inside Wynn to await a female officer to accompany her to a rest room.
“Hilton said she needed to put some lip balm on, and I handed her the purse from the table,” Lt Flynn wrote. “As she began to open it, I saw a small bindle of what I believed to be cocaine in clear plastic baggy begin to fall from the purse and into my hand.”
Hilton briefly faced a marijuana charge last month after a Fifa World Cup match in South Africa, but the case against her was dropped after a woman who was with her pleaded guilty to possessing the drug.
Hilton will appear before a Las Vegas judge October 27 on a felony cocaine possession charge that could get her probation if convicted.
A violation of that probation could be punishable by up to one to four years in Nevada state prison.
Waits, 34, was arrested on a misdemeanour charge of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. He spent the night in jail before he was released on €1,500 bail with a November 29 court date.
