Paris Hilton: Poet or Plagiarist?

The poem, which she also submitted to the literary journal People magazine, is surely well known to all by now:

They say when we reach a crossroad Or a turning point in lifeit doesn’t really matter how we got there but what we do next after we get there, usually we arrive by adversity and it’s then and only then we find out who we truly are and what we are truly made of, it’s a process, a gift, and a journey and we travel it alone, the road may be rough at the beginning but we find we are able to walk it.

After I heard Hilton read the poem on Larry King Live, I called my friend Scott Brown and asked him to set her words to a rocking 19 80s power ballad. We submitted a clip of it to Will Ferrell’s web site, FunnyOrDie.com, where it received more than 200,000 views — nearly a third of the hits received by Haunted Lesbian Sorority.

I did not imagine that people one day would fight over authorship of those words. But Judi DeBella, a 43-year-old chef-turned-real-estate-agent-recently-turned-back-into-a-chef-because-of-the-housing-crash, living in Utica, New York, saw my name on the music video and e-mailed me to do just that. She claims that she wrote Hilton a fan letter in jail that started with those precise 13 lines, the ones that evoke Nietzsche, Oprah, Whitesnake and Robert Johnson in a way most poets don’t have the guts to try without a guitar and a keyboard, and probably one of those keyboards shaped like a guitarParis Hilton: A poet or plagiarist?.DeBella — who keeps photocopies of everything she writes — faxed me a copy of the first of her trilogy of handwritten letters to Hilton, which went on, quite convincingly, in the same style for two pages and ended, after quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, with the line, “I’m just an everyday person who has been to the crossroads.”

“I knew in the first four words that it was my letter,” she says about watching the Larry King interview. “I battled writing those words. ‘Do I want to put crossroads? Do I want to put turning point?’ And then I decided on both,” she said.

That’s the moment when I totally believed DeBella.

I’ve spent five weeks e-mailing and calling Elliot Mintz, Hilton’s publicist, making it clear that the Los Angeles Times was about to run a story about this accusation. Though he said he would get back to me, he hasn’t. I’m guessing when you’re Hilton’s publicist, you’re a busy guy. In retrospect, I should have gotten his attention by saying Hilton wore the same dress as DeBella.

Meanwhile, DeBella’s family and friends are encouraging her to sue. But DeBella, who has talked to a few lawyers, isn’t sure.