'It was nice to be away from all the flashes for a while,' she told talk-show host Wednesday night.
After letting the media do most of the talking while she was in - and then out of, and then back in - jail, Paris Hilton gave her first interview since the ordeal on CNN's "Larry King Live" Wednesday night. She opened up about the "traumatic" experience, telling the host that she's learned from her mistakes - but still believes she got a raw deal.
"It was a very traumatic experience, but I feel like God does make everything happen for a reason," the rejuvenated heiress told King. "It gave me a timeout in life just to really find out what is important and what I want to do, figure out who I am." She added, "It was nice to be away from all the flashes for a while."
Hilton's interrupted 23-day jail stint - for violating probation that stemmed from a DUI arrest - began when she unexpectedly turned herself in to authorities after making a surprise appearance at the MTV Movie Awards on June 3.
She revealed to King why she decided to go to jail that evening: "Actually, I was playing a trick on everyone, because outside my house outside there was paparazzi, I heard, from all around the world. So I thought, 'If I went to the MTV Awards, snuck out during the show, I could get  unnoticed,' and that's what we did. No one even saw me going in. ... I didn't want to cause a whole media circus."
Of course, that was only Hilton's first attempt at serving her sentence, as she was subsequently "reassigned" to house arrest due to a medical condition and then later ordered by a judge to return to jail. She was released again, after completing her sentence, early Tuesday morning.
While in jail, Hilton said she "was treated like any other inmate - no better, no worse." She lacked privacy, was confined to her cell for 23 hours a day and had to eat "jail slop." She also admitted that she had been strip-searched, calling it "the most humiliating experience of my life." She bided her time by reading the Bible and letters from fans - including correspondence from U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq, she said.
"I would literally sit in bed crying, reading these letters," she said. "I had no idea I had so much support from so many different age groups, so many people from around the world." While she didn't receive any hate mail while in jail, she did say she was "scared to open letters, because I was like, 'Uh-oh, I hope this person isn't mean.' "
Hilton choked up and looked downcast when King asked her about her toughest day in jail. "[It was] the first Father's Day when I couldn't give my dad a hug, and that was really hard on me," she said.


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