Paris May Not Film The Simple Life: Rwanda After All
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Okay, so a few weeks ago Paris Hilton did this interview with Newsweek, in which she talked about her planned philanthropic trip to Rwanda in coordination with a charity called Playing For Good. Founder Scott Lazerton said that the trip would be filmed as part of a new reality series:
She'll be traveling with a little-known children's charity called Playing for Good. "She's using her celebrity and the cameras that follow her for the good of humanity," says Scott Lazerson, the organization's founder. Let's not forget the good of Lazerson, and Hilton. Turns out that he's filming the trip in hopes of selling it as a reality show called "The Philanthropist," featuring various selfless celebrities who rescue the world's poor.
But hold up a second, don't pack those Gucci bags with Snickers bars just yet:
“Due to the restructuring of the Playing for Good Foundation, the philanthropic trip to Rwanda that the foundation had previously planned with Paris Hilton has been postponed,†the organization said Thursday in a statement.
Now comes word that the planned reality series was an unplanned fiction, or at the least a gross overstepping of his boundaries. It seems that Lazerton has been given the old heave-ho as part of the "restructuring":
A charitable organization on Friday denied that a planned trip to Rwanda it had organized for hotel heiress Paris Hilton, and which has been postponed, would have been filmed as part of a reality television show. [...]A spokesman for Playing for Good said Lazerson was no longer associated with the Spanish-based charity, the group never planned to tape Hilton's trip in order to sell a reality TV show and nor was Hilton linked to any such reality TV show.
Uhm, yeah...when you boot out the founder, I'd say that falls in the category of "restructuring". How much you wanna bet this Paris thing had something to do with it? Sounds like major backpedaling to me, to avoid a potential embarrassing situation. My guess is that they received a bunch of negative press after this interview.
So will Paris still go, if there aren't cameras following her? Has it occurred to her that she can still do philanthropic work without someone there documenting it all for posterior posterity?
So will there ever be a Paris in Rwanda? Watch this space!
