Perez Hilton

Mario Lavandeira, a.k.a. Perez Hilton, was born on March 23, 1978 in Miami, Florida. Perez is the son of Mario and Teresita Lavandeira, the gossip queen has one sister, Barbara.  He was raised in Miami, Florida but currently splits his time between homes in New York and Los Angeles.

He graduated with Honors from New York University where he received a B.F.A. in Drama from The Tisch School of the Arts in 2000.  Lavandeira took a stab at acting but the roles just weren’t finding him. As struggling actors do, Lavandeira had many odd jobs before becoming the self-professed Queen of All Media.

He was a media relations assistant at GLAAD and honed his writing chomps by freelancing for many gay publications. He was briefly the managing editor of Instinct, a lifestyle magazine for gay men. He also served as a reported for Star Magazine, but was fired from that job. Frustrated, he started in 2004, a celebrity blog website called Pagesixsixsix, which was a reference to Page Six, the New York Post's gossip column. The blog earned the reputation of being Hollywood's Most Hated Website, but Perez was sued by the New York Post in 2005.  

He was then forced to change his domain name to PerezHilton.com. Since then, Perez is everywhere. His gossip site is one of the highest trafficked sites on the Internet. His posts are witty, sometimes cruel nuggets of tongue-in-cheek love. If he likes you it’s evident, if you’ve made the list: you get nothing but hate. He often adds his own doodles and captions to photos as part of the blogs culture.  

With success, however, comes scrutiny. PerezHiton.com has been sued numerous times for using photographs from agencies without garnering a license. His web hosting service recently dropped the site over those lawsuits sending Perez scrambling and forcing the site to shut down for several days while they made the switch.  Celebrities take swings back at the gossip blogger frequently. Roseanne Barr called him out in her blog and Fergie wrote a song about him on her The Duchess album called “Pedestal”.  

Despite all the haters, Perez Hilton marches and blogs on. He recently signed a lucrative deal with Viacom to appear in a series of specials for VH-1 called “What Perez Sez”. They air on September 7, 2007.