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LOS ANGELES - Hotel heiress and reality TV star Paris Hilton has been ordered to spend 45 days in jail for violating the terms of her probation for alcohol-related reckless driving.
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ordered the 26-year-old celebrity socialite jailed for driving on a suspended license in February. He ordered her to report to jail on June 5.
People magazine reported Hilton, 26, who was present along with her parents, as looking shocked when the sentence was read, while her mother gasped.
The judge, Michael Sauer, made the decision after a two-hour hearing during which Hilton insisted she was unaware that her driving privileges had been suspended when she was pulled over for driving without headlights on February 27.
"I'm very sorry and from now on I'm going to pay complete attention to everything. I'm sorry and I did not do it on purpose at all,"' Hilton told the judge before he announced the sentence.
Hilton will not be allowed any work release, furloughs, use of an alternative jail or electronic monitoring in lieu of jail, Judge Sauer ruled.
Hilton was placed on three years probation earlier this year for pleading no contest -- the equivalent of a guilty plea -- to alcohol-related reckless driving after a September 2006 arrest in Hollywood.
She landed in hot water again in late February, when she was pulled over on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood for driving without headlights. Police impounded her car, a US$190,000 blue Bentley, when they discovered she was driving on a suspended license.
Hilton's latest legal problems come a little more than three weeks before her reality TV show, The Simple Life, co-starring her friend Nicole Richie, returns to the airwaves in the US for a fifth season. The series has already been taped.
- REUTERS
