When two gossip-attracting starlets publicly deny that there's a rivalry percolating between them, it's the solemn duty of the tabloids to make sure that if no feud existed previously, one does now:

"Paris left so many hurtful messages on Mischa's voice-mail," a Barton friend claims to us. "She'd call her a cow. Mischa finally had to change her number."

Yesterday, Barton said in Britain's Daily Mirror: "[Paris is] making out there's this big rivalry between us, and there so isn't. She seems to hate everyone around her age who is more successful. Silly bitch."

Barton also told the paper Hilton doesn't have a "hands-off policy" when it comes to other women's men. "She does steal people's boyfriends!"

Barton's rep insists that she was joking. But Paris isn't laughing.

"I don't even know the girl," Hilton told us. "I could care less. It seems like she's the one trying to stir up a rivalry. I've never said a word about her in my life. But she seems to be spending a lot of time thinking about me."

Though we must admit that it's pretty hard to choose sides between a one-skank self-promotion industry and someone who was out-acted by some pool furniture and finds the act of driving a car beneath her, if we were the betting type, our money would be on Hilton. The cruel voicemail-bombs seem to be Hilton's m.o., and Nicole Richie has never recovered from their well-publicized falling out, recently resorting to whoring herself out to the diet soft drink industry to keep her name in the press. In the end, after all the weaves are yanked and cheekbones lacerated by the angry flailing of bony elbows, Hilton will be the last silly bitch standing, triumphantly straddling Barton's broken body and playing her defeated rival's ribs like a xylophone.

• Paris and Mischa: Is it war? (second item) [Rush & Molloy]
• Previously: Jesus, Paris, For the Hundredth Time, My Refrigerator Is Not Running [Defamer]