The Bling Ring (36 page)

And then there was Courtney Ames. On December 14, 2012, Courtney pleaded no contest to one count of receiving stolen property—it was that leather Diane Von Furstenberg jacket of Paris Hilton's, the one Courtney's wearing in the photograph from Les Deux, the same jacket Nick Prugo said she stole from one of those early missions to Paris' house in the fall of 2008, when the Bling Ring had first discovered “going shopping.”

Courtney received three years supervised probation. “You caught a break and you know it,” Judge Fidler told Ames in court, again referring to the Goodkin affair.

“The prosecution never developed the position that Courtney Ames entered the home of any of the crime victims,” said Robert Schwartz. Courtney is now back at Pierce College and “getting straight As,” according to her stepfather, Randy Shields.

41

“Goodbye world,” Nick tweeted on April 15, 2012, before entering the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in L.A. His $200,000 bond had reportedly been revoked by his parents, who had formerly put their house up as collateral. It seems they had grown frustrated with Nick's repeated drug use (he'd been in and out of rehab programs since being arrested) and thought jail might be the best place for him until he was sentenced.

Nick had pleaded no contest on March 2, 2012, to two counts of residential burglary for Audrina Patridge and Lindsay Lohan. His plea deal was two years. “My hope is to keep him in the local jail as much as possible,” his attorney, Markus Dombois, told me. “I hope it drags out and Nick, with good time credits, will only serve a year.”

Before he went into jail, Nick came out to his parents, according to his other lawyer, Daniel Horowitz. “Nick is gay and being able to say it and say it to his parents was a tremendous watershed for him,” Horowitz emailed. “He believes that keeping this hidden led him to act in ways that were self-destructive, e.g., the drinking, partying, trying to seem important, etc. He came out to his parents and there was no resistance by them. They were immediately and tremendously accepting. This is not just Nick saying it. Shortly afterward, I was with Nick and his dad. His dad was so supportive that it touched me . . . a lot.”

“It's like this whole Bling Ring thing was one long complicated way of coming out for him,” said a friend of mine who's gay. “It's sad.”

42

Rachel Lee is now living in the California Institution for Women in Corona, California (she was originally sent to Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, but was later transferred). On September 24, 2011, she pleaded no contest to one count of burglary of Audrina Patridge, and was sentenced to four years in prison. “The last two years of my life have changed me from an irresponsible and childish drug and alcohol addict towards becoming a responsible adult,” Rachel wrote in a letter to Judge Larry Paul Fidler before she was sentenced. “I was really messed up from so much substance abuse as well as poor choices of friends.”

At CIW, Rachel may be doing clothing and textile manufacturing, making shirts, shorts, jeans, smocks. Or she may be learning construction. She may be taking computer training or adult education classes. She may be involved in the Drug Treatment and Diversion program or the Prison Puppy program.

Before entering jail, Rachel reportedly received some coaching from Wendy Feldman, a celebrity “prison consultant” and founder of Custodial Coaching. Feldman has appeared on
Today, Nancy Grace
, and other news programs. CBS Radio called her the “go-to girl” for people going into custody.

Just before Rachel entered jail on October 21, 2011, Feldman gave an interview to Fox News' FOX411 Pop Tarts column online. “[Rachel] is a very little scared girl, and she had a drug problem, a self-esteem problem,” she said. “Rachel is also extremely shy and this gang became a way for her to make friends. It became a rush and it was so easy, but obviously she has learned a lesson. . . .Rachel has gotten lots of therapy; she's gotten clean and sober and become much closer to her mom. She has taken full responsibility for her actions.

“To be honest, Rachel has a learning disability,” Feldman went on. “She doesn't have a particularly high I.Q. and I find it hard to think she could have been the one to instigate the whole thing. She wants nothing to do with the movies or with the media. She accepts full responsibility for what she has done, but she was a young girl who was absolutely fascinated by celebrities.”

The Rachel who had been described to me by multiple sources—schoolmates, friends, co-defendants, cops—didn't sound that dumb. I wondered if, faced with the daunting prospect of jail, Rachel was playing the helpless “pretty girl,” again, as Nick said she did when she needed things to go her way. Feldman's characterization of Rachel's motivation also sounded a lot like what Nick had been promoting about himself with journalists—including me: she did it because she had a drug problem, she did it to make friends, it wasn't her idea.

Although she has never spoken to a reporter, Rachel has already been depicted in two films: Lifetime's
The Bling Ring
(2011), and Sofia Coppola's
The Bling Ring
(2013). In neither film does she appear to be shy or unintelligent. Without ever saying a word to anyone, Rachel came to symbolize the spoiled, celebrity-obsessed American teenager. It will be interesting to see, when she comes out of jail, if she has anything to say about that.

43

In April 2012, then 20-year-old Alexis married a handsome 37-year-old Canadian businessman, Evan Haines, in Mexico, in front of 20 guests. She told
E! News
they had met in Alcoholics Anonymous. “It's amazing to be in a happy marriage with such a loving husband,” Alexis tweeted in October of last year. She was already pregnant. She Instagrammed a picture of her “baby bump,” as the celebrity magazines call it. “I felt like I've always had motherly instincts,” she told E! Online. “So it's been a very joyous experience.”

Alexis seemed to have come a long way since she spent time in jail. After she was busted for probation violation on December 1, 2010, and found to have black tar heroin in her home, she was sentenced to a year in rehab. She checked into the SOBA Recovery Center in Malibu, a celebrity rehab center, that same month. She seemed to take her recovery seriously, vlogging about it frequently, sharing her tips for staying sober with her “fans.”

And then in December 2011, Alexis declared that she had been sober for a year and had completed a course to become a drug and alcohol counselor. She did a very candid interview with her former nemesis, Nik Richie of The Dirty, on his online Nik Richie Radio. Richie was the one who had posted pictures of both Alexis and Tess smoking Oxycontin from a bong. He's sort of a wannabe Howard Stern, a tough-talking exposer of pseudo-celebrity secrets.

“I was a drug addict,” Alexis admitted on his show. She said that she had had her first drink at 12, and that by her teens she had become a user of “I.V. heroin, I.V. cocaine, major Valium, major Adderrall.” She said that she was “drinking, drinking, drinking, it was out of control. . . .I was major into Oxies”—the pill form of Oxycontin.

“I was smoking twenty eighty-milligram Oxies a day,” Alexis said. During the filming of
Pretty Wild
, she said, she was actually living “at a Best Western at Franklin and Vine,” staying in the hotel room and doing drugs with her “user friends.”

“Yeah, but you were famous,” said Richie.

“I don't even call myself famous, I was a fucking drug addict,” said Alexis.

“It was about getting as far from reality as possible,” she said. “Drugs and alcohol were” a way of “seeking acceptance. That goes hand in hand with this whole celebrity thing. . . . Our culture as a whole idolizes this behavior.” She attributed her problems to the sexual abuse she said she had experienced as a child by a person close to her family; and to the influence of Tess: “We are like fire and gas.”

Alexis seemed almost like a different person now. The squeaky baby voice was gone. The spiritual clichés had vanished. She seemed sober. And then Richie started asking her about her involvement in the Orlando Bloom burglary—for which Alexis had already done her time.

“I was not there for it,” she said flatly. She denied that the LAPD had ever found any stolen items in her house. She said she was “not on any surveillance” footage. “I only knew Nick [Prugo] for four months really, during this whole thing,” she said.

44

“I'm in this recovery journey and it's been an incredible learning experience for myself,” Alexis had said in one of her post-rehab blogs. She was sitting on her bed, wearing a blank tank top, showing off an armful of new tattoos. She looked as glamorous as ever, if in a different mode. She was recovery Alexis. She was styled like her idol, Angelina Jolie.

“I
know
who I was,” Alexis said of her former incarnation. “I was a dope fiend, alcoholic, lying, cheating girl, and it was not a pretty picture by any means.”

And then she started talking about Tess. “It's nice when you find out stuff about your sister on a media outlet,” Alexis said, laughing softly. She was referring to how TMZ had reported that Tess had been arrested in January 2012 for drug possession. Alexis said she hadn't spoken to Tess since Tess left the SOBA Recovery Center, where she had briefly spent time in 2011 getting help for her own addiction problems. “I'm really, really happy to say Tess checked herself into treatment again,” Alexis said. “She checked into the Pasadena Recovery Center. . . . TMZ did another story about that. She's not doing the whole celebrity rehab thing. I've gone to visit her several times now and I can really see the growth and the change and the lightbulb really starting to turn on. And it's really an incredible thing to watch. To see someone really getting to know who they are is a beautiful, beautiful thing.”

Alexis tweeted that she's having a daughter.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In researching this book, I relied on many sources, including L.A.P.D. officers, officials in the L.A. District Attorney's office, and defendants in the Bling Ring case, including Nick Prugo, Alexis Neiers, and Courtney Ames. I spoke to their friend Tess Taylor, as well as Alexis' mother, Andrea Arlington Dunn; her father, Mikel Neiers; and her sister, Gabrielle Neiers. I interviewed Ames' stepfather, Randy Shields, and Elizabeth Gonet, the mother of co-defendant Jonathan Ajar. I interviewed friends and classmates of several of the defendants. I spoke to lawyers for all of the defendants, sometimes multiple lawyers for a single defendant.

As further sourcing I used police documents such as the L.A.P.D.'s report on the case and search warrants for the defendants' homes. I viewed surveillance footage of the burglaries at the homes of Audrina Patridge and Lindsay Lohan, which were made available publicly, and Orlando Bloom, which was shown to me by an L.A.P.D. detective. I read the Grand Jury proceedings which took place in June of 2010, at which all of the celebrity victims testified. I used accounts from newspapers, magazines, and online news outlets.

I did not speak to Rachel Lee, although I made many attempts to do so through her lawyer, Peter Korn. I spoke to Korn only once, when he told me that he did not wish to participate in any media regarding the case, and did not want his client, Lee, to do so either. The case against Lee is detailed in the Grand Jury proceedings and in the report of the L.A.P.D.'s investigation. I sent Lee a letter to her prison address, asking her to respond to allegations made in those documents as well as allegations made by other sources, but she did not respond. I sent letters to Lee's mother and father, Vicki Kwon and David Lee, neither of whom responded.

I have relied here on interviews I did with Nick Prugo in the fall of 2009. I communicated with Prugo in person and, later, by telephone and text messages. As Prugo was himself charged in multiple burglaries, his credibility as a witness was called into question by some of the lawyers for other defendants. However Prugo's confession was the basis for the L.A. District Attorney's case, and his testimony led to the discovery of stolen goods in some of the defendants' homes. The participation of some of the defendants in the burglaries was then verified by other police work.

I relied very little on Detective Brett Goodkin in telling this story, mostly via the L.A.P.D.'s report on the case, which Goodkin wrote. The report was not his work alone, however, but the product of several other detectives on the case, including Detectives Steven Ramirez and John Hankins. The basis for the report was largely Nick Prugo's confession, which, again, was a jumping-off point for further investigation.

In the last year Goodkin has been the subject of media attention and criticism from some of the attorneys in the case for having appeared in Sofia Coppola's film,
The Bling Ring.
However, several of the lawyers involved told me that they did not think Goodkin's movie appearance diminished the credibility of his police work. “Goodkin's movie participation has nothing to do with his conduct at the time,” wrote Daniel Horowitz, Prugo's current lawyer, in an email. “I'm still not sure what he did wrong. Certainly he did nothing that would affect his investigation of the case.”

The Bling Ring case, involving several teenage defendants, became one of “he said-she said,” as criminal cases often do. Defendants made allegations about each other's participation in the burglaries. As I researched, I made all of the defendants aware of any allegations that were being made against them, and gave them an opportunity to respond. In some cases their lawyers chose to respond and in other instances they declined.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blake, Jeanne, Collins, Rebecca L., Lamb, Sharon, Roberts, Tomi-Ann, Tolman, Deborah L., Ward, L. Monique and Zurbriggen, Eileen L.
Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls.
Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2010.