The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  But Alexis insisted: “I have a good statement to say.”

  “I’m a firm believer in Karma,” Alexis began, “and I think that this situation was attracted in my life because it was supposed to be a huge learning lesson for me to grow and expand as a spiritual human being. I don’t think the universe could have really chosen a better person than me because for this—it’s not just affecting me, it’s affecting the media, it’s affecting everyone—and I think that I’m meant to bring truth to all this.

  “I think that my journey on this planet is to be a leader,” she said; her voice was trembling now. She was welling up. “I see myself being like Angelina Jolie but even stronger, pushing even harder for the universe and for peace and for the health of our planet.

  “God didn’t give me these talents and what I look like,” she said, “to be sitting around and just being a model or be famous or whatever path I want.” Her pretty face was screwed up with emotion. “I want to do something that people notice, so that’s why I’m studying business”—she had taken some classes at Pierce College—“because eventually I want to be a leader. I want to lead a huge charity organization. I want to lead a country, for all I know. I don’t know where I’m going just yet, but eventually I can see myself taking a stand for people.”

  “And so it is,” said Andrea. It was their family motto, a Hindu prayer and the mantra of the movie version of The Secret.

  11

  Christopher Lasch’s 1978 best-selling book, The Culture of Narcissism, noted a trend of Americans becoming more self-absorbed at a time of diminishing economic expectations. Since then, sociologists and psychologists have been trying to puzzle out the reasons for the precipitous rise in narcissism in America. Over the last three decades, American college students have scored increasingly higher and higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), a test of narcissistic personality traits developed in the 1980s by psychologists Robert Raskin and Howard Terry at the University of California at Berkeley. (The rising of the scores has actually accelerated over the last decade. The increase between 2002 and 2007 was twice as large as the increase between 1982 and 2006.)

  Without being told what the test is about, respondents are asked to rate which statement in a pair describes him or her best. The first question on a shortened version of the test says, “Choose the one that you MOST AGREE with. . . A) The thought of ruling the world frightens the hell out of me. B) If I ruled the world, it would be a much better place.”

  The American spirit is about confidence; in “Self-Reliance” (1841), Emerson said to “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” But the kind of spiritual wholeness presupposed by that encouragement is very different from believing, as high scorers on the NPI do, that, “I can live my life any way I want to,” or “I will never be happy until I get all that I deserve.” The Bridezillas and Real Housewives of reality television, with their outrageous demands and insistence on being treated like queens, are cartoonish symbols of an age in which many people seem to feel so entitled they believe they “deserve” royal treatment. Advertisers happily cultivate the notion. JetBlue assures us that we “deserve a vacation”—and snacks. Time Warner Cable’s slogan is “The Power of You.” Kohl’s department store ran an ad with a 2007 song by the punk band The Dollyrots (also featured on Paris Hilton’s reality show The Simple Life) entitled “Because I’m Awesome”: “I’m a leader/I’m a winner . . . I don’t need you . . . and I beat you/’Cause I’m awesome.”

  The self-importance and diva behavior on display in shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Gastineau Girls (2005–2006)—whose star, Brittny Gastineau, was on the Bling Ring’s target list—are extreme reflections of traits that have now become familiar, especially among the young. In a 2008 survey of college students, one-third said they should be able to reschedule an exam if it interfered with their vacation plans. A 2007 survey of 2,500 hiring managers found that 87 percent felt that young workers “feel more entitled in terms of compensation, benefits, and career advancement than older generations.” And then there is the “princess phenomenon” in which little girls who believe they are princesses insist on dressing in bejeweled plastic tiaras and faux taffeta ball gowns purchased from the $4 billion Disney Princess empire.

  One possible reason for the spike in narcissism, according to the authors of The Narcissism Epidemic (2009), Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, is the value American culture puts on fame. It’s a chicken-and-egg proposition—do we want to be famous because we are narcissists? or has fame culture made us narcissistic?—but according to one study, famous people tend to be the biggest narcissists of all. In 2006, Drs. Drew Pinsky and Mark S. Young published the results of administering the NPI to 200 celebrities from all fields of entertainment: “they showed that narcissism is not a byproduct of celebrity, but a primary motivating force that drives people to become celebrities,” the authors wrote in The Mirror Effect. In other words, many of the leading representatives of our dominant culture may have seriously dysfunctional personalities.

  Other possible factors for the rise in narcissism are the self-help and self-esteem movements of the 1970s; the Baby Boomers’ premium on “finding yourself”; the skyrocketing divorce rate (which drove families apart and isolated individuals, allegedly turning them inward); the expansion of celebrity-driven media, and the emergence of reality television. You might throw into that pot the fall of the Berlin Wall, which gave Americans an unbridled feeling of national triumph in our hegemony (“USA! USA!”).

  And another factor is parenting. Listening to Alexis talk about her plans to possibly run a country someday, I was reminded of a child-size T-shirt I’d seen for sale in a store that said, “Future Leader of The Free World.” It hung on a rack alongside other shirts saying, “I’m In Charge,” “Spoiled Rotten,” and another saying, simply, “FAMOUS.” I always wondered what kind of parents bought shirts like that for their kids. Apparently parents of budding narcissists do. The reaction of many Baby Boomers to the strict upbringings of their Depression-era parents was to indulge their own children, praising every scribble and softening every blow, giving them an inflated sense of self-worth, leading to a host of ills, including “failure to launch syndrome,” or the inability to figure out how to move out of the house and live as an independent adult.

  More troubling, according to child psychologist Dan Kindlon, author of Too Much of a Good Thing (2001), overindulgent parenting can lead to character flaws resembling the so-called seven deadly sins: pride, wrath, envy, sloth, gluttony, lust (here, an unhealthy promiscuity), and greed. “The seven deadly sins are, of course, a succinct summary of the symptoms of narcissism,” write Campbell and Twenge.

  12

  It was just a coincidence that I happened to know a family who knew the Arlington-Dunn-Neiers family when they lived in Oak Park, in the Canejo Valley (it’s about ten minutes away from Thousand Oaks, where Andrea and Alexis later moved). I met this family while I was doing another story. The mother, who asked to remain anonymous, and I’ll call “Susan,” had taken a pole dancing class from Alexis at Poleates, a Pilates and pole dancing studio in Westlake Village.

  “Andrea was into all this Buddhism stuff,” Susan said, “but then she was letting her daughter hang out in nightclubs.”

  “At five thousand feet from the situation,” said Susan’s husband, who also asked to remain anonymous, “I could see that Andrea had become her girls’ buddy. She had no objection to her daughter teaching a pole dancing class.”

  Susan’s daughter, whom I’ll call “Emily,” was friends with Alexis, Tess, and Gabrielle Neiers—known as “Gabby”—when they were all Oak Park neighbors. When Emily met the family in 2005, Alexis was 14 and Tess 15. “Tess lived with her parents in Oak Park, but she hung out at Alexis’ house all the time,” Emily said. “When I first met them they were not wild at all. They wore no makeup. They were just naturally pretty and they were always talking about their spiritual thing. Guys loved them; al
l the guys’ mouths would, like, drop open when they saw them.”

  But then, she said, the girls began to change. “They became, like, these manipulative girls. They were good at getting guys to do what they wanted. They said they were older than they were. Their mom, Andrea, would do arts and crafts all the time. Tess was nice. She dated this boy who had inherited a lot of money. He had parties. Everyone would be there. Rick James’ son Taz was part of the scene.”

  And then, “Tess and Alexis started getting into modeling,” Emily said.

  “They were always doing photo shoots,” said Susan. “Andrea let them do those boudoir pictures in Paris.”

  In 2009, when they were 18 and 19, Alexis and Tess appeared in a video shoot for Issa Lingerie, which showed them in a Paris hotel room wearing fancy Victorian underwear and canoodling with each other. Their youthful allure was made use of, again, in a TV commercial for CamsNetwork.com, “The Hottest Adult Web Cams Site on the Net.” In the ad, they can be seen in matching sports bras and “booty shorts,” jogging bouncily down the street together, until they come upon a stunned male pedestrian, unaccountably stop, and begin caressing his face.

  Emily said, “Alexis showed us all this stuff—she knew it belonged to celebrities. She showed us this dress she said belonged to Miranda Kerr”—the Victoria’s Secret model and then girlfriend (now wife) of Orlando Bloom.

  13

  Rubenstein wouldn’t allow me to ask Alexis about the Bloom burglary yet, which I wasn’t thrilled about, but I decided to make the best of it and ask Alexis about herself. I did want to know the background of the kids, where they came from and who they were when they weren’t allegedly burglarizing celebrities. I wanted to know about Alexis’ friendship with Tess.

  “She’s been in my life since I was two-and-a-half and she was three years old,” Alexis said. She and Tess had met in ballet class as little girls, she said, and “she’s stuck ever since. We’ve shared a bedroom for the last six years. We’ve legally adopted her,” she claimed. “She had a kind of dysfunctional background. We both did.”

  “And I met her mom,” Andrea interjected.

  “Can I talk please?!” Alexis snapped, turning around in her chair to glare at her mother.

  Andrea stopped talking.

  “The reason why we related so well,” Alexis went on, turning back around, “is my dad is a recovered drug addict and alcoholic, and Tracie, Tess’ mom is—”

  Andrea tried to cut in again to say something.

  Alexis turned around and shouted, “Please! I told you that if you were going to be here you had to be quiet!”

  Andrea shut her mouth.

  The lawyers shuffled papers.

  Alexis and Tess seemed to have a very close bond, so much so that they would sometimes pretend to be sisters. Their reality show, Pretty Wild, which would premiere on the E! network on March 14, 2010, encouraged the idea that Alexis, Tess, and Gabby were all actually sisters—wild sisters. The premise of the show was simply that—wild and pretty girls who lived in the Valley, with Andrea as the harried mom who can’t figure out how to stop their out-of-control behavior. The show had been brought to comedian Chelsea Handler by a young comedian and actor, Dan Levy, who was familiar with Tess and Alexis’ underage presence on the Hollywood nightclub scene; and then Handler brought it to the E! network.

  When the girls appeared together—in short, tight dresses and high heels, beaming and giggling—on Chelsea Lately on March 11, 2010, to promote the show, host Handler said, “You’re all sisters,” to which Alexis, Gabby, and Tess responded, “Yes.”

  “So one of you was involved in that burglary,” said Handler, who during the interview did not disclose that she was the executive producer of Pretty Wild.

  “Well, I certainly would not say I was involved,” said Alexis. “I’ve been accused of many things. The press constantly is hounding me. . . .We definitely use our philosophy of the Secret to get us through this.”

  “It absolutely works!” said Tess.

  “You were in a movie together?” Handler said.

  It was called Frat Party (straight to DVD, 2009). Dan Levy had also appeared in the film.

  “We had a love scene together,” said Alexis, coy.

  “Alexis and I,” Tess said, proud.

  It was a mini-make-out session in which Tess was topless.

  “Sisters had a love scene together. So this was shot in the Valley?” Handler joked. The audience laughed, perhaps aware of the Valley’s reputation as the capital of the adult film industry.

  In real life (as opposed to “reality”), Tess was not abandoned, nor was she ever adopted. Born Tess Amber Adler to Tracie and Franklin Adler, she attended Oak Park High School and Oak View High School, another alternative high school in the area. (She took “Taylor” as her stage name.) After her parents divorced, she lived with her mother and then her father, according to sources who know the family.

  When I had the opportunity to talk to Tess on the phone, in December 2009, she told me she had no contact with either of her parents. “My mom kind of fell off the face of the planet,” she said, “and it just luckily happened” that she was taken in by Andrea some six or seven years earlier. When I asked if I could talk to her mom, Tess said she was “unreachable. Honestly I have no idea [where she is].”

  Soon after the premiere of Pretty Wild, discussions began to pop up online about the identity and relationships of the characters on the show, which was generally found to be unwatchable. “This is an example of the downfall of our society” was a typical complaint. (Joel McHale, host of E!’s The Soup, would quip, “Pretty Wild is like Keeping Up with the Kardashians without the intellect or the moral center.”) You can only put so much stock in anonymous comments on blogs, but there was a repetitive nature to some of the stories told by people online who claimed to know the family. And some of these claims were borne out in my interviews with Andrea and Alexis—for example, the fact that Andrea and Tess’ mother Tracie had once been very close.

  Alexis said, “My mom and [Tess’] mom became best friends and—”

  Andrea interrupted, “And then—”

  Alexis shouted, “Please! That’s why I didn’t want you in here because you talk!”

  Online comments painted a picture of two New Age friends, pretty Andrea Neiers and Tracie Adler, who had two pretty little dark-haired girls they would take to ballet classes and services at the Westlake Church of Religious Science. Tess, especially, showed a talent for dancing at an early age; people who knew the family thought that one day she would go professional. As the little girls grew, their mothers began to have trouble at home. Andrea’s husband, Mikel Neiers, left her for another woman. Alexis told me that when she was three, her father left her mother for a production assistant on Friends. The breakup was hard on her, Alexis said. Neiers married the woman, but then later, “his wife left him,” said Andrea. (Mikel Neiers declined to comment.)

  Tracie Adler also got divorced from her husband Frank. Their daughter Tess was becoming “wild,” hanging out at nightclubs in Hollywood, and not getting along with her father. “Frank and Tessy’s relationship was tough,” Alexis said. Tess moved out of her father’s house when she was around 18, preferring to stay at Alexis’ house, where her unofficial mother now also acted as an unofficial manager, encouraging Tess and Alexis in pursuing careers in modeling and acting.

  In July 2009 Tess became a Playboy “Cybergirl.” Andrea was there for Tess when she began working for the porn empire where Andrea herself once had modeled. “I was in the magazine doing ads all the time,” Andrea told me. “I was a centerfold in the international edition. I was a Playmate.” Stephen Wayda, the veteran Playboy photographer who shot Tess’ Cybergirl shoot, also photographed Andrea in the 1980s, Andrea said. “I remember those days,” she told me nostalgically.

  Cybergirls, who appear on Playboy.com rather than in the print version of Playboy magazine, are considered second-string; but Tess was an instantly popular one. She was “
Cybergirl of the Week” for the week of July 14, 2009—coincidentally the week after Alexis allegedly participated in the Orlando Bloom burglary. Tess was “Cybergirl of the Month” for November, the month after the Bling Ring suspects were arrested and her face and midriff appeared all over the media. And she would be “Cybergirl of the Year” for 2010.

  “Enough about Tess,” said Susan Haber curtly.

  14

  “In my life,” Alexis said, dabbing at her eyes, “I’ve had a lot of struggle, with my dad falling off the face of this earth—he wasn’t a father. He wouldn’t give any child support for years and he was a drug addict and alcoholic and thank God now he’s sober and lot more in my life than he was before.” (Mikel Neiers declined to comment.)

  “And that’s why I want to be doing charity work,” Alexis said, “and that’s why I want to encourage women to take a stand for themselves. To realize that they don’t have to deal with this in their lives and through certain steps you can eliminate negativity in your life—”

  “Or the possibility of it,” murmured Andrea.

  “Or the possibility of x, y, and z,” Alexis said.

  “I dealt with a lot,” Alexis went on, “with a lot of women leaving and coming into my life. My dad had a lot of girlfriends, and there was a lot of abuse with my dad. Some physical.”

  “Um, Alexis—” Andrea cut in.

  “I’m being honest!” said Alexis.

  “Okay,” said Andrea, “but you also have to be considerate of where your dad is now.”

  “He’s raised his hand on me a couple of times.” Alexis sniffed. “He’s smacked me in the face. Stuff like that. Just a lot of verbal abuse, emotional abuse—just pain, in seeing him in bad positions.” (Again Mikel Neiers declined to comment.)

  While as a reporter I was interested in knowing these things, I was also curious as to why Alexis was revealing such intimate details about her life just minutes after we’d met. I wondered if it could have anything to do with the confessional culture in which she’d been raised, with celebrity confessors like Oprah—whom her mother told me she idolized—and Dr. Phil, Jerry Springer, and Maury prompting their guests to spill their guts posthaste, as this made for better TV. Exposing one’s pain had become a celebrity rite of passage, and Alexis seemed to think of herself as a celebrity, although her reality show had not yet aired, or even been picked up by a network. Whatever the reason for her confessions, she clearly felt traumatized by something.