The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  “What did you tell him?” I asked.

  “We’re not gonna get into that,” said Rubenstein.

  “Well they found some [allegedly stolen] stuff at your house,” I said.

  “We’re not gonna get into that,” Rubenstein said again.

  “It was my grandmother’s jewelry,” said Alexis. Actually, it was the black and white Chanel necklace allegedly belonging to Lindsay Lohan and Marc Jacobs bag allegedly belonging to Rachel Bilson. “Everything that was found I have receipts and copies for,” Alexis reassured me. But an officer with the LAPD later told me Alexis never provided receipts for anything.

  “He [Officer Alvarez] said he was gonna take me down to the station for more questioning,” Alexis said. “He told me I was arrested. He read me my rights. I yelled to my mom that I would like my lawyer. . . . I started crying; they took me outside and put me in the back of the cop car. . . . I was feeling exhausted from the night prior—so tired, shaky, because I have hypoglycemia. I become really shaky and I get really bad migraines that lead to me vomiting or getting really dizzy or passing out.” Coincidentally, these are also the symptoms of a hangover.

  “By the time I was in the car I was already a mess,” Alexis said. “I got down to the station and they put me in a holding cell, which is like the scariest most terrible place ever. It smelled terrible; it was freezing. Before I left my house the female officer took me up to my room and let me get dressed”—at which point Alexis put on a pair of ice blue Juicy sweatpants. The LAPD would later point out the similar look of these sweatpants and the pants worn by one of the figures in footage from Orlando Bloom’s surveillance cameras on the night of the burglary of his home.

  “In the holding cell,” Alexis said, “they told me what I was arrested for. I was in shock. I was scared. I felt like, why is this happening to me?”

  17

  The producers of Pretty Wild told me they believed Alexis when she said she was innocent; and they didn’t seem very worried about her case. Alexis being in the news brought attention to their show and paparazzi to her house—she wasn’t even a celebrity yet, and yet she was being treated like one, with photographers camped out on her lawn, waiting for her to emerge. “This is so annoying,” Alexis says in an episode of the show as photographers follow her mother’s car, snapping away.

  Pretty Wild covered Alexis’ legal battle with the same light-hearted style as, for example, the scene where Alexis and Tess plan Gabby’s birthday party. (“We’re doing a pole dancing routine for you,” Alexis says. “This is my sixteenth birthday, not some kind of whore party,” says Gabby.) As soon as Alexis was in the squad car and on her way to the Van Nuys Community Police Station on the morning she was arrested, the Pretty Wild camera crew was filming again.

  In the show’s pilot Andrea and Gabby can be seen traveling to the station in an SUV driven by Mikel Neiers, after they all had a prayer circle.

  “Those two,” meaning Tess and Alexis, “think they’re invincible,” Andrea complains in the car. (Tess had also been taken in for questioning.)

  “Untouchable,” Gabby chimes in. “Maybe this was just the universe sending a wakeup call.”

  “Her face is gonna be all over the Internet,” Andrea frets.

  “Oh. My. Gosh,” says Gabby.

  “What? . . . That’s frickin’ ridiculous! . . . She’s so stupid!” Andrea says, when Tess informs her by cell phone that Alexis had waived her right to have an attorney present when she spoke to police. (Tess had Jeffrey Rubenstein in the room when the police talked to her.)

  Rubenstein told me, that morning at Van Nuys Station, “Andrea arrived with the bondsman. We were talking in the hall. She asked me, ‘What’s happening with my daughter?’ and then she started buzzing, I said, ‘What’s that?’ She was mic’d,” meaning wearing a microphone. “I said, ‘What? Are you kidding me? I’m a lawyer. You’re asking me confidential information and you’re mic’d?’ The reality crew was there, recording us. I put a stop to the filming.” Rubenstein hadn’t yet joined the cast.

  In the pilot, Gabby tells the camera, “I cannot believe that Alexis was arrested. I don’t understand this at all. It was just like, this whirlwind of like, thoughts was going through my head like, what could this be?”

  18

  When we arrived at Alexis’ house in Thousand Oaks on the day of her arraignment, November 16, 2009, the reality crew was setting up in the living room. The house was a set, with photographic equipment parked everywhere and lunch for the crew set up in the kitchen.

  It was a brightly lit suburban home, cheerfully furnished, with religious talismans and floor-standing statues of Buddhas, which Andrea told me she had purchased at the closing of a Thai restaurant. She said that she and “the girls” prayed in front of the statues every morning.

  Alexis went and changed her clothes while the crew prepared to shoot a scene in which Andrea and Mikel Neiers recount for Gabby what happened in court that day. Gabby looked very much like Alexis, with long dark hair and a pretty face. She told me she had recently lost 40 pounds. “My mom has a machine that sucks the fat out of you,” she said, “upstairs.” In her bedroom upstairs, Andrea had an assortment of New Age beauty equipment including a plastic face mask that resembled the Jason Voorhees mask in the Friday the 13th series; but I didn’t know which one was the “fat machine,” which Alexis had described to me as an “infrared hot dome” that “literally melts your fat.”

  Gabby told me that she went to Alexandria Academy in Agoura Hills and that “the fat girl on Weeds goes there.”

  The reality crew was ready to film the scene. “Tell her, ‘Everything’s go to be okay, Gabby,’ ” said Gennifer Gardiner, the supervising producer. She was standing to the side of the action, holding a large loose-leaf binder—the script.

  “Everything’s going to be okay, Gabby,” Andrea repeated. She was still dressed in her brown suit from court.

  Mikel Neiers looked a bit lost.

  Gardiner told him what to say.

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  I’d always heard that reality shows weren’t really “real,” but it was startling to see evidence of it firsthand. As I stood watching the Dunn-Neiers family act out the facile script of their lives, I wondered what fans of these shows would think if they could see for themselves that they were fake.

  The target audience for most reality TV is young women and teenage girls. And studies of teenagers have shown they identify strongly with characters on TV, often replicating their behavior. What’s served up on the scripts of reality TV is, of course, shocking behavior, profanity—and outrageous women. From My Super Sweet Sixteen (2005–) to the Real Housewives franchise (2006–) to The Bad Girls Club (2006–) to Jersey Shore (2009–2012), reality’s females are ruthless creatures who will stab each other in the back, if not punch each other out, almost as quickly as they will take off their clothes.

  A 2011 study by the Girl Scouts Research Institute found that reality television may be having an unhealthy effect on the self-image of girls—50 percent of whom said they believed reality TV was “real.” The Girl Scout study found that 68 percent of regular reality TV viewers believe that “it’s in girls’ nature to be catty and competitive with one another,” while only (only?) 50 percent of nonviewers do. Seventy-eight percent said that “gossiping is a normal part of a relationship between girls,” and 63 percent said, “it’s hard for me to trust other girls,” compared with half of nonviewers. A higher percentage of reality TV viewers also agreed that “Being mean earns you more respect than being nice” and “You have to be mean to others to get what you want.”

  In a 2010 lecture titled “Project Brainwash: Why Reality TV Is Bad for Women,” media critic Jennifer Pozner railed against how reality TV “crushes” women for our amusement, calling it a “pop cultural backlash against women’s rights and social progress.” What’s disturbing is why the women who appear on these shows submit themselves to the negative stereotypes they’re asked to fulfill—do they want to be fam
ous that bad? Is fame more important than self-respect? Is it really worth the money?

  That was always Kate Gosselin’s argument: that she needed to put her kids on Jon and Kate Plus 8 (2007–2011) in order to keep food on the table (meanwhile the show made her famous and rich). Gosselin was criticized for airing her toddlers’ private moments on camera; but this was really nothing compared with the mother on an episode of Toddlers & Tiaras (2009–), who dressed up her four-year-old like Julia Roberts as the prostitute in Pretty Woman. Or June Shannon, the mom on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (2012–), who plies her six-year-old daughter Alana, a.k.a. “Honey Boo Boo Child”—an inverse Shirley Temple for our age, a little girl with the moves of a stripper and the catch phrase “A dolla make me holla”—with a caffeine cocktail of Red Bull and Mountain Dew (she calls it “go-go juice”) to get her energy up to perform. “There are far worse things,” Shannon said in an interview. “I could be giving her alcohol.”

  Pretty Wild fulfilled both trends: that of women and children being exploited in the name of “reality.” “I am the mother of three wild and crazy teenage girls,” Andrea says in the pilot of the show, announcing to the world that her daughters (one of whom, again, was not actually her daughter) are out of control. Throughout the series (which would last one season), she could be seen giving Tess and Alexis Adderall. “Every morning I give the girls Adderall,” Andrea cheerfully informs the camera. “Time for your Adderall!” she calls. (Alexis said she was taking the prescription drug for ADD, but it was never clear why Tess was taking it.)

  “Alexis and Tess, it is time for school!” Andrea shouts in Pretty Wild. But both Tess and Alexis were done with high school well before the show was filmed (Alexis graduated from her homeschooling program when she was 16). You can only wonder if it was considered more titillating for the audience to think of Tess and Alexis as barely legal, high-school–age girls. In nearly every episode, an excuse was found to show them in bikinis, even topless (with their breasts fuzzed out for broadcast), disrobing. In one episode they could be seen wearing bikinis and pole dancing in the living room. In another pole-dancing scene, Andrea joins in, awkwardly spinning around the metal bar. (The pole was installed in their house for the series.)

  In an episode entitled “Breast Wishes,” Andrea takes Gabby bra shopping at a lingerie store, encouraging the 16-year-old to try on a sexy black lace brassiere. “I’m gonna try it on too because I think maybe we should have matching bras,” Andrea tells Gabby. “No!” Gabby shouts. But Andrea does so anyway, appearing alongside her daughter and wearing the same bra as they look in the store mirror together, Gabby scowling.

  The girls of Pretty Wild were stereotyped; but so was Andrea herself, cast in the role of the jealous mom who’s competitive with her beautiful young daughters. She played the anxious MILF, or, pardon the expression, “Mother I’d Like to Fuck”—a designation which didn’t exist until being “hot” seemed to become more important, in the gaze of pop culture, than being a mother.

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  The impossible new standards of youthful beauty do seem to have made it harder for some mothers to watch their daughters develop into young women and therefore gracefully accept that this means that they, too, are aging. It’s a malaise that seems to be felt particularly hard by the Baby Boomer generation. As Baby Boomers started getting older, they resisted the inevitable—they wanted to look younger. And an America obsessed with the rich and famous wanted to look like the rich and famous could afford to look—which always meant looking younger.

  The past decade has seen a huge boom in the anti-aging and plastic surgery industries. Ten years ago we had Oil of Olay; now there is micro-dermabrasion, Retin-A, antioxidants, and peels. “Fillers” like Restylane are becoming so mainstream, women in Dallas are getting them done in the mall. Americans spent $10.1 billion on plastic surgery in 2011, undergoing nearly 14 million cosmetic procedures, an 87 percent increase since 2000. Between 2000 and 2011, Botox treatments were up 621 percent. More than 230,000 cosmetic plastic surgery procedures were performed on people ages 13 to 19 in 2011. And American girls had 8,892 breast implants.

  It’s hard not to see Americans’ preoccupation with their appearance as anything but another symptom of a culture of narcissism. The Narcissistic Personality Inventory includes the statements, “I like to look at myself in the mirror” and “I like to show off my body.” The preoccupation with good looks and fame merged in the MTV reality show I Want a Famous Face (2004–), which follows the lives of 12 young people who receive extensive plastic surgery so they can look like their favorite celebrities—among them, Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Ricky Martin, and Victoria Beckham.

  As never before, Americans seem concerned with looking, as Paris Hilton called it, “hot.” Interestingly, the precursor to Facebook was Facemash, a website launched by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg while he was an undergraduate at Harvard, on which students could vote on the hotness of their fellow students. Now Facebook has become the central stage on which nearly a billion people worldwide post pictures and other content about themselves, promoting their greatness and hotness. Hot Or Not, a website launched in 2000 with basically the same idea (and no connection to Zuckerberg), has attracted hundreds of millions of users internationally who have voted over eight billion times on each other’s hot-or-notness.

  After she finished filming that scene with Gabby and her ex-husband, Andrea came into the kitchen fiddling with her mic box. “Dude,” she told me (like Audrina Patridge’s mom, she often talked in that rough Bro-Speak most commonly associated with teenagers), “I can never figure out how to put on this thing. Tessie and Alexis and I were at a runway show—and I was looking so hot, this young guy were checking me out—and the mic box slid down my hose. It looked like I took a friggin’ dump!”

  Alexis was downstairs now. She and Gabby smiled uncomfortably.

  21

  While they were setting up for me to interview Alexis in the living room, I was starting to get a queasy feeling about all this. Susan Haber had been sent along to sit in on the interview, and now she was telling me I couldn’t ask Alexis anything about her case.

  “But Jeffrey [Rubenstein] said I could,” I reminded her.

  “Not now,” she said brusquely. “Another time.”

  “When?”

  “Not today,” Haber insisted. “If you ask her anything about it we’re going to have to cut this short.”

  I went outside on the lawn to call my editor.

  “What do they think I’m doing here?” I complained. “They’re acting like this is a celebrity profile. I think they just want publicity for the show.”

  “Just do what you can,” he told me.

  Alexis came into the room in full makeup, beaming. She was wearing a sweater and leggings, very Sandra Dee. We were seated on a mahogany couch with white and yellow pillows between us. Alexis sat cross-legged.

  One of Andrea’s sculptures of Buddha sat in the foreground. Susan Haber stood a few feet away, watching us sternly. A cameraman, a soundman, and Gennifer Gardiner were across the room. The camera started to roll.

  “What’s it like to be you?” I asked Alexis.

  “My life’s pretty cool,” Alexis said, very cutesy-bubbly. She seemed to be enjoying the Vanity Fair interview moment in her life. “I find myself to be a normal teenage girl. I go out a lot. I go to dinners with my friends and shopping. I shop everywhere.”

  I asked her about her style.

  “I’m just into a big new craze of tights and sweaters,” she said. “Big into shoes and handbags. I’m always in heels—at least five inches or taller. I have a pretty cool shoe collection going on right now. . . . I love fashion; eventually I’ll have my own line. That’s one of my goals. My shoes are everything from Christian Louboutin to Miu Miu to YSL . . . I have tons of bags.”

  Susan Haber interrupted: “Can you make a statement that all of the shoes and handbags that you have—it’s hard to purchase them. Like, ‘I can’t
afford this so that’s why I like to go to cheap stores and once in a while I splurge.’ ”

  “Well, I can’t always afford them,” Alexis amended. “I’m saving up plenty of paychecks, of course. I can’t afford the high-end stuff all the time. I teach pole dancing, Pilates, hip-hop—that’s my main income right now.” But since she had started filming the reality show, she’d stopped teaching classes. And how much does a pair of Louboutins cost? $500? $1,500? How much does a part-time pole dancing teacher make? I wondered.

  “And of course modeling is great and I wish I could do that all the time,” Alexis said. “But with this business, sometimes you’re on, sometimes you’re off. And it’s hard to save once you do get those big paychecks. . . . Saving is difficult. Also I save by not going to the tanning salon all the time or . . . I’ll do my own nails.”

  “What else is important to you?” I asked.