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Nick scoffed at Alexis’s version of events. “We didn’t even go to Beso that night,” he said. “We’ve been to Beso—we’ve gotten wasted at Beso—but this had nothing to do with that night. Alexis just said that as a cover, I think, to make herself sound like” she was drunk and unsure about what was happening.
“Alexis was staying at my house” that night, Nick said. “My parents went out of town and I had the house to myself. Alexis’ mom had kicked her out of the house for, like, a learning lesson, so Alexis moved in with me. Alexis’ boyfriend was a drug dealer. Her family didn’t like him ’cause Alexis had had problems for smoking heroin for a while, and Oxycontin—‘O.C.’ I’ve seen [her] smoke it.”
“Obviously, it’s not true,” Alexis said when I later asked her about her alleged drug use. “I would never want something like that said about me.”
“Oh God, Alexis and Tess got into the hugest fight over me,” Nick said. “Tess was originally supposed to stay with me for those two weeks and Alexis stayed with me instead, and I guess Tess got upset about it. Tess felt threatened that Alexis was taking her friend. . . . And I felt like Alexis was trying to do that to Tess just to make her jealous.
“So Alexis was staying with me,” Nick said, “and this was the time when Alexis was into the whole ‘I want to rob,’ thing. Easy money and whatever.” (Neiers’ current lawyer, Lesli Masoner, declined to comment.)
Nick said it was Rachel’s idea to burglarize Bloom. “Miranda Kerr, the Victoria’s Secret model, was dating Orlando Bloom,” he said, “and Rachel wanted Victoria’s Secret model clothes. So we mapped out Orlando Bloom’s house. We knew he was out of town through the Internet—you’d Google his name, see ‘Orlando Bloom is shooting a movie, he’s with Miranda Kerr in New York.’ We planned to meet there, me and Alexis met Rachel and Diana, and we just kind of went from there. We went up to the house—in the video you can see Alexis is walking backwards up the hill. How would a drunk person, so sick, throwing up, be walking backwards up a hill?” he asked.
“That’s her Juicy sweatsuit,” Nick went on, “those blue pants are her Juicy sweatsuit, guaranteed they’re at her house right now.” He sounded a bit upset. “I’m more than happy to get on the [witness] stand and give them whatever they need,” he said. (Masoner declined to comment.)
Aside from the big robbery of Paris Hilton’s jewels—the proceeds of which Nick never saw, as Roy Lopez was never able to sell them—the theft of Bloom’s Rolexes was their most valuable haul to date. Bloom’s watch collection included over 40 timepieces, some of them quite rare. He had an anti-magnetic Rolex Milgauss from the 1950s and a Rolex Submariner—special items known to collectors.
“Rachel found them,” Nick said. “She was in the bedroom. . .and there was like a wall, and Rachel pushed on the wall and it opened up. It was like a bookcase in the wall . . . . I looked in and at the bottom there was a case full of Rolexes and, like, fifteen hundred dollars. So I picked it up and put it on the bed, opened it and we all saw the cash and the Rolexes.”
“Alexis was, like, in the house running around,” Nick said, “rocking” that Louis Vuitton laptop bag she’d found “like a purse.” “Miranda Kerr also had a dress there by Alex Perry, who’s an Australian designer,” he said, “like a one-of-a kind dress, a fashion runway dress. [Alexis] took that . . . . She had that dress; she had the bag. . . . Everyone just went into the house—you grabbed a suitcase and filled it up with whatever you wanted. Just throw everything in, go back to your house and look through it, and whatever you don’t want, just throw it out.”
Then “we all left,” he said. “We went to the cars and Rachel came up to me and she said, ‘I want to go back in. I want artwork ’cause I’m moving to Vegas. I want stuff to decorate my house,’ and I’m like, okay. . . .”
It was the first time Nick had heard that Rachel was leaving town.
30
Orlando Bloom told the Grand Jury that he was in New York on July 15, 2009, when he got a call from a woman named Maria Skara, a friend of his girlfriend Miranda Kerr. Skara said that when she went to Bloom’s house to pick up some things for Kerr, she found the place had been robbed.
“I called my cousin, Sebastian Copeland,” Bloom told the court on June 21, 2010, “and asked him to go up to my house and see what happened. He went to my house, and he called me and said, ‘Dude, you have been burglarized. You have been broken into. Yeah, dude.’. . . He said it was a mess.”
In testimony, Bloom, the suave-looking action star, detailed the psychological effects of the burglary on him and his girlfriend. He seemed still shaken from having seen his house trashed, and pained about the way in which the crime had caused him to suspect those close to him.
“There were things everywhere,” Bloom said. “It’s an awful, awful violation. [My girlfriend’s] property, my property, my underwear—you know, everything [was taken]. Personal items, things that I cherish and treasure. It was very hard—it’s very invasive, obviously. You don’t know until it happens, but it’s an awful thing to go through.
“It was immediately apparent that there were painting and photographs [missing],” Bloom said. “It was immediately apparent that everything of any sort of real value had been sort of lifted. . . . There was a painting in the dining room . . . a picture in the hallway. There [were] photographs in numerous rooms around the house. There was a painting taken from the guest bedroom.
“[They took] jackets, T-shirts, underpants. There was a bag full of clothes that was stolen. And I think my girlfriend had a lot of her clothes [taken]. . . .
“I collect watches,” Bloom said, “and I had a collection of watches stolen, and a ring. . . . I had a box with [ten] watches and some stuff in it, and that was all gone. . . . There was a ring, and there was some of my girlfriend’s jewelry, and some cash that I had in the house for emergencies and stuff . . . Of course I kick myself now because I don’t have a safe. But I had [the watches and jewelry] in a box that I thought [I had hidden] quite carefully.
“There’s a wall that has . . . a secret [cupboard] in it,” he said. “If you look carefully, you can tell that there’s a cupboard there, but then there was bookshelves [in front of it]. And at the bottom [of the cupboard], I hid a box, like a briefcase box with my collection of watches and some other personal items in it at the back. I sat books around it, [so] it just would have looked, like a bookshelf—somebody would have to have known.
“I mean, that was one of the things that was really freaky about the robbery,” Bloom said. “I thought, because they had found those [watches], that somebody who I knew personally must have broken into my house. To know that I even had the watches, because it’s not something that I talk about particularly. . . . The books were stacked so that it made it not obvious for anyone to look. Everything had been pulled out and dislodged in order to find them. . . . Not a single person in the world knew where I put those.”
Also stolen, Bloom said, was “a rug. It’s a very odd thing, because things sort of hit you later.” The total amount of his loss, he said, was “in the region of five hundred thousand dollars. The watches were of particular value.
“I was really, really freaked out that somebody, and somebody who I knew, who was close to me, who I work with, had somehow been connected to this,” he said. “And that for me was the worst thing about it. My housekeeper, [I] was pretty set on [her] . . . as my idea. And so she sort of declined to work.” In other words, she quit. “And I have since sent her flowers and stuff, you know.”
“You are suddenly second-guessing everything,” said Bloom. “You are like, ‘Who has been in my house?’ The value of things kind of fades away. It’s really about who is it? Who am I starting to question? You wind up looking around at people who are [your] friends [and asking]. . .who it is that could have been involved in this?”
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In late July 2009, Rachel moved to Las Vegas to live with her father. Nick said she told him she had to get away from he
r mom, with whom she wasn’t getting along. “She was living with her mother in Calabasas, and she and her mother had a falling out,” Nick said. “It wasn’t about a certain thing. They were just always kind of on edge, and she decided to make the decision to move in with her dad for a change of pace.”
It never occurred to Nick that Rachel’s decision to move could have anything to do with the burglaries they’d been doing; or the release of the Audrina Patridge surveillance video in February 2009; or the fact that Rachel had just been arrested with Diana Tamayo for stealing makeup at Sephora, and was now “in the system”—that is, the judicial system (her previous offenses were allegedly committed when she was a juvenile and therefore sealed). He never considered that she might be skipping town, distancing herself from him and the robberies. “Not to my knowledge,” he said when I asked him about this. To him they were still Nick and Rachel, closer than ever.
He threw her going-away party at Les Deux. It was the last time that they all hung out together—Nick and Rachel, Tess and Alexis, Diana and Courtney and Johnny. “There’s actually pictures of it,” Nick said. “I bought a table. I wanted to celebrate that Rachel was leaving in a good way. We all had drinks and I got really sick, of course. We had a really good time.”
He helped Rachel move to Vegas. They drove across the desert together, he said, his white Toyota crammed with her stolen goods: bags full of Paris Hilton and Audrina Patridge and Rachel Bilson and Miranda Kerr’s clothing and shoes and handbags and hats and underwear and makeup and jewelry and watches and Orlando Bloom’s paintings and rug. It didn’t occur to Nick that he was assisting Rachel in taken stolen property across state lines. He said, “I really didn’t think about that.”
He said he stayed with Rachel at her father’s place for a week before coming home. “We were going to all the hotels and casinos and hanging out. Partying, I guess you could say.” He helped Rachel decorate her father’s house with Orlando Bloom’s belongings, hanging one of Bloom’s paintings in her bathroom. “She was, like, decorating her house [with stuff] from these celebrity homes,” Nick said.
He said that Rachel assured him they would stay close, that there wouldn’t be any change in their relationship, even though she’d moved away. She said she wouldn’t be gone forever, she would probably come back when things with her mom cooled down.
That week in Vegas, Nick said, they didn’t talk about all that they had done. He said they never really talked about it—why they did it, or what it meant. “It was, like, a weekend thing,” he said. “It was never that serious. In our minds, in the way we were—it didn’t mean anything.”
But his friendship with Rachel did mean something to him. There were so many things he wanted to tell her now; but he couldn’t bring himself to say any of them He just said good bye. “Then I went back to L.A.,” he said.
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By 2009, it had begun to dawn on people that the life of Lindsay Lohan wasn’t getting any saner, and that she might be on a trajectory from which her career might never fully recover. Lindsay’s career, so far, consisted of a string of successful Disney films (notably the 1998 remake of Parent Trap, which made her a star) and a bona-fide hit with Mean Girls (2004), the Tina Fey–scripted comedy about a girl who attains popularity by becoming a member of a vicious high school clique.
It was a relatively thin resume for someone as famous as Lindsay, who by now was on a first-name basis with the world. She had stayed in the public eye over the last couple years mainly through the disastrous Georgia Rule (2007)—during the shoot she was publicly reprimanded in a letter from her producer, James G. Robinson, CEO of Morgan Creek Productions, for her “unprofessional” behavior and “ongoing all night heavy partying”—and her repeated run-ins with the law, her multiple car accidents and D.U.I.s, trips to rehab, and habit of falling down in front of paparazzi (once outside club Les Deux). There was also the sideshow of her made-for-reality television family, her stage mother Dina (who had actually had a reality show of her own, Living Lohan, 2008) and her ex-con father Michael, a pugnacious fame-seeker who acted the part of his daughter’s nemesis, calling the tabloids on her, once selling her plaintive voicemail message to the gossip mill.
By 2009, Lindsay was already beginning to embody what is known as the celebrity “trainwreck.” The Internet was full of merciless chatter about everything from her latest legal battles to her breast size to her weight. She’d become a lightning rod for a new wave of misogyny as evidenced by the language with which it had now become acceptable to discuss a woman, particularly a young woman, at least online—that is, with the liberal use of the words such as “whore,” “slut,” and “bitch.”
A Google search of “Lindsay Lohan is a bitch” turns up over 13 million links; “Lindsay Lohan is a slut” comes up with over six million, and “Lindsay Lohan is a whore” over four million. Which says a lot more about the meanness of Internet culture than it does about Lindsay Lohan. In 2009, there was a popular drink among college kids, a “Redheaded Slut,” also known as a “Lindsay Lohan.” “It’s a Red-Headed Slut with some Coke in it!” said a drink website. Which I guess is supposed to be hilarious. By 2009, abusing Lindsay had become a national pastime. Her famous frenemy, Paris Hilton, kicked off the game in 2006, when she was videotaped shaking with laughter as oleaginous oil heir Brandon “Greasy Bear” Davis dubbed Lindsay “Firecrotch,” a reference to Lindsay’s fiery natural coloring. When Lindsay entered the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood, California, in July 2010 for probation violation, her fellow inmates reportedly taunted her with the moniker, chanting it.
By 2009, Lindsay was already wearing the scarlet “S,” for Starlet. While the others in her once infamous crew had settled down and begun to repair their images, Lindsay’s continued to unravel. Paris hadn’t been in a courtroom in almost two years. Nicole Richie, meanwhile, had washed her perceived sins away by becoming a mother, having had two children in quick succession with Good Charlotte lead singer Joel Madden in 2008 and 2009. And, in the most stunning turnaround of all, Spears, who had been committed to the psych ward of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in January 2008 for involuntary psychiatric observation, released her fifth Number One album, Circus, that same December, and then went on a wildly successful tour.
But in 2009, Lindsay seemed at her lowest point. In an emotional interview in Us Weekly, in the wake of her breakup with girlfriend Samantha Ronson, Lindsay cried—evincing a seemingly chronic inability to take responsibility for her actions—“Everyone’s turned on me. . . .” Ronson’s family had reportedly spoken to police about taking a restraining order out against her.
It pained her fans—and she did have fans—to see her fall, because Lindsay was talented. Meryl Streep said so, and so did Jane Fonda. Legendary director Robert Altman had cast Lindsay in a film (A Prairie Home Companion, 2006), in which she sang and acted nicely. Plus she was beautiful—“hot”—not yet transformed by the plastic surgery that would bury her fresh-faced looks a couple years later. In 2007, she was voted Number One on Maxim’s “Hot 100” list. And that was the same year she was arrested for, outrageously, hijacking an SUV with two men inside and engaging in a high-speed chase through the streets of Santa Monica (she was allegedly pursuing her former assistant’s mother, with whom she had been seen arguing earlier).
“It is clear to me that my life has become completely unmanageable because I am addicted to alcohol and drugs,” Lindsay said in court in 2007 upon being sentenced to a day in jail and three years probation for misdemeanor cocaine use and D.U.I. But shortly thereafter, she was in the tabloids again, fighting in nightclubs and tweeting angrily at Ronson.
What was wrong with Lindsay? Of all the Bling Ring victims, she bore an uncanny resemblance to the alleged members of the gang. She was the closest to them in age, only about four years older. And there seemed to be a powerful mirroring going on. To begin with, Lindsay seemed as caught up in her own celebrity as the burglars who came to rob her.
As part of
research for a Vanity Fair profile of Lindsay I did in 2010, I had a long conversation with one of her friends, a former boyfriend who had met her in 2003 when she was 17 and having her first moment of white-hot fame. “She became infatuated with just being a celebrity and being in the press like a Paris Hilton or a Kim Kardashian,” said the friend. “At the time she was blowing up, there was this whole celebrity gossip craze that became so big so she concentrated more on that than on her work. She thought it was about being in the gossip magazines. She would plant stories about herself.”
When I interviewed Lindsay for the same story, she seemed to concur with this assessment of how she was sucked into the fame machine. “Tabloids were becoming, like the main source of news in the world,” she said, “which is really scary and sad, and I would look up to those girls in the tabloids. The Britneys and whatever. And I would be like, I want to be like that. This was around Freaky Friday [2003], before Mean Girls.”
“It’s so ironic that Lindsay was in that movie Mean Girls,” another one of her friends told me, “because that’s exactly what it was like. Mean Girls with coke and paparazzi.”
“She was young and she had no real guidance,” said Lindsay’s former boyfriend. “Her mom”—Dina, who was then her manager—“had never managed celebrities before. Lindsay was her mother’s boss. She was bringing home the bread. If Lindsay threw a tantrum, her mom wouldn’t reprimand her.” Or worse, Dina was seen out partying with Lindsay; she was called an “enabler” in the media.
Without any discipline or guidance, Lindsay’s former boyfriend said, “She developed this sense of entitlement. Since she was a little kid, people were giving her whatever she wanted. She just became rebellious and spoiled and thought that everything was hers and she had the right to everything. She didn’t think anything could happen to her.” Which was strangely similar to how people had described Rachel Lee to me.
The Bling Ring Page 18