The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-obsessed Teens Ripped off Hollywood and Shocked the World. Nancy Sales Jo
female, and fairly troubled. A picture of Lindsay passed out in the front seat of a car, a photo of Britney strapped to a gurney, on her way to a psych ward, became indelible images of the new celebrity culture. But sometimes the starlets seemed to be milking their misfortunes for attention. Paris and Lindsay made use of their paparazzi-documented walks in and out of courtrooms and jailhouses, working them like runways. The public seemed to revel in their growing disrepute as much as they were outraged by it. The white, skintight Kimberly Ovitz minidress that Lindsay wore in February 2011 when she attended a hearing for grand theft felony sold out across the country almost immediately.
The national preoccupation with the trials and tribulations of these young women—who seemed to spin more out of control the more preoccupied people became—got so bad that former vice president Al Gore felt moved to weigh in, denouncing our “serial obsession” with “Britney and KFed, and Lindsay and Paris and Nicole” in his bestselling book, The Assault on Reason (Penguin, 2007). Newsweek decided that the influence of the starlets was becoming a matter of national concern and in 2007 did a cover story, “Girls Gone Bad,” which hovered on the edge of parody: “Paris, Britney, Lindsay and Nicole. They seem to be everywhere and they may not be wearing underwear,” said the magazine. “Tweens adore them and teens envy them. But are we raising a generation of prosti-tots?” An accompanying poll found that “77 percent of Americans believe that Britney, Paris and Lindsay have too much influence on young girls.”
But were the starlets really a source of trouble in Girl World, or just another one of its symptoms? Weren’t they just girls themselves, exhibiting in a public arena behaviors that had already become widespread? News of their misadventures was a powerful distraction from some of the more worrisome headlines of the day. How did it feel to be a kid in America? By 2008, the same year Nick Prugo and Rachel Lee began their burglary spree through the Hollywood Hills, we’d just lived through what might be considered some of the darkest eight years in American history. We’d been attacked by terrorists; engaged in two very bloody and unpopular wars. The Bush administration had sanctioned torture. We’d grown accustomed to the drone strike as a form of warfare, and had seen our fellow citizens left to perish on rooftops after Hurricane Katrina. If, as Joseph Stiglitz said, “trickle-down behaviorism is very real,” then there was plenty of meanness and aggression to trickle down.
Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008 promising hope and change; but nothing changes overnight. The number of drone strikes has increased. There have been 15 more mass shootings. As of 2013, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other industrialized country. And Lindsay Lohan is still getting arrested.
* The phrase appeared in Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes (Crown, 2002), largely the basis for the movie Mean Girls.
On a bright afternoon in L.A. in November 2009, I went to meet with Alexis Neiers at the offices of her lawyer, Jefferey Rubenstein. Rubenstein had a suite in an orange-colored high-rise on Wilshire Boulevard. After much back and forth on the phone he’d agreed to let me talk to his client, saying it was an opportunity for her to “protect her interests” in the face of a “prejudicial media storm.” In the press release he’d put on his website he maintained her innocence, saying she had been “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
This press release included a picture of Rubenstein and Neiers and Tess Taylor (also then his client) meeting in his office and poring over papers together. Taylor had on a halter-top that revealed some cleavage and some of her seventeen tattoos. Rubenstein had advised me that Taylor was “going to be a Playmate.”
“We think it’s a fun case,” Rubenstein had said on the phone. He’d told me he couldn’t discuss the particulars of Neiers’ situation, but he would talk about the Bling Ring generally based on information he had learned from the police.
“These kids went on shopping sprees,” he said. “It’s like they went shopping online. They’d look at a picture on some website of a celebrity holding a Marc Jacobs bag, and they’d say, instead of going to a Marc Jacobs’ store and getting a bag like that, I want that bag that Lindsay is carrying—I want Lindsay’s Marc Jacobs bag.”
Images taken off the recovered computer allegedly stolen by Nick Prugo showed a gallery of photos of celebrities in designer clothes and bling—Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox, Audrina Patridge, Britney Spears, Hayden Panettiere, Rihanna, Jessica Biel. It had a Google Images search with the heading “Audrina Patridge diamond watch” and photos of Lohan and her then girlfriend, D.J. Samantha Ronson, out shopping for Rolex watches in L.A.
“In some ways they were very unsophisticated,” Rubenstein said, “and in some ways they were right out of Ocean’s Eleven. My understanding is they did really detailed surveillance of these people. They’d drive by their homes and check out the places to see how they would enter. You know when you were a kid and you and your friends would break into your parents’ pool house and steal beer? There was some kind of clubhouse thing going on with these celebrities’ houses. They were hitting the homes more than once. They weren’t into hot prowls; they weren’t trying to find these people at home. But there was something very weird going on. This is a Dr. Drew book.*
“What started off as trespassing,” he said, “became burglary and then something much scarier. There’s elements in this stuff of—well, somebody brought up the Mansons.”
I asked him why he thought they did it.
“I wanna feel like they look,” said Rubenstein, riffing, “and if I have what they have then I’ll be like them. If I can dress like they dress, my problems will go away, my pain will go away….”
When I arrived at his office, Rubenstein got up from behind his desk and came over to greet me. He was a bullet of a man with a shaved head and dark blue eyes, which matched the indigo of his Armani jacket. There was a panoramic view of L.A. behind him and a framed picture of him with Neiers on his desk. “Even if I never get paid, I’m gonna get this little girl off,” he told me firmly.
“I wanted to keep her from being charged,” he said, “and I’m not happy that she was.”
On October 28, 2009, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office had formally charged Neiers with one count of residential burglary for the robbery of Orlando Bloom. (Taylor was never charged.) That same day, Nick Prugo was also charged with six additional counts of residential burglary—for Bloom, Hilton, Bilson, Green, as well as an Encino builder and developer named Nick DeLeo and a Hollywood architect, Richard Altuna (whose home Prugo had apparently mistaken for celebrity D.J. Paul Oakenfold’s). There were two counts against Diana Tamayo (for Lohan and Ashley Tisdale); one against Courtney Ames (for Hilton); and one against Roy Lopez (for Hilton again). Each count of burglary carried a potential sentence of two to six years in prison.
A warrant had been issued for the arrest of Jonathan Ajar for possession of narcotics and a stolen handgun found in his apartment in a police search on October 22. But so far, curiously enough, Rachel Lee had not been charged. “I was blown away when she wasn’t charged,” Rubenstein said. “She thinks she’s smarter than anybody else, and, guess what, I think she might be.
“This case has been amateur hour,” in terms of the justice system, the lawyer complained. “The other lawyers have made every amateur hour move that can be made. Everybody wants publicity. Even the police. And somebody’s talking to TMZ.” He frowned.
“One of my threats if Alexis was charged was to go on a media blitz,” he said. “I believe her story is compelling and I don’t think she was a principal.”
I asked him what her story was. Why did she have stolen property in her house? Why was she arrested for the Bloom burglary? “I can’t talk about that yet,”