The Bling Ring (20 page)

At the other end of the hall, a mob of reporters was clustered at the door to Department 30, arguing with the blonde court public information officer about who was going to be let inside. Too much media had shown up for the number of benches—the
Los Angeles Times
was there, and
Good Morning America, Dateline, Inside Edition
, TMZ, et al. The publicist was blocking the door like a nightclub bouncer. Reporters were pleading with her, flashing their credentials. “Is E! going to get a spot?” one demanded, outraged. The answer was yes, they were.

It was time to go into the courtroom now. Alexis stood up, wobbling a moment on her heels. She wore a fuzzy pink sweater and a short tweed skirt—demure as Rubenstein had suggested. A diamond stud twinkled in her left nostril. The cameraman said “ready,” and Alexis began to walk down the hall. It reminded me of the girls learning how to walk the runway on
America's Next Top Model
. The camera followed.

Alexis pleaded not guilty in her baby voice.

Despite Rubenstein's advice against it, she insisted on making a statement for the media on the courthouse steps after her hearing.

“This is a very difficult time for myself and my family right now,” she squeaked for the cameras, smiling flirtatiously. “I just want to say thank you for respecting my privacy, and I look forward to my day in court and to getting this all cleared up.”

After this, Rubenstein filmed a scene in the parking lot where he was discussing the case, repeating lines for
Pretty Wild
's supervising producer.

16

About the last thing I ever wanted to do was appear on a reality show; but the producers of
Pretty Wild
had Alexis under contract to work on the day of her arraignment, and said I could only interview her if they could film me doing it. “Go ahead,” said my editor on the phone. “That show will never get picked up.” At that point it did seem unlikely.

We all drove from the courthouse to Alexis' home in the Valley. I traveled in a van with some of the crew, two girls and a guy, all in their 20s. “Alexis and Tess are in a fight,” one of the girls told me as we drove along, the mountains coming into view. “Tess isn't living at the house right now—she's staying somewhere else.”

“What are they fighting about?” I asked.

“Maybe 'cause they're both burglars and only one is taking the rap?” said the guy with a laugh. (When I spoke to her, Tess denied having been involved in any burglaries.)

“No,” said the girl. “I heard they're fighting 'cause Tess wants to be in your article and Alexis just wants it to be about her.”

“Do you think Alexis is guilty?” I said.

“I don't know,” said the girl. “There sure were a lot of cops at their house when she got arrested.”

Alexis had described for me the chaotic scene of the morning of her arrest. (At her lawyer's request, this conversation had taken place at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel.) She said that she had come home late from the first night of filming
Pretty Wild
—the camera crew had followed her and Tess as they partied the night away at Wonderland, one of their favorite clubs—and she was pretty out of it.

“I woke up with my mom and my sisters screaming at me around 9:30 and put on my robe,” Alexis said. “They were screaming that the police were here and that we needed to leave the premises and come outside in my driveway. All of my neighbors were outside. The cops were like in full SWAT uniforms; they wanted to make sure there was no one else in the house, no weapons, and that the dogs were under control.” The Dunn-Neiers household was home to a yippy Yorkshire terrier. “There were five cop cars and a lot of cops, ten cops probably—”

Andrea was trying to say something.

“I'd like you to stop talking!” Alexis said, raising her voice. “I'm sorry—she talks in every interview! I just don't want her to say anything! So,” she went on, “they handcuffed me right away, I was in complete shock. I started crying, my sister [Tess] was crying, Gabby was crying. My biological dad was there. He's just there in the morning; he gets to my house around five a.m., he comes pretty much every day—”

Andrea interjected, “There's more to that story. He doesn't really have a place right now—” (Mikel Neiers declined to comment.)

“I would like you to stop talking!” Alexis shouted. “I did not want that information to come out and that's why I asked you not to speak in this interview. Now if you'd like to go sit in the other room—”

Andrea closed her mouth.

“Anyways,” Alexis said, “he was there that morning. He just comes to the house, he waters the front and the backyard, he takes my sister [Gabby] to school. It's like a morning thing. It's like a big part of my life.”

“Did you have any idea why the cops were there?” I asked.

“No, I just had no clue,” said Alexis. “I was so scared. They immediately arrested me. I didn't think it had anything to do with me. They didn't tell me why they were there—they said be quiet, don't talk, turn around, face the wall . . . We went into the house and they separated me from my family and put me in another room . . . They started ransacking the house, going through everything—stuff was flying everywhere. They were talking and making some rude comments between each other and he”—Officer Jose Alvarez of the LAPD, one of the arresting officers at the scene—“sat me down and he said do you know why I'm here? He said he had a search warrant; he pulled out a big book and in that book was a photo of me and honestly I was petrified. I had no idea what was going on. It was like a headshot of me off my MySpace or Facebook or something. He started asking me a bunch of questions. I started telling the truth from what I knew; he was asking me questions about the people who were involved, locations, if I had seen anything that was stolen. I told him the truth and he said he was gonna take me down to the station for more questioning.”

“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.

19

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.