The Bling Ring (9 page)

“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,” Rubenstein said, “but we
will
. She wants her story known.” He further said Neiers “seemed to be a good girl” and had achieved the “highest level in Pilates you can earn.” (When I later contacted the Pilates Method Alliance, the governing body of Pilates in the United States, they said no such ranking exists.)

I asked Rubenstein if I could ask Alexis about her upcoming reality show,
Pretty Wild
.

He said, “I have to get clearance.” He didn't tell me he was also going to be a character on it.

Now Rubenstein's colleague, Susan Haber, brought Alexis and her mother, Andrea Arlington Dunn, into the room. Dunn was tall and curvy and wearing a fuzzy bronze-colored Juicy sweatsuit. A pair of headphones dangled from her ears, connected to a cell phone inside her purse. She had highlighted, shoulder-length brown hair and wore a startled expression. There was a flirtatious lilt to her voice, which brought to mind sex kittens of another era.

And then there was Alexis. She was a leggy five-foot-nine, wearing black tights, a long gray sweater, and six-inch heels. She had big hypnotic green eyes and a cascade of chestnut hair. On her wrists there were tattoos of cherry blossoms—“a sign of consciousness,” she told me—and on her hand there was an ankh, the Egyptian symbol for life. She was like something out of a Philip Marlowe tale, the beautiful suspect whose story sounds a bit suspect as well.

“I'm an indigo child,” Alexis said in her squeaky baby voice, after she'd settled into a chair. “Which means I have a special energy, a spiritual energy.”

Her mother nodded, wide-eyed, from Rubenstein's couch. I was trying to remember when I had seen a mother look on her daughter with such devotion—it was Kathy Hilton, mother of Paris.

An “indigo child,” I later learned, is a tyke who's said to be blessed with extraordinary and supernatural gifts, according to husband-and-wife New Age self-help gurus Lee Carroll and Jan Tober in
The Indigo Children
(1999).

“I believe that I'm an old soul,” Alexis said.

“Yes, she is,” Andrea murmured.

They told me that they lived by a spiritual philosophy, which relied heavily on the teachings of
The Secret
, the 2006 self-help best-seller by Australian television writer and producer Rhonda Byrne, which posits that wealth, health, happiness, and weight loss are all achievable through positive thinking.

“It's the law of attraction,” Andrea said. “It's the study of man's relationship to the divine. It's not Scientology. It's not Christian Science. . . .”

“My mom is a minister,” Alexis offered. “She's been a masseuse. She's an energy healer. She does holistic health care for people with cancer.”

“I don't serve at a church currently,” Andrea interjected.

She later told me that she'd been ordained through an online course, “the Ernest Holmes
⁷
Religious Science Ministerial Program, whose teachings include ancient wisdom principles from spiritual teachings since the beginning of time.”

“Our church does a yearly trip to Africa where they build wells and schools for the kids,” said Alexis.

I asked her which country; she couldn't remember.

“It was like three years ago,” said Andrea. “We participated in that fund-raiser.”

“We do bake sales, car washes, and we go to women's shelters during Christmas, feeding the homeless and all that type of stuff,” Alexis said.

“Alexis has expressed to me a lot of her humanitarianism,” said Haber, the lawyer, an angular woman with angular hair in a conservative brown suit.

I remarked that there seemed to be a bit of disconnect between Alexis' good works and her now being charged with burglary.

Haber interrupted, advising Alexis not to respond.

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; all the guys' mouths would, like, drop open when they saw them.”