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If you don’t live in LA or New York, you won’t get a chance to see Sofia Coppola’s newest movie, The Bling Ring, until June 21. The movie tells the story of a group of teenagers who allegedly robbed the homes of celebrities, including Orlando Bloom, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. Over the course of a year, this group managed to steal a reported $3 million worth of goods from the homes of various A-list celebrities. They came to be known as “The Bling Ring.”
Alexis Neiers, one of the teens who was charged for the crimes, was featured on the short-lived reality show, Pretty Wild when she was arrested. The show was supposed to be about a mother and her wild teenage daughters in star-studded, superficial Los Angeles. However, when Neiers was charged with taking part in the robberies, the story line quickly changed. One scene in Pretty Wild shows a clearly high Neiers screaming and crying while leaving several voicemails for Vanity Fair journalist Nancy Jo Sales after her negative portrayal in an article about the crimes.
The reality show played for one season on E! and was then canceled allegedly because pictures surfaced of Alexis and her adopted sister, Tess Taylor, smoking black tar heroin. Alexis Neiers, who is now 21, admits that she was high the entire time the show was filming.
She tells VICE:
“People think I was living with my family [when the show was filmed], but I was living at a Best Western on Franklin and Vine. I was smoking 20 80-mg oxys a day, I was doing tons of cocaine, I was panhandling for drugs. I had an over-$10,000-a-week drug habit. What you were seeing on TV was not what was really going on.”
VICE reports that after serving one month of her six month sentence (in the same cell block as Lindsay Lohan, ironically) she was released and then caught with heroin and sent to rehab.
She recalls the day she came clean about her addiction, during a hearing for her heroin arrest.
“I had this moment of clarity. I was prepared to go in there and deny all the drugs and to say it was everybody else’s fault. I didn’t. I remember saying to the judge, ‘I’m a heroin addict. I’m 19 years old. I can’t stop using heroin.’ I remember envisioning myself walking through that courtroom and having this presence of God on my shoulder, protecting me. There’s a man, Greg Hannley, who was in the audience, and he said, ‘I’ll take her to my rehab for a year on a scholarship.’ I was elated. There was my answer. I later asked him, ‘Why did you take me in for free?’ He was like, ‘It’s living amends for all the women that I hurt when I was using.’ What an incredible thing. He’s still helping people today. He saved my life.”
She is now married to a Canadian businessman she met at a 12-step meeting and is a new mother. She also reportedly volunteers at her husband’s sober living facility, Acadia Malibu.
She tells VICE:
“I’m living a life that’s beyond my wildest dreams. The truth of the matter is that, for the majority of heroin addicts out there, we don’t get sober. We don’t get healthy. For a lot of victims of rape and molestation, we don’t ever heal. This life that I’m living is absolutely—it blows my mind. It’s not filled with tons of money or fame. I wouldn’t give it up for anything. If I could just have my baby, my husband, our apartment and a car, I’d be happy. I feel really, really blessed.”
If you or someone you love is in need of heroin or painkiller addiction treatment, please give us a call at 800-951-6135.
Sources:
http://www.vice.com/read/alexis-neierss-pretty-wild-road-to-recovery
http://www.eonline.com/news/213818/pretty-wild-star-alexis-neiers-busted-for-heroin
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/03/billionaire-girls-201003