The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-obsessed Teens Ripped off Hollywood and Shocked the World. Nancy Sales Jo

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СКАЧАТЬ were having a hard time, too. If we’re going to talk about the Bling Ring burglaries as iconic crimes, then we have to begin with the fact that, as my cop source pointed out, they were mostly girls robbing mostly girls. There was Rachel the “mean girl,” the arch fashionista; Courtney Ames and her blasé attitude toward getting high; Diana Tamayo, the good student who got into physical altercations; and Alexis Neiers with her pole dancing and exulting over her friend Tess Taylor getting tapped to pose for Playboy: “Tess and I woke up to a call from Hugh Hef,” Neiers tweeted on April 15, 2009. “Letting her know that she got a 6 pg layout and the cover for playboy! He asked me too but idk [I don’t know].”

They were like four faces of the crisis in what is sometimes known as “Girl World.”* Meanness, alcohol and drug abuse, aggression, “hypersexuality”—these were all symptoms of a plague of seemingly bubonic proportions that was robbing girls of their childhoods and making them confused and depressed and hard. Once upon a time, the American girl was a shining symbol of something fresh, spirited, and fully self-confident. Mark Twain said, “The average American girl possesses the valuable qualities of naturalness, honesty, and inoffensive straightforwardness; she is nearly barren of troublesome conventions and artificialities.” Now, the American girl is often associated with the raunchy style of the girls on Girls Gone Wild (1997–). She sometimes seems unhappy and out of control, and nobody seems to know quite what to do about it.

      I had a little girl of my own at home. She was lovely, then age nine. Travelling back and forth to L.A. from New York on this story, I would have to leave her for a few days at a time. I didn’t like to leave her, even though she was always with someone I trusted to the core. There was something about this story that was making me anxious to be near her, with her, watching over her. This story was making me think about what a tough time it was to be a girl growing up in America.

      The statistics are all so dismal. Nearly a quarter of American girls now say they start drinking before age 13. Between 1999 and 2008, the number of females arrested for D.U.I. rose by 35 percent. A 2012 study by the Partnership for a Drug Free America found a 29 percent increase in marijuana use among teenage girls from the year before, with close to 70 percent agreeing that “using drugs helps kids deal with problems at home.” The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that as many as 10 in 100 American girls and young women suffer from an eating disorder. Over the last two decades, the number of arrests of females age 10 to 17 for aggravated assault has nearly doubled. In 2005, Newsweek ran a cover story headlined “Bad Girls Go Wild,” calling “the significant rise in violent behavior among girls” a “burgeoning national crisis.” In 2004, the FBI released data showing an increase in arrests of girls between 1991 and 2000, with arrests of girls now accounting for one in three of all juvenile arrests. Boys commit suicide more often than girls do, but girls attempt it three times more often.

      Why were girls being so self-destructive? There’s certainly no lack of positive role models for girls in America (Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, Ellen Ochoa, and Serena Williams come to mind), but there’s also no question that there’s a disproportionate amount of coverage of women you wouldn’t necessarily want your daughter to emulate. When the Bling Ring girls were coming of age, there were four other girls in the public eye with very similar problems—except that they were very, very famous. In roughly the four years before the burglaries began, between 2004 and 2008, there had been a frenzy of news about the misadventures of a group of Young Hollywood personalities known as the “starlets”—Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, and Britney Spears, a panties-flashing coterie of paparazzi bait who were BFFs and frenemies in real life.

      The starlets seemed just as fame-obsessed as the consumers of the gossip about them, staging catfights for the cameras, calling the paparazzi on themselves. But they also had real problems. Paris, Nicole, and Lindsay had all been arrested for D.U.I. and done brief—sometimes very brief—bids in jail. (In 2007, Nicole did 82 minutes of a four-day sentence for D.U.I. That same year, Lindsay did 84 minutes of a one-day sentence for D.U.I. and misdemeanor cocaine use.) Nicole had admitted to using heroin, while Lindsay had been found with cocaine. In 2010, Paris was arrested for cocaine possession as well. Nicole and Lindsay had struggled with anorexia and bulimia, respectively. A 2006 paparazzi shot of them both looking skeletal, in designer gowns, is still shocking. Britney shaved her head and beat a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella in a bizarre public meltdown. Nicole, Lindsay, and Britney had all sought help in rehab. Nicole flashed her breasts for the audience at a fashion show.

      The starlets had the misfortune of having shot to fame just as the celebrity news business was exploding like a mushroom cloud. TMZ chased after them as if they were their own personal Furies. They were perfect fodder for the new, mean style of celebrity reporting, being young, “hot,” 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. СКАЧАТЬ