Okay, so I heard about Alexis Neiers the same way a lot of people did: through Vanity Fair—an infamous Vanity Fair story that covered The Bling Ring, a group of young, attractive, glamorous-looking kids who robbed a series of celebrity’s homes (among them, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom and Audrina Partridge of The Hills). Despite being the least involved, Alexis became the best known of the group because she had the misfortune of being arrested while shooting a reality show that documented the shenanigans of her wild and crazy life (Pretty Wild, which ran on E! in 2010). [The whole thing’s been turned into the recently released movie, in which Emma Watson plays Neiers.]
But while she may have looked glamorous and exciting on the outside, Neiers was actually dying inside—addicted to smoking Oxy’s and holding onto the secret that she’d been severely abused as a child. As she told Vice magazine about the time when she was shooting Wild, “People think I was living with my family, 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.”
But the story has a happy ending in that Neiers ended up going to treatment for roughly a year and emerging a wholly different person—sober, sane and, as it turns out, in love with a nice Canadian gentleman who had just started a Malibu sober living called Acadia. The two have since married and had a baby and Alexis has become certified to become a drug and alcohol counselor.
In short, this girl is the exact opposite of who you might expect to find when you show up to interview a Bling Ring-er who starred in a reality show called Pretty Wild. Don’t believe me? Listen to the pod. (To download previous episodes, featuring Greg Behrendt, Jimmy Pardo, Pat O’Brien and Carlos Herrera, go to iTunes.)
Photo courtesy of VanityFair