The Bling Ring (23 page)

The spread of Internet porn and hardcore porn also coincided, unsurprisingly, with the ascent of “lad culture”—the British term for a new frat boy–style of male swagger. The unabashed new sexism was exemplified by
FHM
and
Maxim
magazines, raunchy rags with content dedicated to hard drinking and hot girls, with covers of nearly naked and usually oiled-up female celebrities.
Maxim
debuted in the U.K. in 1995, in the U.S. in 1998. It seems significant that all of the female Bling Ring victims—so idolized by the girls in the gang—have appeared on the cover of
Maxim
: Paris Hilton (2004); Rachel Bilson (British edition, 2005); Megan Fox (2007 and 2008); Lindsay Lohan (2007 and 2010); Audrina Patridge (2009); and Miranda Kerr (Australian edition, 2012). All have also appeared on
Maxim
's “Hot 100,” which rates famous women based on their “hotness.” While their
Maxim
cover girl status heralded their arrival as hot chicks on the celebrity scene, did it also make them seem more accessible and therefore violable to the burglars? I wondered.

The Bling Ring girls came of age at the dawning of so-called “raunch culture” in which self-objectifying women are seen as cool and empowered. “Many young girls and women today,” writes Dr. Leonard Sax in
Girls on the Edge
(2010), “do not question the idea that baring their skin is a badge of sexual liberation.” Girls post provocative pictures of themselves on the Internet as if they were already porn stars; a 2008 survey found that one in five teenage girls had published a nude or nearly nude picture of herself on social media or sent one via cell phone.

But girls may just be replicating an image of themselves they see virtually everywhere around them today. In its 2010 “Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls,” the American Psychological Association found evidence of girls being sexualized in a vast array of mediums—movies, television, advertising, music videos, song lyrics, toys, video games, cartoons and animation, magazines, clothing, beauty pageants, and the Internet. These are images, messages, products that portray girls in a sexual context inappropriate to their age, promoting the idea that they can or should be “hot.” The adverse effects on girls' well-being, said the APA report, include anxiety and low self-esteem, “body dissatisfaction and appearance anxiety,” and depression, all potentially leading to eating disorders, cutting, drug and alcohol abuse, and smoking.

“Perhaps the most insidious consequence of self-objectification,” the APA report said, “is that it fragments consciousness. Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer cognitive resources available for other mental and physical activities.”

In Tess' Cybergirl shots, she looks delighted to be there, eager to please—and very young. In her pole-dancing videos on the Internet, in which she wears high heels, a bra, and a thong, you get the sense she might have been an athlete or the ballerina she trained to be if she hadn't decided to pursue a career in modeling.

25

“So you and Tess seem like you have the kind of life a lot of teenagers dream about,” I said to Alexis that day in Thousand Oaks.

“It
is
glamorous,” Alexis chirped. “It's fun, but we don't take it for granted and at the end of the day we are so wholesome and down to earth and we really just care about people and the environment. Of course living this lifestyle is
incredible
,” she said, “hanging out with celebrities and sitting in V.I.P. and traveling and stuff like that. But it's all about giving back. 'Cause I feel blessed—I really do—for the lifestyle that I have. . . .And Tess and I, we started from nothing, barely being able to afford groceries, to this lifestyle.”

There was that word again—“lifestyle.”

“When was it that you were struggling?” I asked.

“Up until two years ago,” Alexis said. “But that's how the entertainment business is—with the [Writer's Guild of America] strike [of 2007–2008] and everything, it's been tough; there's been very rocky tough times in our lives. Two divorces . . . shows not going . . . a lot of stuff factors into it.”

“So how do you deal with the rough times?” I said.

She paused a moment, and then she began to cry.

“I know who I am,” she squeaked, her face screwing up. “And I'm proud of who I am. And it's taken me, like, a really long time to get to this point; but I've been through a lot of tough, tough stuff and . . . it just made me stronger.”

She told me about a former boyfriend she later confided was a drug dealer. “He was a functioning drug addict,” she said. “He was twenty years old.” She said that they had met through Rachel Lee's ex-boyfriend—the one who allegedly came along to a burglary of Paris Hilton's house in the fall of 2008—and that she had dated him until the spring of 2009.

“Underneath it all he's a good person,” Alexis said, “totally into chakras, energy. And we fell in love so deeply and the reason I fell in love with him is I thought that I could fix him. . . .He was completely emotionally abusive to me and verbally he would cuss at me all the time. He started getting heavily into drugs. I didn't have a clue. I didn't know until one day I caught him using it. He was freebasing heroin; he was taking cocaine and smoking weed.” She said that when she broke up with him, he threatened her physically. “My parents hated him. It wasn't just the emotional stress on me, it was affecting my whole family.”

She said he tried to get her into drugs, but she never succumbed. “I'm never gonna make the same mistake that I've seen since I was young,” Alexis said. “I had a dad who used drugs and alcohol and I used to always tell myself that I'm never gonna be that person.” (Mikel Neiers had no comment.) “For many years I've been offered
tons
of drugs,” she said, “especially partying out in Hollywood; but it's just not my choice, it's not who I am.

“Who is Alexis?” she said, referring to herself in the third person, as celebrities often do. “And how are you being a role model?. . . It's taken me a long time to get to this point, where I can say, ‘I'm Alexis. This is who I am, so take it or leave it'. . . . I feel strong. I feel independent. I feel like I have self-worth—”

“Why are you crying?” I asked.

“I've got so many people that are talking crap and getting this view of who they think Alexis is. It really bothers me when people assume and judge.”

“Who's doing that to you?” I asked.

“A lot of people,” she sobbed. “The press, everyone. And now is the time in my life where. . . I'm ready to say, ‘This is Alexis, take it or leave it.' ” She took a deep breath. “I'm ready to set a great example. My main goal, my main focus and my main destiny in life is to be a leader. It's
incredible
for a girl my age to be where I'm at right now. Honestly, it's like I'm a thirty-year-old woman in my body. I'm so confident and so excited for my future. I'm ready to take on whatever comes my way.

“My emotions are really raw and, lately,” she said apologetically. “Everyone's been attacking me. I haven't been able to get the truth out. . .I want to tell the truth, but I can't yet. But eventually when I do everyone will see who I really am.”

26

After we'd finished our interview, the producers set up Andrea in front of the camera to make a statement about Nick. “He's a con artist,” Andrea said with her startled eyes, “and he conned me into believing that he was lending them clothes that were leftover from a season of being a stylist and he was able to lend them for their fashion shoots in order to develop their modeling portfolios. . . .”

Gennifer Gardiner made Andrea say the sound bite again and again. Andrea was rushing her words, not getting it quite right.

This was Tess and Alexis' story: that Nick had told them he was a stylist and that was how he had access to all the fabulous clothes he was giving them to wear. “That was a story they told their mother,” Nick told me later. “That's how they explained how they had all this new stuff. These girls want to sound like they're naïve, but they knew” the clothes were stolen.

Later, Alexis went to the back porch to smoke a cigarette. There, away from her parents, her lawyer, and her crew, she started talking about the Bling Ring kids.

“Rachel's a klepto freak,” she said, her voice taking on an edgier note. “She was so manipulating, so conniving. Nick always did what she said. Rachel was in charge. She started it all.

“Nick was in love with Rachel. Like, he wanted to be her,” Alexis said. “She was the girl part of him. I thought he was a good guy. He was Tess' friend. I got kicked out of the house for two weeks for a bunch of stuff and went and lived with him. . . .” That's when they went to Orlando Bloom's house together.

27

Their target, according to Nick, wasn't Bloom at all, but his girlfriend, Miranda Kerr. Kerr, then 26, was a Victoria's Secret model whose wardrobe Rachel admired. Born in Sydney and raised in Gunnedah, a small rural town, Kerr became a nationality celebrity at 13 after winning the
Dolly
Magazine/Impulse Model Competition. When she appeared in bathing suits in a
Dolly
shoot not long after her 14th birthday, some members of the local media complained that the shoot was “pornographic” and might attract the attention of pedophiles. A national debate ensued over the increasingly young age at which models begin working.

Once upon a time, models were women in their 20s with hourglass figures. Up until the 1960s, it wasn't uncommon for a model to be a mother. The “youthquake” of the 1960s saw the introduction of younger models like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, but 18 was considered an unofficial cutoff point, the age below which a girl was still vulnerable enough to warrant protection from the pitfalls of the industry. In the 1970s, Calvin Klein broke the age barrier by casting 15-year-old Brooke Shields in a controversial ad for jeans (“You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing,” she cooed). In the 1980s, the age of models started to creep ever downward. Canadian model Monika Schnarre, who was discovered in 1984 at 14, appeared a year later on the cover of the
Sports Illustrated
Swimsuit Issue. Schnarre has recalled how she was once asked by a photographer encouraging her to mimic sexiness, “Listen, I know you're a virgin, but could you just pretend?”

In the last 10 to 15 years, the fashion industry's use of very young models has soared—which can't have gone unnoticed by the girls in the audience. And one wonders if that's not the point. Fashion designers explain the youthfulness of models on the fact that samples sizes have shrunk to “0” and only 13- and 14-year-olds can fit into them anymore (another issue on its own); or on the popularity of Kate Moss, who throughout her influential career has retained an adolescent look; or on the novelty of fresh faces. But that's only part of the story. The last 10 to 15 years have also seen an increasing push for marketing to teenage, tween, and even elementary school-age girls fashions, which were once considered appropriate for adults only. Major fashion brands have been developing teen lines for decades; what is more recent, however, is the marketing of “sexy” clothing to girls of all ages—belly shirts, low-slung pants, cleavage-baring tops, “booty shorts,” etc.

The thong—an item once found almost exclusively in the wardrobes of strippers, which then found its way into the lingerie drawers of young women in the age of raunch culture—is now marketed to girls, sold on the tween and children's market, often decorated with pictures and slogans designed to appeal to children. “I [Heart] Boys,” says one; “Look Out Boys Daddy Is Coming Home”—from being deployed in the military—says another; and most cynical of all, from Kmart Australia: “I [Heart] Rich Boys.” (The latter was removed from stores after a Twitter campaign.) Clothing chains such as the Limited Too that cater to tween shoppers now carry “sexy” lingerie such as teddies and scanty panties. In 2011, the website Jezebel posted a story on a store in a Colorado mall called Kids N Teen which was selling crotchless thong underwear. When confronted by an outraged shopper, the owner of the store reportedly defended herself by saying that 25 percent of her merchandise was for teenagers—as if that made it okay. (The store later removed the offending thongs.)

One of the biggest marketers of lingerie for girls is Victoria's Secret. In 2012, its $12 million annual Fashion Show made no secret of who its target audience was, with performances by Justin Bieber, Bruno Mars, and Rihanna. Sales of the company's youth line, Pink, have skyrocketed since its launch in 2002. While Victoria's Secret says Pink is targeted to 15- to 22-year-olds, a performance by Justin Bieber at its biggest marketing event of the year would seem to say something else; Bieber's fan base is tweens. As the singer performed his hit, “As Long As You Love Me,” models walked the runway in Pink merchandise. One of them was Miranda Kerr.

Pink features lingerie, sleepwear, and clothing designed to look sexy. Its 2012 Christmas stocking stuffers included lace panties that said “Unwrap Me” and “Ho Ho Ho.” Pink also has a “Bling Lace Trim Thong Panty,” a strip of nylon encrusted with fake diamonds. In addition to Pink, other major clothing brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch and American Eagle have rushed to put out teen lingerie, an increasingly large chunk of the multi-billion-dollar lingerie market.