The Bling Ring (33 page)

“He accessorized,” said Andrea.

“He accessorized,” Alexis said. “He was like, ‘I wanna put this on with this.' ”

“I was like, ‘Tessy, where are my high heels?' ” Andrea said. “ ‘Oh, I left 'em at Nick's house.' When I got them back they were scratched up way beyond their size. I'm so sad 'cause I can't replace them now. They were the perfect nineteen-forties-style heels.”

“She didn't like Nick,” Alexis said.

Andrea made a face and mouthed the word “No.”

“Then we had a falling out,” Alexis said. “I didn't like the influence that he was on Tess and I chose after a while that I didn't want to be associated with him—especially when all of the news stuff started coming out. I completely stopped hanging out with Nick and I told Tess I'm not gonna be a part of that anymore. . . .

“I would never want to surround myself with someone like that ever,” Alexis said. “When I found out that all of this was going on”—she meant when Nick was arrested—“I wasn't a part of his life anymore by choice.”

But the problem with the timeline here is that Nick was exposed in the Patridge and Lohan videos months before his September arrest, in February and August 2009. If people in Tess and Alexis' circle of friends knew of his involvement in the burglaries—and Tess told police she knew—then how is it that Alexis didn't know, especially by July? July was when Alexis was temporarily living at Nick's house and when the Bloom burglary occurred. When I attempted to bring all this up, Rubenstein told me, “We're not answering that.”

“And I did receive threatening phone calls from [Nick] just saying that I'm a ‘stupid reality girl' and I'm never gonna get anywhere in life,” Alexis went on. “He mentioned some things about my body. He could be very insulting. He threatened me about this situation that he was having, saying you better keep your mouth shut.

“He gave Tess and I clothes to borrow and we gave them back,” Alexis said. “I remember a little blue vest and a butterfly necklace and a couple of dresses. . . . He said he purchased them when he was doing shoots for magazines and TV shows and he got to keep the clothes. He said he worked for his dad's company.

“He really tried to put on a persona in my eyes,” she said. “He was a con artist. He was putting on this act, pretending to be someone that he really wasn't. . . . I completely believed this, basically, this actor to say who he was. I mean, it's common. Women go out with men for years until they really figure out who a man is.” She sniffed.

“And he tried to get into a show that we were eventually going to be in,” Andrea said. She was talking about
Pretty Wild
. According to Andrea, Nick had tried to get in on the show, to be a character on it.

Alexis said, “He's shaking his head ‘no' ”—meaning Rubenstein—“and he's been shaking his head ‘no' at you this entire time because you keep talking!”

“Shut up,” Andrea muttered.

“You just told me to shut up!” said Alexis, eyes flying open. “Don't tell me to shut up!”

They glared at each other.

“I am looking forward to my day in court,” Alexis said, “and I can't wait to kick some ass and get this all cleared up and get found not guilty and tell my story 'cause it's powerful.”

“Then why don't you tell it to me now?” I pressed. “I thought that's what we came here for—”

Rubenstein cut in, offering, “If I can put it to you this way: you're stuck in the rain and you need to get home and a friend drives up and offers you a ride and you're cold, you're wet, you want to get out of the rain and get home and your friend gets drunk and gets in a car accident—do you get hurt? Yes, but was it your fault? No. I would analogize that to Alexis' involvement.”

26

Alexis brought her reality crew to her preliminary hearing on December 1, 2009. I sat with the
Pretty Wild
supervising producer, Gennifer Gardiner, on a bench outside the entrance to Department 30 before the proceedings began. Gardiner—wearing her usual walkie-talkie and yoga gear—didn't seem concerned about the fate of the star of her show. “They think it's all good,” she said of Alexis and Tess. “They said they weren't in the surveillance videos. They were celebrating. They say they had no idea” what Nick was doing.

Gardiner said that Alexis and Tess were now “in a fight” and not speaking, and that Tess was “living with friends.” I asked her what they were fighting about, but she said she didn't know: “They're teenage girls.”

Alexis wore jeans and ballet flats that day; her hair was in a braided bun. She frowned and rolled her eyes throughout Brett Goodkin's testimony about how she could allegedly be seen on the surveillance videos from Orlando Bloom's home; how Nick Prugo had identified her as one of his accomplices in the burglary; and how she allegedly came and went from the house carrying bags of goods to Prugo's car. Detective Jose Alvarez testified that Alexis said that she was drunk and didn't know what was going on during the three hours of the burglary. He also said that at first Alexis said she didn't know it was Orlando Bloom's house her friends were robbing, but then she said she did.

Alexis' lawyers attacked Prugo's credibility: couldn't he have lied? How many burglaries was he charged with? Eight? On the witness stand, Goodkin countered that “everything Prugo said proved reliable through investigation.” Judge Darrell Mavis rejected the motion to dismiss based on the argument that Alexis never knew she was involved in a burglary and that she never intended to commit a crime.

In the parking lot after the hearing, Andrea was upset at the negative decision. She told me she truly believed Alexis' legal ordeal would be over that day. I walked with her to her car. She was wearing a fashionable suit and heels. She seemed to really believe that Alexis was innocent and that this whole thing was the result of Nick Prugo's lies.

“I never liked Nick,” Andrea said, standing by her SUV, “but I never thought he would do something like this. I left home at fourteen. I had a mentor, a gay man I called ‘Uncle Kit.' He basically raised me. I was his little protégée and he taught me how to dress, how to walk, how to do my makeup and hair. He was what we were hoping Nick would become for the girls. Teach them how to dress.”

“But why did you kick Alexis out of the house?” I asked.

“I never kicked Alexis out, I kicked Tess out,” Andrea protested in her breathy voice. (Tess did not respond to requests for comment.) “I gave both of the girls two weeks [to prove] that they were serious about their professional careers. . . . Then they started socializing with the professionals in the industry and they were staying out and not waking up and getting started with their day and going out in Hollywood at night. I was paying all their bills. I said if you're going to develop your careers, then you'd better be up and out of bed at seven in the morning. This had been going on for months. . . . I had them in therapy. . . . And the therapist said to me if they weren't going to get serious I had to kick them out and they had to get jobs. . . . My therapist said the only way they'll take you seriously is if you kick them out. I knew they had a place to go. The day I decided I was kicking Tessy out, Alexis decided to go with Tessy. It had nothing to do with [drugs]. Alexis was not kicked out of the house. It had nothing to do with drugs at all.

“They both moved in with Nick, but then Tess was getting jealous of the growing friendship of Alexis and Nick, and she moved out so Alexis was there alone with Nick,” she said.

27

In December 2009, as I was closing my story, I persuaded Jeffrey Rubenstein to let Alexis give me a statement about the Bloom burglary. If she wasn't going to talk about it openly, after all this talk, I wondered if she could at least offer something prepared. So Alexis read me this statement over the phone, with Rubenstein listening in on the three-way call:

“I was staying with Nick Prugo for a short time in the middle of July two thousand nine,” Alexis said. Her squeaky voice was trembling, and I wondered if she were going to start crying again. “I did not know what he was up to,” she continued. “There were personal reasons for why I needed to spend some time away from my home and unfortunately the week that I needed to take a break from the drama at home, was the same week in which Orlando Bloom's home was robbed. On July thirteenth, Nick got me involved into a situation that I had no part of or knowledge of. I was very, very drunk, and after drinking with Nick at Beso I was so drunk that I threw up. I did not do this. I did not take anything. I never disguised myself or wore a hoodie. It is not me in the surveillance videos or photos. Nick Prugo is very troubled and I hope that someday he gets the help that he needs but at this time he has only caused harm. I have learned a great deal of lessons based upon what has occurred. I used to be a trusting person, but I am now more guarded. . . . It is risky for me to make this statement with a pending case and my lawyers advised me against it”—I wondered whether Rubenstein had asked for this wording—“but I am hoping that by telling you this will help me clear my name and will help others as well. Thank you for listening to me and my story.”

Later I asked Vince the cop if he believed her. “I don't know if I believe any of them totally,” he said. “They're just pretty little liars, all of them.”

28

On January 13, 2010, I saw that Rachel Lee turned herself in at Hollywood Station, whereupon she was re-arrested and finally charged with three counts of residential burglary, for Paris Hilton, Audrina Patridge, and Lindsay Lohan. Apparently, it had taken this long for Rachel to be charged because she'd continued to dangle the prospect of returning stolen property.

But “Rachel Lee never returned any property,” L.A. Deputy District Attorney Christine Kee told me on the phone. “A lot of property is still missing.” Rachel was released on $150,000 bail. She still hadn't spoken in an interview with the police. She hadn't ratted out anyone, nor had she discussed her own involvement in the crimes—and never would. She still had not given an interview to any member of the media, and her lawyer, Peter Korn, had said very little to anyone.

29

My story, which my editor headlined “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” appeared in the first week of February 2010. The day it came out I got a text message from Andrea's phone: “What r u u r not even human.”

I thought it was a pretty straightforward story, so I didn't reply. One night a couple days later my phone started ringing. I saw it was Andrea calling so I didn't pick up. I had some friends over, and wasn't able to talk.

Later I listened to my voicemail and heard it had actually been Alexis calling; she'd left several messages. They were kind of strange: she would stop and start again, saying the same thing over and over, until she would be interrupted by her mother and they would start screaming at each other.

Message One: “Nancy Jo, this is Alexis Neiers calling.” She sounded choked up. “I'm calling to let you know how disappointed . . .
fuck
!”

Message Two: “Nancy Jo, this is Alexis Neiers. I'm calling to let you know how disappointed I am in your story, how horrible you—

Then I could hear Andrea screaming: “You lied!”

Alexis: “Just stop! Stop it!”

Andrea: “You lied! She didn't do it!”

Alexis: “Stop it! Stop it, Mom!”

Andrea: “You lied!”

Alexis: “Stop! Goddammit!”

Message Three: “Nancy Jo, this is Alexis Neiers calling. I'm calling to let you know how disappointed I am in your story. There's many things that I read in here that were false. Like you saying that I wore six-inch Louboutin heels to court with my tweed skirt, when I wore four-inch little brown Bebe shoes—”

Andrea: “Twenty-nine dollars!”

Alexis: “Every time you [fucking] yell I have to re-record it!”

They were actually filming a scene for
Pretty Wild
—the episode, which would air on April 25, 2010, was entitled “Vanity Unfair.” I didn't know this yet. All I knew was Alexis seemed to have prepared a script for what she wanted to say.

The Soup
ran the clip, which shows Alexis, tearful, sitting on the living room couch as she makes the call. Tess looks on sympathetically, wearing something skimpy. Andrea stalks around the living room in an orange sweatsuit with earphones dangling from her ears. The background music is heavy and dramatic.
The Soup
's Joel McHale introduced the clip by saying, “On Sunday's all new
Pretty Wild
perp-utante Alexis Neiers, who is awaiting trial, has given an interview to
Vanity Fair
that turned out to be a hatchet job. She must feel so violated! It's like coming home to find you've been burglarized!”