'Bling Ring' Member Alexis Neiers Wants Movie to Show Deeper 'Truth'

By Tracie Egan Morrissey | April 24, 2013 | 10:00pm

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Alexis Neiers, former reality star, convicted felon, and member of the infamous group of teenage burglars who robbed about $3 million worth of cash and belongings from celebrities like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Orlando Bloom will be portrayed by Emma Watson in Sophia Coppola’s Bling Ring. With her criminal history and drug abuse behind her, a married and pregnant 21-year-old Neiers has been sharing her feelings about the film and her sobriety on her blog.

When she was 18, Neiers and her sisters began filming the E! reality series Pretty Wild (an epic scene from the show, above) the night before she was arrested for her involvement with the “Bling Ring.” She pled no contest to felony burglary charges and did one month of a 180-day jail sentence—the last five days of which were served in a cell next to Lindsay Lohan, one of her alleged victims. Shortly after her release, she was arrested for possession of black tar heroin and sentenced in December 2010 to one year in a drug rehab program.

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Today, Neiers is married and expecting her first child next month. Now sober and a California State Certified Drug and Alcohol Counselor, she has been open about her past, admitting that she was on all kinds of drugs during the filming of her E! show, including heroin, Xanax, and OxyContin, and speaks openly about her addictions on her blog.

She’s also blogged her thoughts on the impending release of the Bling Ring movie:

When I found out last March that Sofia Coppola was making a movie about the Bling Ring at first I was shocked and then I became optimistic after I heard what her intentions for the film were. I can only hope that this movie does not just tell the story of Los Angeles teens robbing the homes of celebrities because that, I don’t believe, would have much impact on people as what I believe the real cultural obsession with what the Bling Ring is. See as a society we are so focused in this day and age on what celebrity is doing what and we have gotten off track. It has lead to teens literally killing themselves and privacy and boundaries no longer exists. If you look back a couple of decades ago to the beginning of time, spirituality and religion was the center focus of every home. The work like, family life, finances etc. were focused around a cultures spiritual beliefs. I don’t know exactly where we started to go wrong, I believe it has something to do with technology advancing so quickly in the last decade especially.

This obsession is what makes the Bling Ring so prevalent almost 5 years after the initial robbery took place and it is because, I believe, that a majority of society is just as sick as these teens were. We are obsessed, I believe because we want an inside look into the real life of these celebrities and we enjoy publicly scrutinizing people because they “sin” differently then we do. It is a method of distracting us from having to look at our own actions and sick behavioral patterns. The story of teens robing the homes of celebrities is artificial and has no real depth and substance and I can only hope that Ms. Coppola decides to shed light to this truth.

It’s a little bit nonsensical and hard to follow (I’m pretty sure the “beginning of time” was more than a “couple of decades ago”) and she doesn’t seem all that apologetic about her crimes, but I get what she’s saying: she hopes the film will illuminate our culture’s problematic obsession with celebrity. Sophia Coppola probably has it under control, though.

So, what are my feelings about the “Bling Ring” movie? [Alexis Neiers]