“Pretty Wild” star Alexis Neiers can now look back at a dark time in her life with a sense of humor.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, the former reality star recreated the iconic voicemail where she famously yelled at Nancy Jo Sales, the Vanity Fair reporter who wrote an article about Neiers’ role in the “Bling Ring” case.
If you recall, in the phone call, Neiers had a full-on meltdown while attempting to tell Sales that she was “disappointed” with the article and its headline, “The Suspect Wore Louboutins.” (Remember, she actually wore “four-inch” $29 Bebe heels). Neiers had to rerecord the message many, many times because her mom, Andrea Arlington-Dunn, kept interrupting by yelling things like, “YOU LIED!” and “29 dollars!”
Neiers, who admitted that she gets sent the clip on a “daily basis” on Instagram, obviously wasn’t laughing when she made the phone call 10 years ago, but said she now considers it to be “comical.”
“It was one of the greatest reality TV moments ever,” Neiers expressed. “That was such a great meltdown and we really just laid it all out there.” And it turns out, Neiers has the entire voicemail memorized. Watch her recreate (and relive) the message in the clip below.
Neiers was a member of the “Bling Ring,” a group of Calabasas teens who broke into the homes of famous celebrities — including Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom and Lindsay Lohan — and stole jewelry, clothing and other valuable possessions.
Neiers was arrested for her role in the “Bling Ring” case and ultimately pleaded no contest to burglary charges. She served one month of her six-month sentence in Los Angeles county jail. Meanwhile, at the time, Neiers was also dealing with alcohol and drug addiction.
“I had been on drugs pretty much consistently from around my middle school years until I got sober when I was 19,” she recalled to ET. “It began with just, you know, teenage stuff — smoking pot, drinking warm beers out of my friends’ fridges in the garage and going to parties. But by the time I was 15, I became addicted to Oxycontin, and from there my addiction progressed really quickly.”
“The funds that I was getting from the show allowed basically for my addiction to explode, so by the time I was 17, I was using heroin every single day, all day long,” she added. “I mean, I was loaded from the second we started filming to the second we stopped.”
10 years later, Neiers, who now goes by her married name, Alexis Haines, will be celebrating nine years sober this month. She shares two daughters — 6-year-old Harper and 3-year-old Dakota — with her husband Evan, who she married in 2012.
In her new memoir and podcast, both titled “Recovering From Reality,” Neiers opens up about everything from her traumatic upbringing, which included childhood sexual abuse and family trauma, to her legal trouble and struggles with addiction.
“I don’t think that traumatized children should be in television,” Neiers added to ET. “This industry is known for having people in it that have a lot of substance abuse issues. And so that trauma and that pressure is, like, amplified when you’re on TV, right? It drove me to a bottom, fast. And so while nobody is responsible for that except for me, it amplified that. I’m just grateful that I was given a second chance.”
“I’m just here to show you that if I can do it, anybody can do it,” she continued. “If I can publicly burn my life down and have everybody ridicule me for it and have a very public addiction and go to jail multiple times and heal, then you can too.”
“Recovering From Reality” is available now.
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