The Bling Ring — consisting of Rachel Lee, Nick Prugo, Alexis Neiers, Courtney Ames and Diana Tamayo — became infamous for stealing roughly $3 million in cash and belongings from Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom, Audrina Patridge and many more from 2008 to 2009.
The teens and 20-somethings became household names themselves following their 2010 arrests, with their infamous antics becoming the focus of two movies (one directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Emma Watson) and a book by New York Times bestselling author Nancy Jo Sales.
Even though Neiers and Prugo were willing to tell their side of the story for Netflix’s The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist, the Pretty Wild alum revealed she never saw the movie based on her infamous past.
“I’m a busy mom of two kids,” she told Entertainment Weekly in September 2022. “If I’m gonna sit down for two hours, it’s not gonna be to watch The Bling Ring. When I was filming this documentary, they had me watch bits and pieces of the movie and asked me my opinion on it. It’s just too easy.”
According to Neiers, the hit film didn’t properly depict her perspective. “That’s the thing that’s so frustrating when you have someone that’s as brilliant as Sofia Coppola and as wonderful an actor as Emma Watson working on a movie together,” she continued. “You have this opportunity to do something really great and to dig deeper and to look at the complexities, but it’s just lazy.”
The former reality star praised the way The Real Bling Ring factored in her version of events.
“I think the docuseries is so great because in the media reporting up until very recently there wasn’t really a space for the nuance and the complexity of what happened in the crime,” she explained at the time. “The story became sensationalized and there wasn’t space to talk about addiction and mental health. We still have a long way to go, but we’re so much farther than we were in 2010.”
Prugo, for his part, also weighed in on his involvement in the burglaries more than one decade later. “I’ve always been the type of person to do whatever I had to do to get what I wanted. But I never thought in my wildest dreams that it would reach the level of criminality that it did,” he shared in The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist that same month.
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