Alexandria “Lexi” Jones, the daughter of iconic singer David Bowie and model Iman, has opened up about her childhood and being raised by her famous parents.
Jones, in a video she shared to Instagram, said she was forced to go to a rehab center when she was young. She said she had to go to “treatment” because she had been depressed and suffered from an eating disorder and substance abuse when she was a teen, People magazine reported.
Jones, now 25, said her father’s liver cancer diagnosis in 2014, when she was “barely 14,” was her “breaking point,” and while others experimented with drugs and alcohol, it was different for her, Entertainment Weekly reported.
“For me, it wasn’t about fun,” Lexi said in her video. “I wasn’t experimenting, I was escaping. Escaping from my complicated mind, my complicated family, my complicated school. When the party ended for everyone else, I kept going. And I drank and got high alone.”
She also claimed that she was forcibly removed from her home for treatment.
Jones said Bowie wrote her a letter before she was removed from their home that apologized for having to send her to treatment.
She said that two men came into their home to take her to rehab, and that she grabbed a table leg to not leave and screamed as they put her in an SUV without telling her where she was going, People magazine reported.
“I felt stripped of any right to stay in my own life,” she said in the video. “By the time the door shut, my parents were already gone.”
It was a wilderness therapy program where she lived for 91 days, outside, under tarps and learning survival skills.
“We made fires by stripping birch bark and striking flint and steel,” she said. “I was a city girl. I didn’t even know this kind of program existed.”
“This was not camping. This felt like boot camp’s weird cousin,” she said, according to Fox News. “And it was disguised as something therapeutic.”
“Treatment made me realize how much I had to fast-forward my teenage years,” she said, according to Fox News. “I found myself longing to be a teenager even though I was one, just not in the conventional sense.”
After three months, she was transferred to a residential treatment center and boarding school, where she was for a year, and where she was when she learned about Bowie’s death.
“I had the luxury of speaking to him two days before, on his birthday,” said Lexi. “I told him I loved him and he said it back, and we both knew.”
Bowie died on Jan. 10, 2016.
Jones returned home when she was 16, but said “sensory overload” and too much freedom, so she went back to her old habits and was sent to another treatment center, Fox News reported.
She said her challenges made her who she is now.
“This is not just a story about trauma, it’s a story about how I was shaped not just by what hurt me but by what I built in response to it,” adding, “I can’t pretend it didn’t shape me into someone who sees people deeply, who feels things deeply, who creates from that place.”
E! News and People contacted representatives for David Bowie’s estate and Iman, but have not received a response.
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