The Real Story of ‘The Bling Ring’

It was fall 2008 when Nick Prugo and Rachel Lee first broke into Paris Hilton's Calabasas, Calif., mansion. MTV Cribs was going into its 16th season of giving “regular” people unprecedented access into the extravagant homes and lives of a new generation of celebrities. Social media, The Simple Life, Keeping Up with the Kardashians and TMZ made fame seem easy to get for anyone willing to take it, so that's exactly what Prugo and Lee planned to do. In a way, it worked, though probably not the way they hoped. 

Prugo and Lee were the two best friends at the center of the “Bling Ring,” the nickname given to the gang of teens who broke into celebrity homes between October 2008 and August 2009. The gang stole millions of dollars in designer goods, jewelry, clothes and cash from the Los Angeles homes of stars like Hilton, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, Lindsay Lohan and Audrina Patridge, all to live just like the celebs they idolized. The burglaries were fictionalized in the 2013 Sofia Coppola film The Bling Ring starring Emma Watson as the hard-partying Nicki Moore, a character inspired not by Prugo or Lee, but by burgeoning reality star Alexis Neiers.  

Around 2006, Lee met Prugo at Indian Hills High School in Los Angeles. In the 2023 documentary The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring, Lee explains she had been kicked out of Calabasas High School after stealing another student's Ugg boots and refusing to admit it. Prugo had recently moved to the area and found himself on the lower end of the wealth spectrum, as he shares in the 2022 docuseries The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist. 

Lee had grown sick of her parents' high-pressure expectations of good grades and getting into a favorable college, and instead wanted to be, in her own words, "a badass." She was already regularly taking Xanax and experimenting with cocaine on top of committing the occasional theft, and she idolized the rich and famous. 

Prugo was exploring his sexuality and struggling to connect with other, richer kids at school and said that Lee was "everything he wasn't" and everything he wanted to be. They bonded over their love of celebrities and their obsession with being perceived as "cool" and became inseparable best friends. 

Both Prugo and Lee describe how their crimes started with "checking cars." They would either walk or drive past cars in wealthy neighborhoods and casually try to open doors, and then they would rob any that were unlocked. They found cash, designer goods and credit cards that they would use for shopping sprees. 

When Prugo's friend, Eden Maimon (or Eden Shizzle, as he's known online), posted on Myspace that he was going to Jamaica, Lee and Prugo got the idea to rob his home when they knew it would be empty. From there, they used the internet to not only find out when certain people would be out of town, but to find celebrity addresses and aerial views of their mansions. They snuck into Hilton's (usually unlocked) house multiple times, searching her various designer purses for loose cash and eventually stealing more than $2 million worth of jewelry. 

As the crimes escalated, the gang grew. Classmates Diana Tamayo and Courtney Ames joined in, and Ames brought along co-worker Roy Lopez Jr. and boyfriend Johnny Ajar to help sell stolen goods. Lee already knew Neiers as her "friend's boyfriend's best friend's girlfriend," and she became fast friends with Prugo. 

They broke into at least 10 different homes, some of them multiple times. Aside from Lee and Prugo, not every other member of the ring was present for every break-in. Lee claims to have never even met Lopez, and Neiers says she was only present for the robbery at Bloom's house. Prugo confirms Neiers’ claim, though their recollections of the Bloom robbery differ. In The Real Bling Ring docuseries, she says she didn't know whose house it was until later and was drunk the whole time, while Prugo claims she was very aware and an active participant in the robbery. 

The "last hurrah" for the Bling Ring occurred when Prugo, Lee and Tamayo broke into Lohan's house on August 23, 2009. Security footage captured the clearest picture yet of the criminals, which scared Prugo into moving all the stolen property to his grandmother's storage unit. When Neiers saw footage of the thieves on the news, she anonymously called the police and turned Prugo in, leading to his arrest—and eventually to her own. 

At the same time, investigators were looking for evidence other than the anonymous call. They got their wish when Prugo, intent on creating a specific image, opted for a "flashy" attorney named Sean Erenstoft. As he says in The Real Bling Ring, Erenstoft calculated that if police connected him to all his crimes, Prugo could face up to 48 years in prison. To avoid that, he informed Prugo that there was an "immunity agreement" in place that would allow him to get off scot free if he confessed to everything and named names. Prugo then told police about burglaries they didn't even know had occurred. 

However, Prugo learned that the agreement was simply a handshake with lead detective Brett Goodkin, who then claimed he would write it in the police report. Erenstoft claimed he also had a conversation with the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, but Deputy District Attorney Sarika Kim said no conversation ever took place and that Prugo would never have been offered immunity. 

While Prugo was regularly making news appearances, Lee was summoned back to Los Angeles from her new home in Las Vegas, and Neiers was arrested on what was supposed to be a very important day. 

Neiers, who had already been working as a model for several years, was about to start filming a reality show, Pretty Wild, with her family. It was supposed to document the unconventional parenting and homeschooling style of her former Playboy model mother, Andrea Arlington. 

Just as producers worried they might not even have a story to film, the first day of shooting was derailed by cops showing up at the front door and arresting Neiers for burglary. The arrest appears in the final version of Pretty Wild, but the footage isn't real—the scene had to be recreated for the cameras. 

In March 2010, Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales published the story "The Suspects Wore Louboutins," which profiled Neiers and detailed her involvement in the burglary and subsequent trial. The article resulted in a memorable clip from Pretty Wild that came to represent a big part of the story in popular culture. In the scene, Neiers, who has just finished praying, is sobbing and calling Sales on the phone, with her mother screaming, "You lied!" in the background. 

"Nancy Jo? This is Alexis Neiers calling," she says. "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." She goes on to say that she had been hoping to show the world "what a great, amazing, talented, strong, healthy" young woman she was, and she was "petrified with this story." 

Neiers' lawyer Jeff Rubenstein agreed to appear on Pretty Wild in what he later called a "highly produced" scene where he falsely told Neiers and her mother that there had been developments in the burglary case, and he "may be able to make this go away." A decade later, Neiers said in The Real Bling Ring that she still wasn't sure if the moment was real or not. 

On May 10, 2010, she was sentenced to six months in prison, though she only served one month. Her last few days were spent in a cell next to Lohan, who had returned to jail after failing to attend court-mandated substance abuse treatment classes. 

Neiers got sober at 19 from a substance use disorder she was battling during the making of Pretty Wild, now has two kids (with a third on the way) and is a certified substance abuse counselor.

Lee was the only member of the group to plead guilty from the start and says in The Ringleader documentary that she was ready to accept any punishment for her crimes. She stayed out of the press and kept a low profile and was sentenced to four years in prison, but only served 16 months. 

She accepts that she was primarily responsible for the crimes but does dispute the "twisted" narrative of her as the confident mastermind while Prugo was the shy follower. 

"I think if anybody was the ringleader, it was me and him because I feel like we did it just as much," she says in The Ringleader. "He and I were both equally as aggressive and both equally as passive."  

On April 15, 2013, just two months before The Bling Ring movie's June 2013 U.S. premiere, Prugo was sentenced to two years in state prison for residential burglary, though he only served one year in county jail. Tamayo, Ames, Ajar and Lopez all got probation. 

"The defendants want to be famous," DDA Christine Kee says in The Real Bling Ring. "The attorneys want to be famous. My IO [investigating officer] wanted to be famous. It was the downfall of everybody."