Sofia Coppola’s newest film, The Bling Ring, comes out this week, and as you’ve undoubtedly heard, it features Emma Watson in her first bad girl role. A fictionalized account of the robberies perpetrated in LA’s Hollywood Hills area in 2008 and 2009, The Bling Ring promises to deliver a stylish yet tawdry tale of excess taken to the extreme…. but how much do you know about the real life robberies?
During 2008 and 2009, the group of teenagers known as the Bling Ring robbed roughly three million dollars’ worth of clothing, jewelry, artwork, other property, and plain old cash from some of the Hollywood Hills’ most famous residents. Mastermind by Rachel Lee and Nick Prugo and including Alexis Neiers, Diana Tamayo, Courtney Ames, Johnny Ajar, and Roy Lopez Jr., they were finally caught in the fall of 2009.
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So: Before we all head to the cinemas this weekend to see how Sofia Coppola has interpreted their story, here’s your guide to the celebs who fell victim to the Bling Ring. Note that most of what’s available to the public about the robberies comes from only one of the Bling Ring’s members—Nick Prugo’s September 17, 2009 arrest is what led to the confession which in turn resulted in the arrests of the other six members. As such you might want to take some of the details, which come from Nancy Jo Sales’ Vanity Fair article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” with a grain of salt; it is also, however, the piece of writing that Sofia Coppola optioned for the film, so there’s also that. Sales has since expanded the article into a book, The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World.
In any event, from Paris Hilton to Orlando Bloom, here are the folks we know the Bling Ring hit on their “shopping sprees.”
