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David Bowie’s daughter said this week that when she was a teenager, she was forcibly taken from her home and put in multiple “dehumanizing” treatment centers, and this all happened while her father was dying of cancer.
“Treatment made me realize how much I had to fast-forward my teenage years,” she said in a lengthy Instagram video on Feb. 18. “I found myself longing to be a teenager even though I was one, just not in the conventional sense.”
Alexandria “Lexi” Zahra Jones, the daughter of Bowie and supermodel Iman, said she started seeing a therapist before she was 10 years old after her parents and teacher noticed something was “off.”
“That was around the time I had my first anxiety attack,” she said.
Split of David Bowie and his daughter (Lexi Jones/Instagram; Larry Busacca/WireImage)
Jones explained that a few years after that, “things got heavier. I started to feel depressed, like my mind was turning against me.”
The 25-year-old said she was failing in schools, struggling with a learning disability and hated the way she looked, “and I developed bulimia when I was 12.”
“I started self-harming when I was 11,” she continued. “I don’t know why I felt the way I felt. I just knew I was miserable. I felt stupid, incompetent, like unworthy, useless, unlovable. And having successful parents kind of only made it worse.”
Eventually, she turned to drugs and alcohol after her father was diagnosed with cancer, which she said was her “breaking point.” “I did everything I wasn’t supposed to do and more because I was angry, I was scared, I was numb, but I was free, until I wasn’t,” she added.
As her mental health declined, she said she lashed out and was “cruel” to people because she was searching for respect by becoming someone people “feared.”
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On a weekday morning after she had gotten ready for school, she said her mom called her into the living room and her mom, dad and godmother were all standing there.
“I did everything I wasn’t supposed to do and more because I was angry, I was scared, I was numb, but I was free, until I wasn’t.”
— Lexi Jones
She said her dad read her a letter to her that ended, “I’m sorry that we have to do this.”
She continued, “Then two men came through the door, and they were both well over six feet tall. They told me I could do this the easy way or the hard way. I chose the hard way. I resisted. I screamed. I held onto the table leg. They grabbed me. They put their hands on me. They pulled me away from everything I knew, and I was screaming bloody murder” for someone to help her.
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But Jones said her parents just watched. “They were crying, but they let it happen.”
The men looped a rope around her, she explained. “I felt like cattle. I felt stripped of any right to stay in my own life.”
She was forced into a black SUV.
“I was alone, I was in a car with two strange men, and they wouldn’t tell me where we were going, and I just sat there completely horrified and silent,” she said.
Once she arrived at the wilderness center, she said she was strip-searched, and she was issued clothes that included snow pants and hiking boots.
The experience she said as a “city girl” was completely unfamiliar to her.
“This was not camping. This felt like boot camp’s weird cousin,” she said. “And it was disguised as something therapeutic.”
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During her three months at the wilderness camp, she said she was only allowed to communicate with people from outside the camp once a week through letters, and even then, “only approved people were allowed to write to us or hear from us.”
During her time there, they made meals over fires, they built themselves and set up tarps that they slept under on a yoga mat and sleeping bag.
Lexi with her dad, David Bowie, when she was young. (Lexi Jones/Instagram)
“We dug holes in the ground to use as bathrooms far away from the site,” she said. “And every time we used the bathroom we had to count out loud so that staff would keep track of us.”
When she first arrived, she said she wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone else in her group because new people at the camp are considered a “potential safety risk until they can evaluate your behavior and decide if you’re fit to be incorporated in the group.”
“So, until then you’re invisible in a way that’s really hard to describe,” she added.
She said some of the therapy was helpful, but some of it felt like she had been “cracked open and left exposed.”
Despite that, the girls in her group were a great support to her, and she said they made each other feel human, “even in a place that was stripping that away from us.”
“But still the whole experience felt dehumanizing,” she said, “like the whole point was to take away every basic human comfort and need” so that they would behave “right” to earn back small privileges.
She said they were only allowed to shower once a week, had no mirrors and weren’t allowed to know what time it was.
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While she said she may have gained some things while she was there, “I didn’t choose to be there and if you don’t choose change, it’s hard to know what change even means.”
While different, she said that all the girls shared the same thing: “We’d been treated like we were bad when we were just scared.”
She said she knew how lucky she was because she wasn’t physically abused there, “because that’s not the case for a lot of kids.”
“But still the mental and emotional manipulation I experienced is something I will not forget.”
After the wilderness camp, she said she was sent to a residential treatment center in Utah for more than a year where she felt like everything she’d worked for at the wilderness center “disappeared” because she said she had gained respect and privileges there, but the moment she got to Utah it was “like starting over.”
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Once again, she was strip-searched, had to count while she used the bathroom and was watched while she slept.
Lexi with her mom as a toddler. (Lexi Jones/Instagram)
She said she did well there, but messed up sometimes because she was 15, including when she kissed a girl once.
As punishment, she had to go back to being watched all the time and wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone for several weeks.
“It felt like solitary confinement, and I felt like a prisoner,” she revealed.
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Still, she met one of her best friends there and had a great teacher who kindled her love of art.
“All of this was happening while my dad was only getting more sick back at home,” she said, adding that for the first time in a long time she wanted to be there with him.
Bowie died while she was still at the program.
“I was not there,” she said. “I had the luxury of speaking with him two days before on his birthday. I told him I loved him, he said it back and we both knew.”
After that, she said a social media post that said he died surrounded by his whole family made her physically ill.
“I had the luxury of speaking with him two days before on his birthday. I told him I loved him, he said it back and we both knew.”
— Lexi Jones
“I’ve accepted it,” she said. “I’ve tried not to internalize it or feel guilty but sometimes I still have those moments where I wish things were to be different.”
At the program, she said the program structured her grief process with how she was supposed to handle it. She thought at the time that was normal.
David Bowie with wife, Iman, in 2011. (Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images for DKMS)
Once she went back home just before she turned 16, she said it was “sensory overload” with too much freedom, and she spiraled back into old patterns and was soon sent away to another treatment center.
The repetitive cycle of being sent from place to place made her feel like “a problem being passed off.”
She said every place seemed to mold her into something different that she didn’t ask to become, and soon she stopped asking where she was going.
The point of her post, she concluded, was to show what those places do to a person and the “parts of yourself you lose in the process of being fixed.”
“As much as I went through things that no kid should have to go through, I also became someone I’m proud of,” she added.
She said having to learn “healing before I knew algebra” wasn’t fair, “but it’s a part of who I am now, so, no, 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.”
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And while she wishes it had happened under better circumstances, “I can’t pretend it didn’t shape me into someone who sees people deeply, who feels things deeply, who creates from that place.”
She said she still scans rooms for rules she doesn’t know about and feels guilty for freedom, but she’s also proud of herself “because I finally get to define healing for myself.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to a rep for Iman for comment.
