David Bowie’s daughter, Alexandria “Lexi” Zahra Jones, claims she was sent away to a treatment centre when she was younger after her father was diagnosed with liver cancer.
In a video posted to her Instagram, Jones, 25 — the daughter of the late singer and supermodel Iman — spoke about growing up with two famous parents.
“Pain is what landed me in treatment as an adolescent more than once,” she began in the 20-minute video posted to Instagram. “People also know me for another reason. Not personally, not because they met me, but because of who my parents are. My parents are David Bowie and Iman. I don’t lead with that in my everyday life. My last name is Jones, and I grew up mostly being treated like a normal kid in normal environments.”
Jones went on to explain that she began failing school and hated the way she looked and “developed bulimia when I was 12.”
“I didn’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,” she said.
Jones shared that when she was 14, she struggled with drugs and alcohol during the same time of her late father’s cancer diagnosis.
“When my dad was diagnosed with cancer, that was my breaking point. I was barely 14 and I could already see what the future would look like for my family and for all of us. I felt broken before it even happened,” Jones explained.
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“It was my first year of high school and everyone around me was experimenting, but for me, it wasn’t about fun,” she continued. “I wasn’t experimenting. I was escaping — escaping from my complicated mind, my complicated family, my complicated school. When the party ended for everybody else, I kept going and I drank and got high alone.”
She said her mental health began to decline as she continued to increase her use of substances and that she turned into “someone who lashed out.”
Jones alleged she was taken from her family’s home after her father’s cancer diagnosis and sent to a wilderness therapy program, where she lived outdoors.
She said her dad read her a letter that ended with, “I’m sorry that we have to do this.”
“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,” she remembered.
Jones said she “chose the hard way” and resisted until the men allegedly grabbed her.
“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,” she added.
She said the men “looped a rope around her” before forcing her into a black SUV and driving her away. Before long, she began to realize how far they were taking her away from home.
“I was born and raised in the city,” Jones continued. “I had been camping before, but nothing like this. This was not camping. It felt like boot camp’s weird cousin.”
She said the entire experience of the wilderness therapy program felt “dehumanizing.”
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“The whole point was to take every basic human comfort and need. No TV, no bed, no roof, no privacy so that we’d behave right in hopes of earning back small privileges,” Jones explained.
Jones said she struggles with trying to justify her experience because she “wasn’t physically abused, at least not after the whole gooning, escorting situation.”
“The mental and emotional manipulation I experienced is something I will not forget, and I won’t pretend it didn’t happen because that is abuse too,” she added.
When the wilderness therapy program was over, Jones thought she would be returning home. Instead, she was sent to a residential treatment centre in Utah for 13 months.
“All of this was happening while my dad was only getting more sick back at home and, for the first time in a long time, I actually wanted to be there with him,” she said. “A few months into the program, my dad passed away. I was not there. I had the luxury of speaking to him two days before on his birthday. I told him I loved him and he said it back and we both knew.”
She said she saw a post online announcing that her father had “passed away surrounded by his whole family.”
“It made me physically ill because, yeah, the whole family was there except for me. I’ve accepted it. 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,” Jones shared.
Processing Bowie’s death became a “whole new layer of the program” for Jones.
“They created a special phase for me called the grief and loss phase. They structured my grief,” she said of the residential treatment centre. “They categorized it and assigned milestones and expectations. I thought that was normal. I had never lost anyone close to me and I didn’t know how to grieve.”
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Jones was able to leave the treatment centre just before she turned 16 and went home, where she “slipped into old patterns.”
“Maybe it was the shock of going from one world to another. I’d spent a year living under constant structure inside a place that was nothing like real life and then suddenly I was back home, back in the world, and it felt like sensory overload,” she said.
Jones revealed that it wasn’t long before she got “legally kidnapped again” and sent away.
“I’m not here to give a rundown of each place I went away to. That’s not the point. The point is to show what this system does to a person,” she continued. “What it takes to be sent away over and over again. Told you’re too much, too broken, too difficult to handle. The point is to talk about what no one talks about … The point is that this happened to me and to a lot of other kids that deserve better.”
Other celebrities have been outspoken about youth treatment facilities, including Paris Hilton, who helped to fight for legislation aimed at cracking down on the industry that cares for troubled teens by requiring more transparency from youth treatment facilities.
In 2024, Hilton testified in a legislative hearing in support of a bill that aims to pry open information on how short-term residential facilities for youth dealing with substance abuse and behavioural issues use disciplinary methods such as restraints or seclusion against minors. She detailed her harrowing abuse as a teenager at a facility in Utah that she said still haunts her and urged lawmakers to take action before more children have to suffer similar treatment.
Later in her video, Jones said she struggled to understand what a “real relationship was supposed to feel like” but she didn’t know if people just wanted to get close to her or hear stories about her parents.
“I couldn’t tell if someone liked me for me or what being around me meant for them. That does something to your state of safety,” she said. “You start questioning every single interaction, every kindness and every friendship, but at the same time, I felt guilty for struggling at all because how could I be unhappy? How could I feel empty when my life was so full from the outside? ”
She went on to say that she “internalized that” and thought that her own pain meant that “something was wrong with me.”
“I didn’t want fame. I didn’t want attention. I didn’t want to be a public person — and I still don’t. The spotlight never felt like warmth to me. It felt like exposure, like being visible without being known,” Jones continued. “I became scared of people and depended on them at the same time. I wanted connection desperately but I didn’t trust it when I had it.”
In January 2016, Bowie, whose hits included Space Oddity, Fame, Heroes and Let’s Dance, died of cancer at the age of 69.
Bowie was married twice, first to actor and model Mary Angela “Angie” Barnett, from 1970 to 1980, and then to Iman in 1992. He had two children — Duncan Jones and Alexandria “Lexi” Zahra Jones — one with each wife.
— With files from The Associated Press
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