Alexandria “Lexi” Zahra Jones, the 25-year-old daughter of David Bowie and his wife Iman, recently took to Instagram to vulnerably open up about why she was absent during the final days of her father’s life because she was away at a treatment center for troubled teens. In a revealing video, she opened up about the mistreatment she experienced there and how she inspiringly survived to tell her story.
Bowie died on January 10, 2016 from liver cancer. The news was revealed to his fans via a statement on his Instagram account which said the musician died peacefully while “surrounded by his family.” Lexi says she spoke to her father via phone two days before his death, but never got to say goodbye in person.
Lexi is the younger of Bowie’s two children. The “Space Oddity” hitmaker welcomed his son, Duncan, with his first wife Angela Bowie in 1971.
David Bowie’s Daughter Bravely Opens Up About How Childhood Emotional Turmoil Led to Substance Abuse Struggles
Lexi began the raw and revealing video by saying, “There’s something a lot of people don’t know about me. A set of experiences that shaped everything about who I am. I spent a lot of time wondering if I was the problem, or if the real problem was the way that the world responds to pain.”
She continued, “That’s so problematic. Pain is what landed me in treatment as an adolescent more than once. In those places I met people who changed me, and people who are also being changed. People like me.”
She then alluded to the microscope of her parents’ fame, saying, “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. And for a long time I tried to keep it that way. But whether I talked about it or not, it still shaped my life. I say it very plainly because avoiding it doesn’t make it less real. People assume that means having a perfect childhood, and a protected one, and a magical one, and parts of it were. I was loved, I was cared for. I had opportunities most people never get.”
GettyLexi then explained there was also a dark side to being a part of a famous family, saying, “What people don’t understand is that life being extraordinary doesn’t make it emotionally simple. I grew up being watched before I knew what being watched meant.” She said adults talked to her differently than other kids, with some being “fascinated” while others “wouldn’t talk to me as a person at all, and only as a proximity to something.” She said she began to feel like she only existed as an idea, not “Lexi the person.”
She acknowledged she felt guilty for struggling, saying, “How could I feel empty, when life was so full from the outside?”
She said due to her emotional struggles, she turned to self-harm at age 11 and developed bulimia when she was 12. “I felt stupid, incompetent, unworthy, useless, unloveable, and having successful parents only made it worse. It felt like I would never live up to them. I couldn’t understand how I came from people that were thriving in every single direction while I was failing at everything,” she revealed.
After her Bowie’s cancer diagnosis in mid-2014, she turned to drugs and alcohol as “an escape.”
Lexi Jones Says Bravely Recalled Dark Times at Teen Wilderness Camp
Describing the moment she was sent away from home, Lexi said, “It was a weekday morning. I had already gotten ready for school, and my mom called me out to the living room. My dad and my godmother and my mom were all standing there. It felt like an intervention, and in some ways it was. My dad read a letter he’d written. I don’t really remember what it said, but I do remember the last line said ‘I’m sorry we have to do this.'”
She then detailed the moment she was removed from her home, saying, “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 legs. They grabbed me, they put their hands on me. They pulled me away from everything I knew, and I was screaming bloody murder. I was screaming for someone to help me, but no one did.”
Lexi said when she arrived, she was forced to live outdoors in frigid conditions and was only allowed one shower a week. She was also forced to count aloud every time she used the restroom so staff could monitor her every move.
“I’m telling this story now, because so many people still don’t know what it’s really like in those places,” she shared.
David Bowie’s Daughter Says She Doesn’t ‘Want Fame’
At one point in the video, Lexi said, “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.” She explained that instead, it felt “like exposure, like being visible without being known.”
She added that she “became scared of people and depended on them at the same time.” She recalled, “I wanted connection desperately, but I didn’t trust it when I had it, and I was emotionally exhausted very young.”
