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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 placed in “degrading” treatment facilities, all while her father was dying of cancer.
“The treatment made me realize how much I had to speed up my teenage years,” she said in a lengthy Instagram video on Feb. 18. “I found myself longing to be a young person even though I was one, just not in a normal way.”
Alexandria “Lexi” Zahra Jones, daughter of Bowie and supermodel Iman, said she began seeing a therapist before she was 10 years old after her parents and teachers realized something was “off.”
“That’s when I had my first fear,” he said.
David Bowie’s separation from his daughter (Lexi Jones/Instagram; Larry Busacca/WireImage)
Jones explained that a few years after that, “things became very difficult. I started to feel depressed, like my mind was turning on me.”
The 25-year-old said she was failing at school, had learning difficulties and hated the way she looked, “and I had bulimia when I was 12.”
“I started self-harming when I was 11,” he continued. “I don’t know why I felt the way I did. I just knew I was sad. I felt stupid, unworthy, unworthy, useless, unlovable. And having successful parents just kind of made it worse.”
He ended up turning to drugs and alcohol after his father was diagnosed with cancer, which he said “took him away”. “I did everything I shouldn’t have done and more because I was angry, scared, numb, but I was free, until I was,” he added.
As his mental health declined, he said he became “cruel” to people because he wanted respect for being someone they “feared.”
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One weekday morning after getting ready for school, he said his mother called him into the living room and his mother, father and grandmother were all standing there.
“I did everything I shouldn’t have done and more because I was angry, scared, numb, but free, until I wasn’t.”
She said her father read her a letter that ended with, “I’m sorry we have to do this.”
He went on to say, “Then two men entered the door, and they were 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 on to the leg of the table. They grabbed me. They put their hands on me. They took me away from everything I knew, and I was screaming to kill him.”
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But Jones said his parents just watched. “They were crying, but they let it happen.”
The men put a rope around him, explaining. “I felt like cattle. I felt deprived of the right to stay in my life.”
He was forced into a black SUV.
“I was alone, I was traveling in a car with two men I didn’t know, who could tell me where we were going, I just sat in shock and kept quiet,” she said.
When he arrived at the wilderness center, he said he was searched for clothes, and was given clothes including snow pants and hiking boots.
The experience she described as a “city girl” was unfamiliar to her.
“This wasn’t camping. This felt like boot camp’s weird cousin,” he said. “And it was disguised as a cure.”
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During his three months in the desert camp, he said he was only allowed to communicate with people outside the camp once a week by letter, and even then, “only authorized people were allowed to write to us or hear from us.”
While he was there, they started a fire, built it and laid out the tiles under which they slept on a yoga mat and a sleeping bag.
Lexi and her father, David Bowie, when she was young. (Lexi Jones/Instagram)
“We dug holes in the ground to use as bathrooms away from this place,” he said. “And every time we used the bathroom we had to count out loud so the staff could keep track of us.”
When he first arrived, he said he wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone else in his group because new people at the camp were considered “a potential security risk until they can assess your behavior and decide if you deserve to be included in the group.”
“So, until then, you are invisible in a way that is difficult to explain,” he added.
He said some treatments helped, but others felt like he was “broken and left exposed.”
Even so, the girls in her group were very supportive, she said, making them feel like people, “even in a place where we were stripping.”
“But still the whole experience felt depressing,” he said, “as if the whole point was to take away every comfort and basic human need” to behave “right” for less rights.
He said they were allowed to shower once a week, without glasses and not allowed to know what time it was.
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Although he said he may have achieved other things while there, “I didn’t choose to be there and if you don’t choose change, it’s hard to know what it means to change.”
Although different, she said all the girls shared one thing: “We were treated like we were bad when we were just scared.”
He said he knows how lucky he is because he was not abused there, “because that is not the case for many children.”
“However, the mental and emotional manipulation I experienced is something I will never forget.”
After the wilderness camp, he said he was sent to a treatment center in Utah for over a year where he felt like everything he had worked for in the wilderness “disappeared” because he said he received respect and rights there, but when he arrived in Utah “it was like starting over.”
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Once again, he was undressed, had to count when he used the toilet and was watched while he slept.
Lexi and her mother when she was a toddler. (Lexi Jones/Instagram)
He said he did well there, but messed up sometimes because he was 15, including when he kissed a girl once.
As punishment, he had to return to being under constant observation and was not allowed to speak to anyone for several weeks.
“It felt like I was in solitary confinement, and I felt like a prisoner,” he revealed.
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However, he met one of his best friends there and had a great teacher who sparked his love for art.
“All this was happening when my father was very sick at home,” she said, adding that for the first time in a long time she wanted to be with him.
Bowie died on the show.
“I wasn’t there,” he said. “I had the luxury of talking to him two days ago on his birthday. I told him I loved him, he answered me and we got to know each other.”
After that, he said that a post on social media saying that he died surrounded by his entire family made him physically sick.
“I had the luxury of talking to him two days ago on his birthday. I told him I loved him, he answered me and we got to know each other.”
“I have accepted you,” he said. “I’ve tried not to internalize it or feel guilty but sometimes I have those moments where I wish things were different.”
In this program, he said that this program organizes his grief in the way he should handle it. He thought at the time that it was normal.
David Bowie and wife, Iman, in 2011. (Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images for DKMS)
When he returned home just before he turned 16, he said it was “overwhelming” with too much freedom, and he reverted to old patterns and was soon sent to another treatment center.
The repeated cycle of being sent from place to place made him feel like a “transmitted problem.”
He said that everywhere seemed to make him something different that he didn’t ask to be, and he immediately stopped asking where he was going.
The point of his post, he concluded, was to show what those places do to a person and “the parts of yourself that you lose during the renovation.”
“Since I went through things that children should not go through, I also became a person that I am proud of,” he added.
He said that learning “therapy before I knew algebra” was wrong, “but it’s part of who I am now, so, no, this isn’t just a story about abuse, it’s a story about how I was shaped not only by what hurt me but what I formed in response to it.”
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And although he wishes it had happened under better circumstances, “I can’t pretend it didn’t make me a person who sees people deeply, feels things deeply, creates from that place.”
He said he still checks the rooms to find rules he doesn’t know and feels guilty to find freedom, but he’s also proud of himself “because I finally defined healing for myself.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to Iman’s attorney for comment.
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