Rachel Lee, the alleged mastermind behind the infamous celebrity “Bling Ring” robberies of the mid-to-late 2000s, is breaking her silence after over a decade of reticence. Who is the pretty young woman who made burgling Paris Hilton, Megan Fox, Lindsay Lohan, and so many other celebrities look like a breeze? We find out, sort of, in The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring, streaming now on Max.
The only problem is, after watching Lee tell her story, you can’t help but wonder if she’s still pulling some kind of swindling act.
Introducing herself in director Erin Lee Carr’s documentary, Lee, now 33, talks animatedly about how thrilling it was to steal money from her mom’s purse as a latchkey kid. She admits she always had an inclination toward subterfuge, paired with resentment over her outsider status as an Asian kid in a largely white California community. She describes her teen self as isolated and insecure and contends that she stole jewelry, clothes, drugs, and more purely for the thrill of it, and as a way to impress her friends.
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Lee says the slew of celebrity heists she and her friends managed to pull off—the ones that inspired the “Bling Ring” epithet as well as the 2013 Sofia Coppola film—were both the product of her toxic relationship with co-conspirator Nick Prugo and her impulse to emulate Hollywood badassery. “For me, it was like, honestly, when I started watching those Fast and Furious, Ocean’s 11 movies,” Lee said. “I was like, ‘Icon. I want to be that.’ I don’t know why I thought like that, but I did.” (The irony of Hollywood fiction inspiring real crimes against its rarified citizens should be studied.)
She ultimately spent 16 months in prison for her crimes.
There’s an unsettling moment where Lee tells Carr about being kicked out of high school after she and a friend stole their classmate’s Ugg boots. Lee’s sidekick fessed up immediately when they were caught, but Lee lied effusively and effortlessly and demonstrated that she hasn’t lost that ability while retelling the story for Carr all these years later. Likewise, there’s something unnerving about Lee’s entire demeanor, with her all-white outfits and fake guru vibes. You get the sense that she’s reveling in Carr’s attention—the director said it took a year to convince Lee to agree to participate in the documentary, but it seems plausible that the ex-burglar was simply playing games with her, and that Carr was too enthralled to catch it.
The degree to which Carr admires Lee—“I think I’m obsessed with her,” the director recently told Vanity Fair—is part of a seemingly growing trend in projects that are meant to be objective, but wind up narratively confusing because of the blurred lines between subject and annalist. We recently saw that on display in Glossy, journalist Marissa Meltzer’s new book about the ascent of the millennial makeup brand Glossier. Most of Glossy is taken up by fawning assessments of Glossier founder Emily Weiss; Meltzer writes of feeling teenager-like insecurity around the polished visionary, and at several junctures, admits to letting Weiss dictate the terms of her inquiries.
The Ringleader strikes a tone similar to another recent Max documentary, Bama Rush, in which an investigation into high-stakes collegiate Greek life becomes an oddly solipsistic portrait of director Rachel Fleit’s struggles with alopecia and low self-esteem. In her film, Fleit turns the camera on herself and opens up about how the young, beautiful sorority girls she’s interviewing make her feel lesser-than, and about how she badly wants to join their ranks.
In all three of these projects, the authorial instinct to report on one’s subjects empathetically ends up overtaking the mission of the projects themselves.
Especially in The Ringleader, Carr produced something more like a feature-length fan-cam than a balanced story. She gives her subject way too much leeway to explain away her chronic thefts as a byproduct of her drug addiction. When Lee blatantly lies to Carr, first saying that she never sold items she stole, before admitting in the same breath that she had, it’s frustratingly brushed over.
“It’s really stressful thinking about the past. It’s quite disturbing, actually,” Lee says at one point in the doc. “I think I, honestly, was a sociopath. I think I honestly didn’t care about anybody or anything.” It’s probably her most sincere moment, and Lee deserves some element of sympathy for her struggles. But The Ringleader ultimately fails to justify itself as an essential or enlightening new piece to the Bling Ring puzzle, which was already the subject of a more comprehensive Netflix documentary last year.
Journalist Nancy Jo Sales, whose seminal 2010 article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” chronicled the Bling Ring saga in full, told Vanity Fair that she declined to participate in Carr’s documentary because, “I’m not sure what else there was to say.” That about sums it up.
