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26 Feb 2026 13:47
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  •   Home > News > Entertainment

    David Bowie's daughter has described being forcibly removed from her family home as a teenager and sent to a treatment centre

    Saying she was left feeling "stripped of any right to stay in my own life" while her iconic father David was dying of cancer, Alexandria 'Lexi' Jones, 25, made the claims in a video on Instagram.


    She explained her family made the decision to send her to a treatment facility amid her struggles with depression and an eating disorder.

    When David was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2014, she said she reached "breaking point" and turned to drink and drugs to cope.

    David, who had Lexi with his model wife man, 70, died in January 2016 at the age of 69, two days after releasing his final album, Blackstar.

    Lexi said she was 14 when two men "well over six feet tall" arrived to take her to a facility.

    Looking back on her childhood, she said: "Adults would talk to me differently than they would talk to other kids. Some were not interested in me as a person at all, and only as a proximity to something else."

    She added: "Something hit me pretty young before I was around 10.

    "I started seeing a therapist because my teachers noticed something was off, and so did my parents. That was around the time I had my first anxiety attack."

    Lexi went on: "I developed bulimia when I was 12. I started self-harming when I was eleven."

    She added: "I felt stupid, incompetent, unworthy, useless, unloveable, and having successful parents only made it worse."

    Describing the intervention, Lexi said: "My dad read a letter he had written. I don't really remember what it said, but I do remember the last line and it said, 'I'm sorry 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. I felt stripped of any right to stay in my own life."

    Lexi said she spent 91 days in a "wilderness therapy" programme, living outdoors in winter conditions.

    She said: "They strip-searched me. They handed me clothes... and a giant a** backpack that was bigger than me at the time.

    "I had never heard of anything like this before. I didn't know wilderness therapy existed. I was a city girl."

    She added: "We dug holes in the ground to be used as bathrooms... and every time we used the bathroom, you had to count out loud so that staff would keep track of us."

    After three months, Lexi was sent to a residential treatment centre in Utah for 13 months.

    It was there she said she learned of David's death.

    She said: "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."

    Lexi added: "Then I saw the post... David Bowie passed away, surrounded by his whole family. It made me physically ill because, yeah, the whole family was there. Except for me."

    Lexi, whose half-brother is film director Duncan Jones, said she is sharing her story "to make this real so that it's not just a memory I carry in private".

    She added: "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."

    © 2026 Bang Showbiz, NZCity

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