There is a motif running through Julia Fox’s new memoir that hints at the incredulity one may experience while reading it. “I can’t believe this is my life,” writes the 33-year-old in Down the Drain, and the phrase is not a rhetorical flourish. The story of her rackety early years in 2000s Manhattan takes in periods as a runaway, an artist, a dominatrix and a provocateur of a kind that grows out of a very particular (and unsupervised) downtown New York childhood. She has overdosed twice; been in a series of abusive relationships with men, starting in her mid-teens; and fleetingly been committed to a psychiatric ward – and this is before she appears in a hit movie and becomes tabloid bait for briefly dating a controlling and coercive superstar. As a result, says Fox, she was for a long time a titanic pain in the arse to almost everyone she encountered. “I really hated when people felt bad for me. So it’s almost like I was an asshole on purpose, to prevent that pity. I was a jerk – entitled and selfish. But I feel like you have to be when you’re in survival mode.”
That survival mode is still in place, although, Fox hopes, these days it manifests in somewhat diluted form. Since 2019, when she won her first acting role in the movie Uncut Gems alongside Adam Sandler, her persona has been outsized and conscientiously unruly; in the years following her debut, she would appear on the red carpet pulling wild faces and mouthing off about her own genius, or posting drunken screeds about her ex-husband on Instagram (“Have you seen this deadbeat dad?”). That’s not how she appears today. At a studio in Manhattan, Fox is pale, quiet, thoughtful, younger-seeming than her age – when I ask how old she is, she says without thinking, “22”, before correcting herself – in shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops. She speaks with the flat, nasal affect of someone trying to repurpose a lot of memories from the bad into the merely boring, an objective she certainly achieves in the memoir, a picaresque tale told with a jauntiness often at odds with the events she is describing, and that she embarked on, she says, partly out of a love of writing and partly to make sense of everything that has happened to her. It is also, I suspect, an effort to wrest back control of her reputation after the warping effect of her extremely brief, extremely public involvement with Kanye West in 2022. “I tried to be as fair as I could and as truthful as I could. It was a purge, I would say.” For long stretches of the book, I itched to reach back, retrospectively, and call social services.
Fox still lives downtown, with her two-year-old son, Valentino, and is determined to create an environment for him as far from the one from which she emerged as possible – which is to say, one in which when she wasn’t being screamed at, she was being totally ignored. As recounted in the memoir, her childhood and adolescence sound like a heavy-handed public service announcement from the 1970s about the perils that befall latchkey kids. Fox’s father, a builder, was volatile and verbally abusive, so that “I never really knew who I was going to get. He could be the best dad ever, or the literal worst.” Her mother was absent for long stretches when she returned to her native Italy, and, when she was present, fought explosively with her daughter. At 11, Fox was drinking, partying and being hit on by 27-year-old men. At 12, she and Trish, her best friend, persuaded a sketchy tattoo artist to give them tattoos and nipple piercings. Her dad’s main piece of parenting advice was “weed, heroin, cocaine ... all that shit is fine. But stay away from PCP angel dust. It makes hair grow on your brain.” When Fox was 16, she absconded with her boyfriend, “Ace”, a minor-league drug dealer, whom the cops threatened with charges of kidnap and statutory rape (the age of consent in New York is 17). Ace ended up in prison, at Rikers Island, on unrelated charges and wrote to inform Fox he wanted to murder her and her family. “I decide that I’ve had enough,” she writes, with the guilelessness that informs the whole book. “I’m going to end things with him.”
One result of all this was a range of tics and behaviours that started young and persist. “I would bite my nails, suck my thumb, hum a lot. I was humming and twirling my hair, I had a lot of security objects.” She would sometimes sleep with the hairdryer on, “for the warmth and the white noise, and because I wouldn’t have to hear whatever was happening, the fighting”. Her relationship with food, she says, was and remains very weird. “I eat a lot of candy, and sugar. Sometimes I don’t eat one not-sweet thing for the whole day. It’s all candy, it’s all ice-cream.” Compared with overdosing on heroin, of course, “it’s not life or death. It’s what I’m left with, but it’s pretty harmless. I mean, I could get diabetes and high blood pressure or whatever. But I’m not going to, like, die. Hopefully.”
This is how Fox is calibrated; to downgrade one set of hair-raising experiences against a set of others that are infinitely worse. When she was 14, she went to live for a while with a host family in Italy, in the “depressing little town” her mother came from and still periodically lived in on the edge of Lake Como. She was enrolled in Catholic school, which went as well as you might expect (among other things, she discovered that two girls who sat behind her in class were “keeping track of the colour of my thongs in their notebook”). The narrative, briefly, turns into a conventional coming of age, a period piece full of Miss Sixty jeans and Nokia phones and this exciting new thing called Myspace. In a phrase that will make anyone over 40 smile, Fox says: “I went through my Facebook messages of 2006 and really transported myself back in time.” Even here, however, there is something wrong with the picture. After Fox is asked to leave the host family for smoking and skipping school, she pretends to her parents she has moved in with her mother’s family, but instead goes to live in her mother’s empty apartment. It’s a sad image, I suggest, a 14-year-old living alone. Fox looks taken aback. “At the time I loved it.” What if her son was living by himself at 14? “Yeah. I can’t even wrap my ahead around that. It’s not an option.”
She can be dry and bleakly comic about these years of her life. She can also be entirely detached. Back in New York and out on the town, Fox and a friend get so drunk that when a bunch of men kerb crawl and offer them booze, they get into the car and end up the next morning out of it in a motel with blacked-out memories of the night before. This falls into the category of things Fox says “my brain has erased that are traumatising”. When she is 16, she makes a desultory attempt to kill herself – she insists it is a superficial gesture to get the drug dealer boyfriend off her back – and ends up in a psychiatric ward, where she is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Within weeks of release, she overdoses in a hotel room with “a bunch of Irish men, from Ireland” whom she meets with a friend in a bar, and is brought round by paramedics. Shortly after this, she responds to an ad on Craigslist for a “dominatrix hiring, no sex, no nudity, no experience necessary”. She takes the job, because, she explains, it pays better than, “these minimum-wage jobs [that] offered no benefits except the things I could steal”.
These events unfold breathlessly, unreflectively, and with a self-romanticising air that has probably been chosen in avoidance of harder-to-bear narratives. In the “dungeon” downtown, Fox’s first punter is a man in his 50s, scrupulously polite (“I’m Stewart but my friends call me Stew”), who stands with his balls in a vice and likes having cigarette smoke blown through a tube into his mouth. “I try not to recoil at the sight of his small, flaccid penis, dangling limply between his chunky legs,” writes Fox, who is in the last year of high school at the time. A middle-aged religious man asks her to sit on his face in her jeans. A middle-aged British man asks if he can flog her. A middle-aged Indian billionaire pays her to talk to him for four hours. The men say: “Wow, you’re so beautiful. You’re so young.” After working in the dungeon for a month, Fox writes, she has got enough money to move into her own apartment and quits, taking the contacts for her clients with her.
Nowhere in this story does Fox use the word paedophile. By the time she encounters these men, she has been preyed on for so many years that, at the relatively advanced age of 18 and in a BDSM club with surveillance and protection and camaraderie, it seems to her a stable and enviable environment. “It was the stuff before the dungeon when I was being used,” she says. At a party at a friend’s house when she is 11, a 27-year-old man kisses her, gropes her and tries to sleep with her, shuffling off when she hides under the duvet and pretends to be asleep. She characterises him as the first “of many. I didn’t want to be repetitive in the book, but there were … a lot of paedophiles. I didn’t even realise that’s what they were until I was much older, or just how many. They were everywhere, and kids back then didn’t have the information they do now. Now, kids know when someone is too old, whereas back then it was just like: hot older guy!! The media didn’t help, either. It was totally normal for a 17-year-old celebrity to be dating 30-year-old whoever. It was normalised.”
In the dungeon, there were rules. She felt looked after. She honed skills that would come in handy later in life. “It taught me how to perform. It was my first acting gig. It was improv, all day, with different characters. It taught me to read a room and kind of know what somebody wanted to hear even before they knew it.” She came to regard her time there as an experience in empowerment, and something else, too. “Even though the clients would say, ‘You’re so beautiful, you’re so this, you’re so that’, I didn’t believe it before I saw that I was being booked the most. And taking the most money.” After years of neglect and abuse, she found the hard metric welcome. “I was like: oh. Now I understand my worth.”
***
If it wasn’t part of Fox’s plan to become an actor, that’s because she had no plan at all – which is, of course, not the same thing as not having ambition. Swimming around the clubs downtown in the mid- to late-2000s, Fox had a style and velocity that garnered attention. She tried to get a design label off the ground, bankrolled by the Indian billionaire she had met in the dungeon, who, for five years, paid her rent and living expenses. (This was a sweet deal, thought Fox, not least because “Rohan” was only mildly controlling.)
She put together a few local art exhibitions that seemed to go down very well. A book of photos and artefacts chronicling some of her misadventures, and that included her ex-boyfriend’s inmate tag and the missing poster her parents disseminated – featuring the wrong height and date of birth for her – when she ran off with him, was presented at the New York art book fair by a friend. An art exhibition called PTSD followed, featuring, Tracey Emin-style, the recreation of a bedroom she had stayed in during a road trip to Louisiana, and in 2017, another show, somewhat in the style of Nan Goldin, called RIP Julia Fox, in which she dropped her own blood on to canvas. These productions were energetic and original and won Fox the attention of i-D magazine and Dazed. She suffered low self-esteem, but on the flip side, she says: “I always felt that something was going to happen, and so did the people around me. I had this supernatural force inside that I could do anything. But then, there’s that other voice that comes in immediately after and says, ‘No you can’t, you’re delusional.’ It’s always a struggle between ‘I know I’m capable, I can do anything’ and ‘You’re a piece of shit, you’re not worthy’.”
A friend of Fox’s had been working on a film that no one in their circle thought would amount to anything. This was Josh Safdie, who writes and directs with his brother Benny. A few years later, after the pair had made Good Time, an indie hit starring Robert Pattinson, that movie – Uncut Gems – was bought and Sandler was cast in it. Josh urged Fox to audition for the female lead. It’s the kind of thing friends say to each other all the time and in 99% of cases never go anywhere. But Fox turned up, dazzled the casting agents, was invited to do a scene with Sandler, and effectively performed her way into the role of Julia – rackety moll to Sandler’s spiralling jewellery hustler – with no acting experience whatsoever. The film was a critical hit, and Fox’s life changed.
Except that, in some ways, it didn’t. Fox had a baby with Peter Artemiev, a pilot she met at the Uncut Gems wrap party, married two months later, and divorced 18 months after that. She made a movie with Steven Soderbergh and Benicio del Toro called No Sudden Move (2021). As her fame grew, so it appeared to Fox, at times, that she had merely advanced to attracting a different kind of abusive man. In late 2021, a message reached her via a friend that a “famous artist” had been asking after her. This was West (who has changed his name to Ye), and a phone call between them was arranged. Over subsequent days, he called her multiple times and they talked for hours, or rather, in Fox’s account, “he talks for hours and I mostly listen”. She writes: “He loves my ideas and thinks I’m really smart.” When he invited Fox to meet him in Miami for New Year’s Eve, she politely declined – her son wasn’t yet a year old – so Ye chartered a private jet. She relented, taking her friends along with her. Within five days, he had put her friends on the payroll as stylists and asked if she wanted to take the “relationship” public.
Before we go further, it should be pointed out that Fox dated Ye for less than a month, during which time she saw him a handful of times. It’s also worth mentioning that this was the period during which he began his campaign of harassment against his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, abusing her via social media and publishing her private messages. Almost every time Fox and Ye met, the meeting was preceded by the arrival of a stylist and wardrobe, so she could change into something he had approved. On one of their early dates, a photographer was present; afterwards, Ye sent photos of them making out to the editor of Interview magazine and asked Fox to write something about how they met. (He didn’t like what she wrote and sent in a new, entirely fabricated version, which is still online, and which, she told him, correctly, sounded dumb.) Describing one of their few, unobserved hang-outs in a hotel room, she writes: “We spend the day playing Uno and a game that involves highlighting positive words in the dictionary.” He told her: “I’ll get you a boob job if you want.” Ah, the romance. She said no thanks and started eyeing the exit.
Fox is great in these pages, funny, and outraged, and all over the place with indecision as she wrestles with the conflict of being simultaneously sucked in by the huge gravitational pull of Ye’s fame, repulsed by his self-indulgence, and ignited by the opportunities – who can blame her? – that being seen by his side will afford. “I went into it with good intentions and feeling all this could be real, and it could be amazing, and he could open so many doors.” At some point in that brief month, Ye said he was going to get her a million-dollar modelling deal and there followed a trip to Milan for fashion week, where, writes Fox: “I meet Donatella and sit front row at the Versace show, which I certainly never thought would happen.” Then, in Paris, they argue after he tells her to stop bringing her friends on trips, and she tells him she’ll only do so if he stops bringing his horrible entourage. He stops answering the phone – his assistant tells her he’s on a “month-long phone break” – and shortly thereafter they “split up”.
The entire episode is ridiculous, and it’s clear to Fox, now, that she was simply “being used as a pawn in this grand master plan to get back at his ex-wife. That’s humiliating. That’s a really shitty position to be in.” Still, looking back, she knows herself well enough to know that if it hadn’t been for Valentino, her baby, pulling her back to reality, she would have chucked in everything and done whatever Ye asked. “I know I’d have gone on this ride.” As it was, she got irritated, then depressed, then jauntily dismissive. One day, an NDA arrived via Ye’s assistant and he texted her: “I can’t be friends with you if you don’t sign it.”
“I’ll live,” she replied.
If Fox had imagined that being seen with Ye would help her out in life, things didn’t necessarily shake out that way. Before Ye, she had been talked about as a hot new acting talent. Afterwards, as front row seats dried up, the conversation changed. “A lot of people were like, oh, she’s only famous because of Ye. It’s like, no, I’ve been around and I’ve been in a full fucking movie and I did a lot of things before that, too. It’s that you’re just hearing about me now. That relationship doesn’t define me. It’s one little blip.”
Most of the blips in Fox’s life have been dealt with via a rigorous programme of denial. When she talks about her problems with men – specifically her pattern of choosing abusers – she says: “I could go to therapy and unpack it, but I don’t have the time to do that. I’d rather just swear off ’em.” This is her mode of living – “I just brush everything off” – and she sticks to it.
Occasionally, however, something happens that she has a harder time keeping at bay. Shortly before auditioning for Uncut Gems, Fox received an excited message from Liana, a friend, advertising what she called “an invitation I can’t refuse”. This turned out to be from “a billionaire with a private jet [who] wants to take us to Art Basel in a few days!” Fox and Liana adjourned to Teterboro airport, boarded a private jet with an “intoxicated rich guy”, and his bro-y sidekick. Sipping champagne, Fox briefly thought, “How lucky I was that my prayers for a sugar daddy were answered with Rohan rather than some jerk like this.” Then she blacked out. When she woke up, hours later, she says she was in a hotel room in Miami, naked in bed alongside the billionaire. “Did we have sex?” she asked, and she says he lifted his head enough to slur, “You wanted to pee on me” before passing out again. Horrified, she grabbed her luggage and ran to a friend’s Airbnb. Later, when the man texted to ask after her, she told him she had lost a diamond earring, whereupon he took her to a high-end jewellery store in Miami and she shook him down for $6,500. It didn’t even the score, says Fox, but it helped.
What to make of this story? In the book, she bounces through it in the same jaunty, flippant register as all the others. Now, she refers to it as “the date rape on the private jet”. She assumes she was drugged. She says that before revisiting the memory for the memoir, it is “something I had really tried to pretend didn’t happen”. Afterwards, she says, it didn’t occur to her to go to the police. What would have been the point? Relative to her attacker, she was a nobody with no resources. Now, however, “if something happened like that I would definitely take the appropriate action. 100%.” She hesitates. “Then again, I don’t know if I would. And then go to battle, have years of my life taken away and have to relive it? We’ve literally seen what happens, with Amber Heard. It’s like: is it worth it at the end of the day?”
Fox says she is a big believer in karma. “I can be very spiteful and vengeful,” she says. “I love getting a good revenge, it makes me salivate. But I also have the wisdom to know: don’t do anything, it’ll do it on its own. Shitty people will get what’s coming to them.” The presence in the culture of a great many truly shitty people suggests this is categorically untrue.
The difference for Fox, these days, is that where in previous phases of her life, when bad things happened, she would spiral towards drugs and drink, now she tries very hard to stay sane for her two-year-old. She is not entirely sober. “I don’t go to AA meetings. I love AA, and I’ve gotten a lot of tools from it, but now I really just abstain. I’ll have a glass of wine if I’m going out but it’s very rare. I stopped smoking weed, because I was such a pot head. I stay away from the things I know will derail my life and I have no control over.” The pandemic happening so soon after her debut movie came out put a big dent in her progression in the film industry, but she has some roles in the works. She is promoting the book. And, in the meantime, she lives with Valentino, who, she prides herself, engages in none of the “twitchy things” she had going on as a child. She has a stable co-parenting relationship with her ex-husband, Peter. And her son, she says, “is so happy, kind, generous, loves to dance”. For all her difficulties, Fox has never had trouble giving herself praise when it’s due. “I’m like, oh, mission accomplished.”
• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
• Down the Drain by Julia Fox published by HarperCollins on 10 October. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
