Jillian Lauren found herself in the headlines this week after she was shot and injured by police, who later arrested her on charges of attempted murder. Authorities say she aimed a 9mm handgun at officers.
The 51-year-old Lauren is the wife of Weezer bassist Scott Shriner, and is also a bestselling author who first made her name with a memoir about her years as a member of a 25-strong harem of women employed by Prince Jefri Bolkiah, brother of the Sultan of Brunei, between 1992 and 1995.
Lauren was born in Livingston, New Jersey in 1973, and went to New York University to study acting for a short time before dropping out. In Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, she recounts how she was approached as an 18-year-old by a “casting director” who offered her the chance to make $20,000 by spending two weeks partying with a wealthy Singaporean businessman.
In fact, the “businessman” turned out to be Prince Bolkiah. Soon after being flown to Borneo, Lauren realized that she had in fact been hired to become part of the playboy royal’s harem, a group of young women employed to entertain him. When asked in an interview by 60 Minutes whether she knew sex would be involved in the transaction, Lauren responded: “Well, I knew I was not being hired as a diplomat.”
Lauren recalled in her memoir that there were about 30 girls recruited from all over the world working there at a time. She claimed some were as young as 15. She later estimated that over the course of 18 months working for the Prince she was paid around $300,000, as well as receiving gifts including jewelry and designer clothes.
In her memoir she also wrote that the Prince at one point gave her as a “gift” to his brother, the Sultan, who at that point had introduced Sharia law in the tiny southeast Asian nation he ruled. Laws against adultery did not, however, apply to him.
"All of a sudden here I am in a room with the guy whose face is on the money, and the billboards, and the television, and I was improvising at that point," Lauren recalled to 60 Minutes. "He asked me to do a little dance and then he asked me to take my clothes off and we had a sexual interaction."
After leaving the Prince’s employment, Lauren returned to the United States. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Antioch University, and published Some Girls in 2010. The following year she followed that with her debut novel, Pretty.
In recent years, Lauren has become a well-known figure in the true crime world through her interviews with the serial killer Samuel Little.
She first contacted the convicted murderer in 2018 and built a rapport with him that allowed her to draw convoluted admissions of guilt from him. Their relationship became the subject of the 2021 docuseries Confronting a Serial Killer, and her own 2023 book, Behold the Monster: Facing America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.
Documentary director Joe Berlinger praised the work, telling The Independent: “When I read that this powerful woman was able to get this unrepentant serial killer who had been denying all of his crimes to talk, and that those clues were being used to identify victims, it called to me.”
Earlier this year, Lauren wrote on social media that she was undergoing cancer treatment, and had been through two back-to-cack surgeries, including a hysterectomy.
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Lauren has been released on a $1 million bond following her felony arrest for attempted murder in her confrontation with police.
The clash occurred after LAPD officers chased three misdemeanor hit-and-run suspects who had left a freeway crash scene and run into a residential neighborhood of Eagle Rock in east Los Angeles. Lauren was not involved in the original car chase.
Authorities claim Lauren came out of a neighboring house armed with a handgun and failed to drop the weapon even after being repeatedly told to do so by officers.
Officers say that Lauren opened fire after seeing one of the car chase suspects on her property, according to CBS News.
She allegedly then pointed her gun at the officers, at which point they opened fire.
TMZ reports that she was shot in the shoulder. Lauren then went inside her home, packed an overnight bag and was escorted to a local hospital where she was treated for non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
