Bestselling author and wife of Weezer bassist Jillian Shriner was shot by police and arrested after allegedly getting into an armed standoff with officers outside her L.A. home.
But although headlines were quick to characterize Shriner as a “Weezer wife,” the author’s own backstory is arguably much more salacious than that of her rock star husband Scott Shriner, who she married in 2005.
Shriner, 51, has been charged with attempted murder and was released after posting a $1 million bail. A 9-millimeter handgun was taken from her home, according to police.
In her bestselling 2010 memoir Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, written under the name Jillian Lauren, Shriner reveals in explicit detail the unlikely journey that led the Jewish-American theater school dropout from New Jersey to spend 18 months living in Brunei as part of a Middle Eastern prince’s concubine, competing with dozens of other women for his attention and untold riches.
Shriner’s journey to Brunei began in the privileged suburbs of Livingston, New Jersey, where as she writes, “orthodonture was mandatory and getting a nose job as a gift for your sweet 16 was highly recommended.” The adopted daughter of a Jewish stockbroker and housewife, she attended NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts at just 16, but dropped out six months later to trade Shakespeare for stilettos at Times Square strip clubs, the New York Post reports.
By 19, she had graduated to high-end escort work, which led her to a fateful audition that required her and seven other women to pose in lingerie for a photographer for the chance of earning a $20,000 gig to “amuse” a Singaporean businessman. But only after winning did she learn the terrifying truth: Her client was actually a prince from Brunei, a tiny oil-rich sultanate where homosexuality is punishable by death and the Sultan’s word is law.
After telling her parents she had scored an acting gig, Shriner hopped on a plane to Brunei and soon found herself at the estate of Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei, the playboy brother of one of the world’s richest monarchs.
Shriner was living at the Instana Nurul Iman Palace: a vast property considered to be the largest presidential palace in the world, costing $1.4 billion to build and boasting over 1,788 rooms.
“It was immense, it looked like a resort in Fort Lauderdale if it had been imagined by Aladdin,” she said of her new temporary home. “There were gold domes, swimming pools, and tennis courts and I saw all of this and my head raced with plans. I thought, is it that far out of the realm of possibility that I maybe could make a prince fall in love with me.”
She admits that she soon succumbed to “Stockholm Syndrome” after arrival, writing “I knew I was a hooker, but somehow I felt like Cinderella.”
Yet the glitter masked a profoundly empty lifestyle, she writes, and upon attending a lavish party with 40 other girls shortly after her arrival—some younger than 16—reality set in that she was part of a harem who were all competing to become the prince’s fourth wife.
Shriner said she initially managed to catch the prince’s eye and soon became one of his early favorites, competing with a former Filipino TV star named Fiona for the monarch’s affections and finding herself falling for him.
But after accompanying him on lavish shopping trips to Singapore and Malaysia, she fell from grace when the prince rented her out to his brother, the sultan, for sex. She soon found herself slipping down the pecking order of girls.
Robin, the pseudonym Jefri asked to be called by his lovers, “was always famished behind the eyes,’ she wrote in Some Girls. ”It was the kind of hunger you could never really feed, the kind that keeps you up until 5 a.m. every night, the kind that drives you to fuck girl after girl, to buy Maserati after Maserati.”
“I know something about performing. I know that when it seems like the avalanche is about to roll over you, you face into it and keep both arms swimming as hard as you can. You smile and you sell it,” she added.
Eventually, Shriner decided to leave the warped reality show and returned to the U.S, having earned around $300,000 and a number of lavish gifts including a Tiffany choker and earring set during her time in the Middle East.
She later joined a burlesque troupe, which led her to meeting her now-husband Scott.
Some Girls proved to be an immediate bestseller when it was published in 2010 and rocketed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, as did Shriner’s second memoir Everything You Ever Wanted, released in May 2015.
In 2021, she starred in a five-part documentary series on Starz titled Confronting a Serial Killer, in which she interviewed Samuel Little, considered to be the most prolific killer in American history.
Just a few weeks before the shooting took place, Shriner revealed she was undergoing treatment for cancer.
“Yes, I have a little bit of the C word y’all. I know a lot of us do,” she revealed in an Instagram post of herself smiling and giving a thumbs up while lying in a hospital bed.
She and Scott have two adopted children: Tariku, from Ethiopia, and his adopted brother Jovanni Starshine who they welcomed into the family in 2016.
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