Jillian Lauren is finally ready to speak out — and she’s “calling from hell.”
The best-selling author and soon-to-be ex-wife of Weezer bassist Scott Shriner is joking, she says during a phone interview with Rolling Stone, but her life has been in a freefall for months – ever since a swarm of police descended on her Los Angeles neighborhood last April, leading to a bizarre standoff in her backyard. The incident thrust Lauren into national headlines. Police claimed she fired at officers who were shouting at her over a fence during a chaotic manhunt for fleeing hit-and-run suspects. Police returned fire, striking her in the arm. She was charged with two felonies.
In her first interview since the incident, Lauren says she can’t discuss certain aspects of the case. While she’s now enrolled in a two-year mental health diversion program that is expected to lead to full dismissal of her charges, technically, her case is still pending.
“I was doing the best I knew to protect my family,” she tells Rolling Stone. “[The] impulse was self-defense.”
The comments were as close as Lauren would come to explaining her side of what happened that day, yet she was more forthcoming about what happened in the aftermath of the gunfire.
“My world fell to pieces around me in a heartbeat,” she says. “It’s like, you spend your whole life just getting an entire deck of cards in order. And just take them and throw them up in the air one day, and I’m still waiting to see how they’re gonna land.”
Lauren recalled being arrested and taken to jail, with newspaper headlines saying she was booked on suspicion of attempted murder. Inside her cell, she says, she tried to memorize the graffiti on the walls.
“It gave me a chance to get out of my head for those hours in the jail cell and imagine who else had been there,” she says. “In the throes of it, I was saying I will never do a book about this because I can’t experience this again,” she recalls. Now, she feels differently. “Books are what I do.”
Prosecutors ultimately charged Lauren with negligent discharge of a firearm and assault with a semiautomatic weapon. The Los Angeles Police Department released body-worn camera and home-surveillance video in a presentation posted on YouTube. According to the police footage, as soon as an officer warned, “Oh, she racked it,” officers opened fire, unloading a barrage of ear-splitting shots. In the soundless home-surveillance video purportedly showing the same scene from Lauren’s side of the fence, Lauren does not appear to react to the volley of shots or exhibit any injury in the seconds after she allegedly fired.
After Lauren pleaded not guilty, a judge found her eligible for the mental health diversion program, which requires counseling and random drug and alcohol testing. More headlines followed.
“When the [mental health diversion] headlines came out, my joke was, ‘I’m not just a gun-toting criminal, now I’m a crazy one,’” she says with another slight laugh. She then turned serious. “My PTSD is a very real thing. I’m a victim of sex trafficking and domestic violence. … When the headlines said ‘Mental Health Diversion,’ what I really thought was, ‘OK, good. People are so scared to talk about this.’” She adds, “I’m in a position where I can speak to it.”
Lauren, the mother of two adopted sons, ages 13 and 17, is already a New York Times bestselling author. Her memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted, chronicled her experience with adoption, and Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, recounted her 18 months as a paid member of a prince’s harem in Brunei. Her latest book, Behold the Monster: Facing America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, focused on her interviews with convicted serial killer Samuel Little.
On Dec. 2, Lauren filed for divorce from Shriner after 20 years of marriage. She says they had been growing apart for years, and then the incident with the police pushed everything to a “crisis” point. The self-care and counseling she has undertaken since then have been revelatory, she says.
“I had to go back and work on trauma from a long time ago in order to try and understand myself now, my actions,” she says. Her goal now is to be her “best self” as she navigates the divorce.
“The headlines about the divorce were the ones that really hurt me,” she says. “I was the one who served my husband, but still, to see it in the public was really painful. It was definitely a day [spent] under the covers, blocking out all the noise. Divorce is painful, I don’t care who you are.”
She and Shriner remain proud of the life they built together and the loving family they created, she says. “He’s still my best friend. We still have beautiful kids together and have always really supported each other in our various transformations,” she says. For the first decade of their marriage, she traveled with Shriner and never missed a show, she says.
Over time, she struggled to “carve out a space” for herself. Then her book about Little became a massive project, and their interests diverged.
“We’re people who grow. We’re passionate people. We’re creative people,” she says. “You hope you’ll change and grow together. We grew apart.”
Scott Shriner declined to comment when reached by Rolling Stone on Friday. In a joint statement posted on Lauren’s Instagram Dec. 5, the couple said they will “always miss the wild-at-heart kids” they were when they met.
“We’ll always share the wonder we saw in each other’s eyes, when we first held our children,” the statement read. “The same wild hearts that brought us together, carry us now in different directions. We’ll forever be a family, united in love, laughter, and music.”
During the conversation on Friday, Jillian said she’s now looking toward the future and leaning on her family and friends. “They’ve circled the wagons around me. … When the chips are really down, you do find out who your friends are,” she says. “My tree was shaken, but it is still standing.”
