In her first interview since a bizarre incident earlier this year in which she was shot by LAPD police during a hit-and-run investigation after officials said she fired on one of their officers, author Jillian Lauren-Shriner has broken her silence on what she called an act of “self-defense.”
The Some Girls: My Life in a Harem author and soon-to-be ex-wife of Weezer bassist Scott Shriner spoke to Rolling Stone about the April shoot-out that took place after police stormed her Los Angeles neighborhood in search of on-the-lam hit-and-run suspects and unexpectedly engaged in a showdown in Lauren’s backyard. Police have claimed that Lauren fired at officers who were yelling over a fence at her, resulting in the officers returning fire and hitting her in the arm.
Lauren-Shriner was charged with two felony counts and later pled not guilty to charges of discharging a firearm with gross negligence and assault with a semiautomatic firearm, a downgrade from the more serious charges she faced when she was initially booked on suspicion of attempted murder.
Lauren-Shriner told RS that she can’t discuss certain aspects of the case for legal reasons, but with the case still pending she is currently enrolled in a two-year mental health diversion program that is expected to result in a full dismissal of her charges.
“I was doing the best I knew to protect my family,” she told RS. “[The] impulse was self-defense.”
While Lauren-Shriner was unable to get into specifics of what happened that day, she said the aftermath of the shoot-out has thrown her life into chaos. “My world fell to pieces around me in a heartbeat,” said Lauren-Shriner, who filed for divorce from bassist Shriner after 20 years of marriage earlier this month citing “irreconcilable differences.” She told RS that the couple, who share two adopted children, had been growing apart for years, with the police incident pushing their relationship to a “crisis” point.
“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-Shriner said. Though her writing has sometimes chronicled her personal experience, the author said she initially thought it was unlikely she’d turn this year’s police encounter into a book.
“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 said of her attempt to memorize the graffiti on the jail cell walls after the arrest. “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.”
Among her books are the 2015 memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted and 2010’s Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, which chronicles her time spent as a member of the Prince of Brunei’s harem.
After her plea, the judge in the case deemed Lauren-Shriner eligible for a mental health diversion program, which also requires counseling and random drug/alcohol testing. “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 said. “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.’ I’m in a position where I can speak to it.”
Though she said the headlines about the couple’s divorce are the ones that “really hurt” her, Lauren-Shriner remains proud of the life they built together. “He’s still my best friend. We still have beautiful kids together and have always really supported each other in our various transformations,” she said of her ex.
