How David Bowie’s daughter Lexi Jones overcame his tragic dying, melancholy and abuse to launch her personal profession in music – however insists she’s ‘not a duplicate’ of her well-known father

When David Bowie tragically died from liver cancer in January 2016, he left behind his wife, supermodel Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid, and two children.

His son Duncan Jones, otherwise known as Zowie Bowie, was from the rock star’s first marriage to Angie Bowie.

But his daughter Alexandria Zahra ‘Lexi’ Jones, who is the daughter of David and Iman, was just 15 when her father passed away.

Now, 25, Lexi, who was born in New York in 2000, is determined to forge her own path in the spotlight and launched her music career last year with her debut album Xandri.

But things have not been easy growing up in the shadow of a music legend and a supermodel. 

‘I couldn’t understand how I could have been born to people who were doing so well in everything while I was failing at everything,’ she said in a clip earlier this week. 

On Thursday, Lexi revealed she turned to alcohol and drugs when her father was living with cancer in 2014.

She was also battling anxiety and depression, developed bulimia aged 12 and was self-harming.

When she hit 14, she was taken ‘screaming’ from her family home to a controversial treatment facility, where she was made to live in the wilderness for three months, forcing her to be away from her father as he lost his battle with cancer. 

Sharing a video on Instagram, Lexi recalled her father writing her a heartfelt letter when revealing the decision to send her to the facility, which read: ‘I’m sorry we have to do this.’

Looking back on her childhood, she said: ‘Adults would talk to me differently than they would talk to other kids. Some were not interested in me as a person at all, and only as a proximity to something else.’

She added that she felt like she ‘existed as an idea’ rather than a real person, with constant projections and expectations from others.

Lexi continued: ‘Something hit me pretty young before I was around ten. I started seeing a therapist because my teachers noticed something was off, and so did my parents. That was around the time I had my first anxiety attack.

‘I started to feel depressed. I was failing school. I had learning disabilities, that made everything feel harder, and I hated the way I looked. I developed bulimia when I was 12. I started self-harming when I was eleven. 

‘I felt stupid, incompetent, unworthy, useless, unloveable, and having successful parents only made it worse. It felt like I would never live up to them. I couldn’t understand how I came from people that were thriving in every single direction while I was failing at everything.’

Following her father’s diagnosis and turning to drink and drugs to cope, she said:  ‘Everyone around me was experimenting. But for me, it wasn’t about fun. I wasn’t experimenting, I was escaping.

‘When the party ended for everybody else, I kept going, and I drank and got high alone. I became someone who lashed out. I was cruel to people who didn’t treat me the way I wanted to be treated. I was begging to be respected by becoming something people feared, or at least noticed.’

Eventually, she said, an intervention occurred that was both unexpected and deeply traumatising. 

She said: ‘My dad read a letter he had written. I don’t really remember what it said, but I do remember the last line and it said, “I’m sorry we have to do this.”

‘Then two men came through the door, and they were both well over six feet tall. They told me I could do this the easy way or the hard way. I chose the hard way. I resisted. I screamed. I held onto the table leg.

‘They grabbed me, they put their hands on me, they pulled me away from everything I knew and I was screaming bloody murder. I was screaming for someone to help me, but no one did…

‘I felt stripped of any right to stay in my own life. They got me back into a black SUV and shoved me inside. By the time the door shut, my parents were already gone. I was alone. I was in a car with two strange men that wouldn’t tell me where we were going and I just sat there completely horrified and silent.’

Lexi said she spent 91 days at a ‘wilderness therapy’ programme living outdoors in winter conditions with no privacy, showering once a week, and being forced to count out loud every time she used a makeshift bathroom so staff could monitor her.

Wilderness therapy, also known as outdoor behavioural healthcare, is a highly controversial style of mental health treatment developed in the US for adolescents and young adults. 

It combines intensive outdoor activities with counselling to purportedly address behavioural, emotional and substance abuse issues.

After three months in wilderness therapy, Lexi was sent directly to a residential treatment centre in Utah for 13 months. ‘I was strip-searched again,’ she said. ‘I had to be watched while I slept. I had to count every time I used the bathroom.’

It was there that she learned her father had died: ‘I had the luxury of speaking to him two days before, on his birthday.

‘I told him I loved him, and he said it back, and we both knew. Then I saw the post, the one that said something like, David Bowie passed away, surrounded by his whole family.

‘It made me physically ill because, yeah, the whole family was there. Except for me.’

She continued: ‘I’ve accepted it. I’ve tried not to internalise it or feel guilty but sometimes I still have those moments where I wish things were to be different.

‘Processing his death became a whole new layer of the programme. They created a special phase for me called The Grief and Loss Phase. They structured my grief. They categorised it and assigned milestones and expectations.

‘At the time, I thought that was normal. I had never lost anyone that close to me and I didn’t know how to grieve. And that was my only frame of reference.’

After finally returning home from Utah shortly before turning 16, Lexi said she ‘slipped back into old patterns’ and was eventually sent away to another programme.

‘This repetitive cycle of being sent away made everything start to blend together,’ she explained. ‘The ache of being away from my life, my people, myself, made me feel like a problem that was being passed off.’

Lexi acknowledged that her experiences have shaped who she is today, making her ’emotionally intelligent, introspective, not afraid to reflect on some of the harder things’.

She added: ‘I was forced to look inward before I even had a chance to look outward. I had to understand emotions before I understood algebra. I had to become fluent in the language of healing before I even knew who I was.’

But she also described lasting effects: ‘I still flinch sometimes when things feel too controlled and I still get the urge to scan the room for rules I haven’t been told yet.’

Lexi later shared a statement explaining she held no resentment towards her loved ones and understood that they were trying their best to help her through something that ‘none of them fully understood at the time’. 

Clarifying, she shared: ‘My story was never meant to place blame on my parents. I love my parents deeply and I don’t hold resentment towards them. 

‘They were trying to help a child who was struggling in ways none of us fully understood at the time. I never shared this to create a narrative of family conflict’. 

Since the passing of her father, Lexi has been open about dealing with grief.

Two years after his death, Lexi got a tattoo honouring him in January 2018. 

Her tattoo is a moon with the words, ‘Daddy xx’ and the years of his birth and death, ‘1947-2016’. 

For many years, Lexi has been paying tribute to her late father on his birthday, with her social media posts prompting a wave of sympathetic responses from followers.

Last month, she publicly attacked those who know her personally for overlooking the occasion and its proximity to the tenth anniversary of her father’s death.

Sharing a selfie with Instagram followers, she wrote: ‘Thank you to all the people I don’t know who wished me condolences, and f**k you to all of my friends who never texted me at all.’

She added: ‘I got 1 text! F**k all y’all.’

Lexi had previously shared a poignant throwback snap with her father, with the caption: ‘Da big 79 today. Happy birthday pops, miss ya!’

The post was shared just months after Lexi revealed she has been diagnosed with autism, after a ‘long and exhausting journey’ and years of struggling to fit in.

The daughter of the late musical legend took to Instagram in August to discuss the ‘validating’ diagnosis and how she’d spent her whole life trying to pretend to be ‘normal’.  

Lexi explained she’d spent thousands of dollars seeking professional help, before finally getting a formal diagnosis from an autism and ADHD specialist.

The artist first announced her diagnosis in June, admitting that learning she was autistic gave her ‘clarity and relief’, after spending years hiding it without realising, leaving her drained and alienated.

She took to her Instagram to write: ‘Autism does not have one look, one voice, or one way of showing up. It comes in many forms, and a lot of us learn to hide it without even realizing we are doing it. 

‘I was recently diagnosed as autistic, and it finally made sense of so much I have carried quietly my whole life.

‘It is very common for women and people socialised as female to be diagnosed later in life. We are often conditioned to mask, mirror, and internalise. That does not make it any less real.

‘This diagnosis does not change who I am, but it gives me language, clarity, and relief. I am sharing this because I know I am not the only one, and because stories like this deserve to be seen.’

Alongside, she posted a deeply personal essay entitled, The Quiet Effort: Neurodivergence through my lens, where she candidly opened up on how she’d ‘spent my whole life feeling like I was different’.

Lexi recalled growing up feeling ‘isolated’ and spent years mirroring those around her and ‘masking’ – referring to the conscious or unconscious effort by individuals to hide or suppress their natural autistic traits and behaviours to appear more neurotypical.

She wrote: ‘I never really felt like I belonged anywhere, and it ultimately left me exhausted from masking.’

Lexi also confessed she had become good at ‘blending in’ but that it never came naturally to her and was something she had to work hard at ‘consciously constructing’.

She wrote: ‘It feels more like a performance I have built over time, not a reflection of how I truly think, feel, or function.’

She explained how she would get overwhelmed and ‘shut down or lash out’, while describing her lack of sense of self as a ‘sense of pain’ that ‘chips away at my confidence and sense of worth.’

However, Lexi went on: ‘I am not trying to be seen as different. I have always just felt different, and I have spent so much of my time trying to figure out why.’

She revealed she had been through a ‘long and exhausting process’ and spent ‘thousands of dollars’ on trying to find the answer, so she could ‘start building a life that actually fits who I am’.

She described finally getting her autism diagnosis as ‘validating’, as it made sense of all the things she had been feeling her whole life.

The musician concluded the lengthy piece by stressing that while she’s still the same person, she is now able to feel ‘more self-compassion and less shame’ about the way she is and thinks.

Lexi finished: ‘It is not about fitting into a category or chasing a label. It is about being able to see myself clearly for the first time. And I wanted to share that.’

Lexi now lives in LA, where she is making music and creating art, and she appears to have a close relationship with her mother.

During the pandemic, Iman, 70, revealed her daughter had helped her become more body positive while they were in lockdown together.

The supermodel said that after she complained to Lexi about her eight-pound pandemic weight gain and how she could no longer fit into her pants, her daughter simply told her to ‘buy a bigger pair’.

Iman shared the anecdote with People in 2021, saying that women should not make a ‘big issue of not fitting in skinny jeans’.

She added: ‘You’re not 20 years old. Buy a size bigger. How about that?’

Despite the pressure regarding physical appearance that many models experience, the Somalian beauty shared that she has tried to shield her daughter from any negative self-image talk.

In the same interview, Iman revealed she never discussed her own body image with her daughter while she was growing up. She believes this is why Lexi has such a positive attitude towards weight now.

Lexi released her debut album Xandri in April 2025. The 12-track record was created independently with Lexi writing, producing and performing all the songs herself.  

At the time of its release, she hit out at claims that her debut album was an attempt to replicate her chart-star father’s success and standing in the business.

Taking to Instagram, Lexi posted an emotional response — written as a poem — to the comparisons being drawn between them.

Under the title, ‘David Bowie’s Daughter, that gets your attention, ay?’ she insisted: ‘I’m the daughter of a legend, but I’m more than just his name.

‘They see the blood, they hear the sound, yet fail to see me, don’t feel the same.’

She continued: ‘They compare me to his heights, like I’m supposed to reach his light. But I’m not here to chase what’s already been done. By loving what I do, I feel I’ve already won.’

Adding that she’s ‘not a copy, not a shadow’, Lexi concluded: ‘I’m not trying to fill his shoes. I’m just trying to find my own peace.’