'The Queen of Versailles' Jackie Siegel on the Opioid Epidemic in the U.S.
From an award-winning documentary to international fame, the Siegel family seemed to have it all. Jackie Siegel, known as the “Queen of Versailles,” and her family made international headlines for building their Florida mega-mansion with the hope that it would be the biggest house in the country. Ten years later, their dreams came crumbling down when the financial crisis hit and brought construction to a halt. But that was nothing compared to the nightmare that would follow. In June 2015 their daughter Victoria had died of an overdose of methadone and antidepressants. In this interview, Jackie explains why she has made it her mission to speak out against the opioid crisis in America and how she plans on keeping the memory of her daughter alive. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
A few years went by, and I keep hearing this in my head and reading when I read her diary that she wanted me to publish this.
And the drug epidemic, with as much as everyone's doing, has gotten worse.
And I really felt that I'm getting goose-like chills right now.
I feel like my daughter's presence is here.
And we felt that we need to get out there and it was time to publish this book.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz podcast.
She's known as the queen of Versailles, Jackie Siegel, and her family made international headlines for building their Florida mega mansion with the hope that it would become the biggest house in the country.
From an award-winning documentary to international fame, the Siegel family seemed to Hi, I'm Dr. Oz.
Their dreams came crumbling down when the financial crisis hit, bringing construction to a halt.
But that was nothing compared to the nightmare that would follow.
In June 2015, their daughter Victoria had died of an overdose of methadone and antidepressants.
The day Jackie has made it her mission to speak out against the opioid crisis in America and to keep the memory of her daughter alive.
It's been about four years since you lost your daughter.
I know it's very hard to hear that introduction.
I thank you very much for being here.
And taking the painful journey back with us.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
I mean, it's an honor to be here.
And, you know, I was thinking, like, people are saying, you know, why would you bring out, like, your daughter's diary and share it with the rest of the world?
You know, it's something so private and intimate.
And the thing is, she left a text that she wanted me to publish her diary and share it with the rest of the world.
Because I think she felt that it could help save lives with people that are – to other teens that are struggling with the drug addiction and, you know, anxiety and things that – That typical teens go to.
Can we go back to that text?
I actually have it.
I wanted to ask you about it.
So this is a text, I guess she sent it to her boyfriend initially.
Yes.
And said, take my journal in my nightstand drawer, the fat one I always use.
I've never shown anyone my journal, but there's no one else I would rather pass it on to than you.
My business is everyone else's business now, and I'm okay with that.
Mom.
Hey, maybe you can publish my teenage journal and bump up your career.
Yeah, but that sounds strange, but right after that, it goes on to say that she would be so proud of me and that she hopes that I get an award and that she'll be there with her peaceful presence on stage.
And the thing is, she always loved me and knew that I loved to be in the spotlight.
And it was actually a positive thing.
And the...
After she passed away, I did not come right out and publish the diary.
It was very difficult for me to relive the whole thing, and I struggled with it.
The press was very mean to me when she passed away, to me and our family.
Like they were calling the New York Post, like calling her the doomed princess.
And like some of the morning shows, they were saying that I look like I was dressed for the Kentucky Derby because I had a black hat on.
But we lived in Florida in the middle of the summer, and it's hot when we were burying her and stuff.
So what happened was back then, about 150 people a day were dying from the drug epidemic.
And my husband and I, we were like a bit of recluse at that time for several months.
And we...
Read a lot online.
Learned about the drug epidemic.
Then we went up to Washington, D.C. After you lost your daughter.
After we lost our daughter, yeah.
We didn't really go out and socialize anymore.
And we kind of like dropped out of society.
My husband, he still went to work, but he said on his desk he had two piles of papers.
One pile that's work-related, that makes money, and the other pile of the drug educational papers that he was trying to learn.
And he says, this pile will save lives.
So he took the other pile, gave it to his executives, and he says, I'm going to focus the rest of my life on saving lives.
So a few years went by, and I keep hearing this in my head and reading when I read her diary that she wanted me to publish this.
And the drug epidemic, with as much as everyone's doing, has gotten worse.
Now we're up to about 250 people a day dying of a drug overdose.
And I really felt that I'm getting goose-like chills right now.
I feel like, you know, my daughter's presence is here.
And we felt that we need to get out there and keep the conversation going and doing as much as we can.
And It's time to publish this book to try to keep the epidemic from getting any worse.
Well, let's get into the book a little bit because you're very honest walking us through what happened in your family.
If you can, I want to go back just a tiny bit more.
I actually saw the original documentary, The Queen of Versailles.
You made some decisions just to allow the documentary to be made.
That put the entire family in the middle of a spotlight, which is good and bad.
There's some families that do it.
It's actually not correct.
Oh, please, correct it then.
Okay.
So what happened was I was out at the Versace opening in California over on Rodeo Drive.
And I was on the A-list and this photographer comes up to me and it was all movie stars like Demi Moore, Beyonce, you know, like all those people.
And this photographer comes up and she says, who are you?
Why are you here?
Like, you're not, you know, an A-list person.
So she got intrigued by that.
And I said, oh, you know, I'm...
I'm married to a timeshare billionaire and we're building a very large home.
And I happened to have my Christmas card in my purse with all of my eight kids.
And the cover of the Christmas card, it's me and my husband in front of one of our private chats with all the kids sitting on the wing.
So she could see that we had money and I wasn't making it up.
And so it kind of like she got my information and she says, well, maybe I'll come visit you sometime.
So anyways, a few months goes by.
I forgot all about it.
And her name is Lauren.
She comes to my house.
And she says, I'd like to see the house that you're building.
And I said, sure.
So we went over there, and she says, you know, I have an idea.
if she could film the house being billed, the construction, then she would like document that for us and we'd have free footage.
We wouldn't have to hire our own photographers and it might be a nice thing for our family.
And she said then she would be able to probably put it on HGTV for like one episode of, you know, like those home makeover shows or something.
Right.
So that's what it was.
And I signed the release.
And, you know, David said, that's fine.
He always likes things for free.
The economy took a turn for the worse in 2008. It was a worldwide recession or economic crisis that everyone felt on every level.
And we stopped construction on the house, so now she figures she didn't have the TV show for the episode.
But she still really...
And she started showing up at the house with the camera crew when they were in town.
And I'm a ham, and, you know, I just...
Open the door, let her in, and they're all following me around.
My husband was getting very irritated.
He'd be sitting there trying to watch TV, and he'd look and there'd be a boom over his head.
So he'd kick them all out, out the front door, and then I'd let him in through the back door.
So it was kind of like a circus for a while.
And we didn't know that it – and I don't think she knew that it was going to turn into a documentary until towards the end when she realized she actually really had something.
And in fact, when it was in the Sundance Film Festival, I didn't even know – I wasn't even invited to the premiere or anything, and it was the opening – Of the Sundance Film Festival, and it was packed, and they sold the movie that night.
Lauren had mentioned to me that it was going on, so I flew out there, and I was lucky to get a couple tickets for me at my friend's.
There's lots more when we come back.
So the movie comes out, you become very well known, in part because of the ups and downs, because life's not just about success.
In fact, your success is defined by how you do a failure.
Your kids are in this.
There's a fair amount of notoriety.
I mean, we all know families that have done really, really well when they've gotten enough attention that they get above the clutter.
Now you actually are on the A-list.
And not just because the Versace guys like you are, because you actually are notable.
And this affects the family.
So how did the difference...
You've got an experiment, a petri dish of kids.
Yeah, we have eight kids.
Exactly.
So how did it affect all of them?
And then I want to get into this issue of the opioid crisis in your daughter.
Because obviously it touched you in a very personal way.
Well...
The kids after that had like a phobia of cameras.
Like even after that I got offers to do TV shows and things like that.
But they wanted like more of what the Queen of Versailles was, like following the family around and the dynamics with that.
And at that point I just turned everything down because the kids didn't want any part of it.
Like even if I take pictures of them now, they say, Mom, don't post that, you know.
They're still traumatized from the negativity that they got at the schools.
Victoria, she didn't want people to know that she was from a wealthy family.
My husband's one of the richest men in Central Florida.
But she went to a public school.
That's what she wanted to do.
We had her in private school, but then she wanted to switch to public.
And she started getting kind of picked on once...
People found out about her father, and I think people started becoming friends with her for the wrong reasons.
And she didn't know who her friends are, but she wanted to fit in, and she started hanging around with just a bad crowd.
But my daughter, she always has the philosophies, like she was kind of believing in kind of the Buddhist philosophy, that you should always look in the good of people.
And she thought that she could make them change, you know, make the bad people change.
But unfortunately, they didn't.
They made her change.
As you look back on the decision to allow the photographer to enter your home, do you have any regrets?
If I had to go back, I would have, had I known it was going to be like a big movie, I wouldn't have had the kids in it at all.
I would still like to have been in it and have just been focused more on us.
But the thing is, since the movie came out, I mean, I wouldn't be here today talking to you because of the fame that this movie has brought.
I can now use that fame to get in the door to promote the book and be able to have the conversations about people doing the opioids and heroin and all that.
So Victoria is going to public school.
She's hanging with some mixed bag of people.
Many kids do.
Did you have any inkling at all that she was suffering with drugs or depression or something that would have culminated in what ended up happening?
Okay, this is what's crazy.
People say, how could you not know?
I mean, this happened right under our noses.
The teenagers are very good.
They're great actors.
And they're great liars.
And a lot of this, like if she said she was tired and she'd go and lock herself in the room, I figured she'd just sleep.
She was probably in there doing drugs.
And a lot of the time she'd be over sleeping at friends' houses.
Maybe the parents were out of town and they'd be doing it over there.
And that's why I think that this book is also good for parents.
It has her personal diary.
It's straightforward.
Nothing's been edited except we blurred out some people's names.
So I want parents to know when they read this...
This could be going on in their child's mind behind closed doors, you know, with feeling the anxiety or being bullied at school and turning to the drugs behind their parents' back, just kind of like they're self-medicating themselves.
Let's get into this, though.
But she was taking prescription medications.
How did she get access to them?
Okay, so at one point she...
Came to me, and her father, and she says, you know, I'm suffering with anxiety.
And, of course, we didn't want her to turn to street drugs.
Right.
So we took her to a psychiatrist.
He evaluated her, and he gave her a prescription for Xanax.
Mm-hmm.
And then she went for another month.
And she's 15, 16?
Yeah, about 16, I'd say.
So then she never asked for any more Xanax.
So I figured she was cured.
Maybe she was just going through something at school and she didn't need it anymore.
Well, so like a year and a half goes by and she comes to me and she says, Mom, she says, I need to go to rehab.
This is about a month and a half before she passed away.
And I said, you need to go to rehab.
I never see you do any drugs.
And she says, Mom, you don't understand.
And so what had happened is she had done an overdose on Xanax.
Like a couple days before, and that's when she sent the text, but I never found out about the text.
Got it.
So she realized that she thought she had overdosed that night, but she woke up in the morning not expecting to, and she comes straight to me and says, Mom, I need rehab.
So not really understanding why she needed rehab, me and my grandmother supported her, and we took her to the rehab center where they cleansed, they washed out their system or weaned them off.
Well, what had happened is she was getting her Xanax for all these years at school.
At school?
At school.
One of the kids had a pill press and made Xanny bars, which is like four pills in one.
And so she was addicted to the Xanny bars.
And if you don't have a break from Xanax, which is addictive, your resistance builds up.
So she was able, by the end, I don't know how many pills, but...
Like probably a handful of pills, you know?
So after going to rehab, was there a sense that she was now in recovery?
Okay, so what happened in rehab, she went in there because she was serious.
She realized she had a problem.
She almost died and she wanted to come clean.
While she was in rehab, she met a 26-year-old man that was a heroin addict that was in there Pretty much by core order.
Like either he needs to go to jail or he's got to show that he's cleaning up his act for his probation.
But he was only there because of that, because he was forced to.
And he had no intentions of quitting heroin when he came out.
So she was in there and she fell in love with him in the nine days that she was there.
When they came out...
He introduced her to heroin and they started running around together and he also gave her a bottle of methadone and she had gotten, I guess in the rehab, some anti-depression pills, some Zoloft I think they prescribed that for her.
And so on their one month anniversary, which was a big deal to her, this was like her first love, it was a grown man.
We didn't like him to begin with, but we didn't know about the heroin part.
We found out after.
And when we went through her phone after she passed away, I went through her texts.
So a month later, she did the drug overdose.
They were in a fight, and he was sleeping with another girl, and the girl texted Victoria and said, he's just using you for your money, and she's...
F-ing him right now and they're doing heroin together and Victoria just, she was by herself and she overdosed.
She took a bottle of the methadone and Zoloft.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah.
So who found her?
The nanny found her.
And the nanny, of course, called 911. Which brings another point that I wanted to bring up.
We're big naloxone advocates.
And back when she passed away, if our nanny had had naloxone, she could have been saved.
And no one really knew what naloxone was four years ago.
And what we've done, naloxone's been around since the 60s.
Now the paramedics, they know what it is because they use it all the time in the hospitals.
And so we went up to Washington, D.C. We went to some like heroin walks and things.
And while we were up there, we found about this CARA Act, which is a comprehensive something.
It's like a bill that's like really thick.
And in there, this act was about the Narcan being distributed across America.
And this had been sitting on the shelf for three years.
So what we did, we got a hold of the bill and my husband and I went around and we brought it in front of Congress and we got the bill passed and we've gotten the government to give, to budget $2 billion to put naloxone all over the country.
Now, because of us going up there, every police car has naloxone, and they're putting it on college campuses.
And Just in my town, I had lunch with the chief of police, and he told me, he says, because of what me and David have done, just in our community, they've used the naloxone that we've gotten provided 2,000 times in Orlando.
Wow.
So we know in there, some of those people may have lived without it, but somewhere in there we know we've spared someone's lives.
More questions after the break.
So the show's been, and I've been very active, pushing care of the bill through, just to make sure people have mental health services.
One of the things...
Oh, so you know about the act?
All about it.
We were one of the earliest and most vociferous supporters.
We actually did several big events, but we did one in the mall in Washington, an iconic location where Martin Luther King gave us I Have a Dream speech.
Yes.
And we would get all these musicians to come perform, trying to get people to realize that recovery is real.
Yeah.
But one of the ways you've realized that you've hit rock bottom is when you die.
And if you have something like naloxone to pull you back up again, it helps.
What's most troubling about your daughter Victoria's story is that she did hit rock bottom.
She almost died.
She goes to rehab.
Rehab fails her, which is the other big crisis we're facing now in America, which is that rehab is not what it's cooked up to be.
When done correctly, it's unbelievably impactful, and I know people who do it well.
But there are all kinds of mills out there.
Did you go back to the rehab facility that she was in?
Because obviously she wasn't treated effectively there.
Well, it's funny you say that about the rehab.
There's a lot of rehabs out there that they actually don't want the people to come clean because they want repeat customers.
It's an annuity.
Right?
And the insurance, people who have insurance, it only covers about, I think, only 30 days.
And in reality, no one gets cured in 30 days.
They need to, I would say, at least three months, maybe a year.
But we don't even have enough support to get people in for 90 days.
Our folks are 30 days.
There are people waiting.
I know many, many families who have lost loved ones while they're waiting to get their kids into rehab.
But I'm even questioning if rehab is done right a lot of times.
Well, no, we have a personal family friend whose daughter died a week after coming out of rehab.
That's the thing.
When they come out of rehab, now their body, their resistance to the drugs is down.
Exactly what happened to her.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And when they do relapse and take the drug, they take the amount that their body was used to from the month before rehab.
Exactly.
And that's when so many of the overdoses happen because the body can't take it.
So maybe they should not be allowed to release someone from rehab without some naloxone.
How do you say it?
Naloxone.
It's available at most places now.
But you probably should take it with you when you leave rehab.
You should, yeah.
You know, because it's dangerous.
I was at an event out in Las Vegas last week, and it was like a recovery charity.
And at this party, they had the emergency naloxone life-saving kits that you keep on your keychain.
And they passed it out.
That was the party favor.
And I thought, my God, you know, That's a great idea.
I'd like to find out.
I want to start passing these out.
Well, there are many communities now where it's prescribed for everybody.
There used to be a prescription.
I mean, my goodness, making the life-saving drug a prescription only.
How did your other children react to losing Victoria?
Oh, my God.
It was such a difficult time.
I felt like in our house...
Before she passed away, someone asked me, you have everything.
We had a football team, private jets.
My husband's company is back on top.
He bought the Las Vegas Hilton.
We built one of the biggest homes in America.
We just did a TV show, so I got on TV. I traveled the world.
I have eight beautiful children.
We did Wife Swap, just an episode of Wife Swap.
And so it's like, I've been everywhere I pretty much wanted to be.
And someone said, you know, and eight beautiful children.
And we were on top.
And when Victoria, when we got that phone call, she passed away.
It felt like the whole world, the carpet was pulled out from under us and nothing else happened.
I mean, we didn't even go over to Versailles to finish.
It's getting finished, but we didn't even go there for several months.
We didn't care about it.
In fact, we kind of wished that we'd never started it.
But at this point, because all our memories are in the house that we're in now, which is a beautiful home.
It's a...
A 26,000 square foot home on a private island in the middle of a lake.
But your kids who grew up with Victoria, they must have...
I would think that some of them may have had inklings that there was something not right, that she was at risk.
I'm just curious how they managed the recovery after losing their sister.
It was the kids...
I thought maybe it'd bring us all closer together, but in a way, we kind of like one of the kids, they painted their room black and put blackout curtains, and we all got kind of depressed.
We probably should have seeked counseling and stuff, but for me, it was just so painful that we did get a counselor in the beginning, and it was just...
Reliving the memory was too hard for me.
I deal better when I block my emotions.
Short term.
Yeah.
Short term.
It's been four years.
How have the kids resolved the situation?
So now, well, kids can be pretty resilient.
And they...
We'll never touch a drug.
They realize, this is for real, it's like playing Russian roulette when you go out there.
They've watched, since then, other kids in their high school, in the community, have passed away.
We just lost another one a week and a half ago.
And they see this.
And they also see there is this marijuana, it was synthetic marijuana.
K2. K2. And they've seen a couple kids, they've Do it one time, and it does so much brain damage that they can't function as a regular human being anymore, like it's mind-altering.
That was a devastating effect on folks.
I know it's been hard to go through this at a personal level in order to tell your daughter's story.
I'm proud of you for doing it.
Recovery is real, but so is death if we don't face up to the reality of what opiates have done to our nation.
Can I also mention that during this process, after Victoria passed away, I did Make like a documentary.
Just something for my own personal thing that I have on my website.
If I can say my website.
It's called therealqueenofversaille.com.
There's an option there that you can click on to see what I put together.
Because everyone, whenever I see anyone, they say, what happened?
They want to see more.
I was thinking that when I watched a documentary on a long plane ride one night.
This one is called The Princess of Versailles.
Yeah, so the documentary that I made is The Princess of Versailles about Victoria passing away.
And...
Also, based on this book, we already have a movie deal, so we're making a scripted movie based on this story, so there will be more to come.
You can hear much more about Jackie's story in Victoria's voice, our daughter's dying wish to share her diary and save lives from drugs.
