She’s a Hollywood actress, fashion muse and a former dominatrix whose brief romance with hip hop star Kanye West made headlines. Now Julia Fox has sworn off men and embraced voluntary celibacy. (Keep up!) When Julia Fox was 16, missing person posters bearing her face were plastered all over New York.
She’d run away from home where her parents fought endlessly, often beat her and usually neglected her. Fox’s childhood had been spent bouncing between her father’s native New York and her mother’s homeland of Italy. There’d been spells of homelessness, she shoplifted, took every drug going and had sex with often much, much older men.
When she moved in with her abusive drug-dealer boyfriend, it took her parents (who thought she was in Italy) several weeks to clock her absence and inform the police. Her boyfriend toured Manhattan, ripping down the posters and proudly presenting a heap of them to her. Fox was outraged.
Not only had her parents chosen an unflattering photo but they’d got the year of her birth, her height and her weight wrong. “It was so embarrassing how little they knew about me,” Fox, 34, says now. “It made me feel I’d done the right thing running away.
I was so angry, thinking, ‘What is wrong with me?’ But now I think it’s funny. It’s like actually, what the f*** was wrong with my parents? Life really sucks but I’m always laughing.” Fox went on to support herself by working as a dominatrix in a Manhattan dungeon, then by finding a .