Yesterday brought news that the fourth – and latest – season of Celebrity Rehab is not happening. Poor Tila Tequila, addicted to Ambien (and fame) will have to find help elsewhere, because Dr. Drew couldn’t get enough celebrity substance abusers to join him at the Pasadena Recovery Center. (Although, you can bet your ass that Shelley’s heaving an enormous sigh of relief right now.) What happened to our little elfin Internet sensation? How did the girl with as many MySpace friends as Tom come to this? Let’s take a ride on the Tila Tequila rollercoaster – her life’s had more twists and turns than an episode of Passions.
October 24, 1981 – A star is born! Tila Nguyen is born in Singapore, the third child of French-Vietnamese parents.
2000 – Tila graduates from high school. She attends a few college classes, but soon drops out in pursuit of her dreams, later telling an interviewer, “I didn’t want to go to college for an actual degree because there’s nothing out there I like besides doing something that involves the entertainment industry.” Later that same year, an 18-year-old Tila is “discovered” at a Houston mall by talent scouts for Playboy.
April 22, 2002 – Tila is chosen as Playboy‘s “Cyber Girl of the Week”. Soon after, she was had the distinction of becoming the first Asian “Cyber Girl of the Month”. Modeling gigs with import racing magazines soon follow. In fact, Tila becomes the darling of the fast and furious crowd, making many car show appearances and appearing in the video game Street Racing Syndicate.
September 2003 – Tila makes the decision that forever changed her career, joining a fledgling social networking site called MySpace. In a TIME magazine profile, she recalled, “At that time no one was on there at all. I felt like a loser while all the cool kids were at some other school. So I mass e-mailed between 30,000 and 50,000 people and told them to come over. Everybody joined overnight.” By December of 2006, Tila was a bonafide Internet sensation. She had more than 1.5 million MySpace friends, her profile had been viewed more than 50 million times, and she was getting between 3,000 to 5,000 friend requests a day. TIME magazine described her popular MySpace single “F**K Ya Man” as ” the sound track of a million parents’ dreams dying”.
2006 - Tila appears on the cover of the April issue of men’s magazine Stuff and in August is the cover girl for Maxim UK. In April of this same year, Black Eyed Pea will.i.am announces on MTV’s Total Request Live that Tila signed a record deal with his own label.
On February 27, 2007, Tila released her first single (and accompanying music video) “I Love U” independently. In October, the single “Stripper Friends” was released. It failed to hit the charts.
On October 9, 2007, MTV debuts A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila, a reality dating show in which the admittedly bisexual Tila invites 16 women and 16 men to a pimped-out, rented mansion where they engaged in ridiculous competitions, all hoping to win her heart. In the thrilling finale on December 18, 2007, Tila chose future Tool Academy contestant Bobby Barnhart over the Futch goddess and all-around cool girl Dani Campbell. In keeping with the grand tradition of celebrity dating shows, the sparks between Tila and Bobby quickly fizzled out – leaving the door wide open for a second season. SIDE NOTE: With this show, MTV had the single biggest wasted opportunity for a spin-off ever, giving contestant and Italian stallion Domenico his own reality show while the greatest reality hot mess (with the exception of DJ Lady Tribe from Rock of Love Bus), Keasha (not to be confused with Ke$ha, but the parallels could be drawn…) was unjustly ignored. How could this woman not get her own show?
Tila wrapped up 2007 by being awarded the prestigious “Entertainer of the Year” award from Joel McHale and the fine folks at E’s The Soup.
2008 saw the second season of A Shot at Love. Tila was rejected in the finale by her final choice, “total package” Kristy. Sadly, there was not to be a third shot for Tila. In December of that same year, MTV debuted A Double Shot at Love with the appropriately named Ikki Twins.
Tila hit the pop culture radar again in September of 2009, when she accused then-boyfriend Shawne Merriman of football’s San Diego Chargers with assault, battery, false imprisonment and emotional distress. Tila sued Shawn for $1.5 million. She appeared in court showing off the bruises on her arms which were allegedly the result of the assault. Shawne countersued “intentional interference with a contract” (apparently the negative publicity killed a deal he had to produce a line of t-shirts for Wal-Mart. I thought spouse abuse and Wal-Mart are a match made in heaven. Those tank tops they sell are called wife beaters, right?) and the two eventually settled (the terms were confidential).
In November of 2009, Tila posted a video broadcast on her Ustream (or, in this case “EwwStream”) page and featured her flashing her boobs, brandishing a gun as if it were a dildo and playing with her…wait for it…tampon string. She told the fine folks at TMZ “People call me an attention whore .. or whatever … but excuse me I’m a grown ass woman and I’m confident in myself …I think a woman’s body is a beautiful thing … that’s why I’m a lesbian … I was born naked … anybody who is against that is gay and in denial.”
On December 9, 2009, Tila announced her engagement to socialite and Johnson and Johnson heiress Casey Johnson. Less than a month later, on January 4, 2010, Casey passed away and Tila took her mourning to Twitter, with over 160 posts like this: “R.I.P my Angel. @caseyjonsonJnJ u will forever be in my heart! I love u so so much and we will Marry when I see U in Heaven my Wifey.” Later that month, Tila was embrolied in a bitter custody battle over Casey’s dogs with Bijou Phillips and Nicky Hilton. Socialites- 2, Tila- 0.
During her brief “engagement”, on December 20, 2009 Tila announced that she was giving her brother and his wife the best Christmas present EVER – a baby. A few days later she denied that she was going to be a surrogate mom for her brother but did announce that she was indeed pregnant and it was “no accident”. Rapper The Game is fingered as the baby daddy.
In February of 2010, Tila decided to leave the Twitterverse once and for all – only to come back four days later with this post, “Damn Twitter was f***ing BORING without me huh? I would be bored as hell if I were U and I wasn’t on twitter anymore! hahhaha jk xox.” Later in the month, Tila fell off a chair and hit her noggin. Fearing the same fate as actress Natasha Richardson (who had more talent in her little toe than Tila’s got in her entire body) Tila again returned to Twitter to whine for a few hours (sample post: ‘I REFUSE to go to the hospital. I did last time and look what happened? Media EXPLOITS all of my pains and serious accidents. NOT OK”) and in a classic OCD move switches gears and announces she’s adopting a Russian baby. “ATTENTION EVERYONE! I have been APPROVED to adopt my own baby boy 2-3 years old from RUSSIA!!!! I will be his Mommy by the end of the year!!” As for her own pregnancy, she told the press that she had a miscarriage.
In April of 2010 Tila released her single “I Fucked The DJ” (and the “clean” version, entitled “I Love My DJ”), through iTunes. As part of her promotional tour, the now-blonde Tila donned some skanky lingerie and shared the pole with some exotic dancers at a Bronx, New York strip club. You stay classy, Tila.
May 2010 – In an attempt to expand her multimedia empire, Tila created a new website – in addition to her two websites Tila’s Hot Spot and Tila’s Hot Spot Dating (started with Joe “King Douche” Francis). Trying to put her arch nemesis Perez Hilton in his place, Tila launched MissTilaOMG, featuring such hard-hitting celebrity news as the smoking baby and also features Tila dressing down celebs such as Ke$ha, who she accuses of stealing her swagger and being a “Tila Tequila Wannabe” (no word on whether or not Tila wakes in the morning feeling like P. Diddy or only dates guys who look like Mick Jagger.) Check out this spicy missive as posted on her site: “NO ONE, TRIES TO COPY MISS TILA AND GET AWAY WITH IT BIATCH! AND KE$SHA FANS, BEFORE YOU GO ON AND SAY ANYTHING, PLEASE DON’T. I KNOW THIS BIATCH PERSONALLY OK? WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY BEFORE SHE GOT HER SONGS ON THE RADIO! AS A MATTER OF FACT I WENT TO A THANKSGIVING DINNER WITH HER A WHILE AGO! 2 YEARS AGO EXACT!”
This brings us to the recent announcement that Tila is addicted to Ambien and is hoping to enlist the help of Dr. Drew to kick the habit – and jump-start her lagging career. A source close to Tila told Radar Online “She would wake up, snort Ambien, Google herself, do more, Twitter all day and then sleep.” What’s with the Ambien – first Tiger and now Tila (too bad they didn’t hook-up before all hell broke loose in Tiger-land…)? Every time I take an Ambien, I can’t Google or Tweet, all I can do is valiantly attempt to walk myself into the bedroom before I pass out. If Tila’s plan to appear on Celebrity Rehab works out, she’s already got designs on her own spin-off. Forget about Sober House, Miss Tila wants a show chronicling her still-ongong search to find true love, in whatever form is currently striking her fancy.
The only problem with this scenario is that no one else seems to want Dr. Drew’s “help” (especially because he’s got such a stellar track record…for example, didn’t Mary Carey and Penny Flame go right back into porn after they appeared on the show? Mary even made a parody video called Celebrity Pornhab with Dr. Screw. Oh, and don’t even get me started on Jeff Conaway…) Such headline-grabbing substance abusers as Jenna Jameson, Heather Locklear, Charlie Sheen and, yes, even Lindsay Lohan have turned producers down. Hills star (?) Jason Wahler signed on, but today, as cameras were slated to roll, production was shut down. Vh-1 producers have announced that the show is “on hold” pending the arrival of some real celebrities. In the interim, we can expect more drama from our intoxicating attention whore, so keep on following her…we sure will!























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