Alexa Curtis was 7 years old when her father was wrongfully arrested and jailed on child molestation charges. He spent the next five years in a maximum-security prison in Rhode Island.
In 2005, Jonathan Peskin was a salesman in a small Connecticut town when he was stopped by police at a local hotel and accused of being a flasher, then charged with child kidnapping and molestation of a girl he did not know in a state he had not visited in years.
At the time he was 43, had never been arrested and did not fit the profile of a typical pedophile. But he was a diabetic who hadn’t eaten. The police denied his request for a lawyer, and he ended up pleading guilty to a crime he didn’t commit during a 10-hour interrogation because his blood sugar bottomed out.
He pleaded guilty to avoid a longer sentence, Curtis said.
The damage to Peskin and his family was immeasurable.
‘When I was younger, at school, I didn’t understand the justice system. I had no knowledge that this kind of thing could happen, but seeing the statistics, it happens all the time.’
- Alexa Curtis
Curtis, who is 18, grew up being bullied. A month before her 13th birthday, she began to blog.
But she is only now talking about her terrible family ordeal.
“I’ve recently decided to discuss this topic, which no one outside of my family and friends knows about,” Curtis said. “One of the reasons I started my blog was to inspire other young adults to follow their dreams. But in reality, I started it as an outlet to escape the pain that came from the terrible thing that happened to him.”
“I’d like to eventually start a charity for kids whose parents have been incarcerated, innocent or not,” she added.
Growing up was tough.
“When I was younger, at school, I didn’t understand the justice system. I had no knowledge that this kind of thing could happen, but seeing the statistics, it happens all the time,” Curtis said.
Blogging, Curtis said, “gave me an outlet to forget what was going on.”
Every week, Curtis would go from Connecticut to Rhode Island with her mother to visit her father in jail.
“I’d then have to go to school the next day and act like everything was normal. Clothing and fashion gave me a reason to wake up every morning and go to school without having the world crash down around me,” Curtis said.
At first, Curtis only wrote about fashion. But at 14, she started writing about issues that were also of serious concern in the teen world, like bullying and eating disorders.
“At 14, I had more confidence. When I was younger, I was more insecure and ashamed. It took me a few years to find myself and to grow into myself and to start writing about things that could help other people too,” she said.
At 14, Curtis said, she also started modeling, in part because “no one told me I could be successful as a writer.”
Curtis worked out four hours a day, and developed an eating disorder, thanks in part to an agent who told her that she was “too fat” and demanded that she email every piece of food that went into her mouth, every day.
“From age 14 to 16, I developed a serious eating disorder. I was in a bad place, always on different diets. Finally, I realized that I would never be good enough for anyone but myself.”
At 14, Curtis was bullied so severely — eating lunch in the bathroom because she couldn’t face the mean-girl taunts — that one week she was too sick to even go to school. That’s when she had an epiphany.
She randomly googled the first fashion house that came to mind, BCBG, and the word “public relations,” because she saw the word in People magazine. A name popped up. Curtis sent an email.
“I knew that if I wanted to make it in fashion, I should go to Fashion Week, so I put together a paragraph about how I was a 14-year-old blogger and how I wanted to inspire other girls to follow their dreams,” Curtis said. “The publicist replied within seven minutes, and invited me to the show — and to see what it was like backstage. I’ve been going to Fashion Week ever since.”
She now has British Airways as a sponsor for her blog, alifeinthefashionlane.com, and has added London Fashion Week as well as Paris Fashion Week to her repertoire. Istanbul, Milan and Tel Aviv are next.
Curtis now has offices in Boston and New York, a Harvard-educated employee, and a second business running her own social media public relations firm. “Over the past two years, I’ve had around 10 clients. Brands contact me. They know they will get a lot of personal attention with no crazy expensive retainers,” she said, adding that her business has grown 80 percent in the past year alone.
But her writing is not all fun and fashion.
In one post that went viral on Streetscape.com, she wrote about her eating disorder: “Don’t let food ruin your life. What you see in the mirror does not determine the type of person you are. … My hips will never be the size they were when I was 5 years old. I’m okay with that.”