The BODY was found in the early hours of Sunday morning, lying at the bottom of the swimming pool of a mansion on Oak Pass Road, one of the smartest addresses in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles.
Edenilson Steven Valle, 21, is understood to have been a guest at a party. Police have ruled out any foul play, believing he slipped and fell. His family said he couldn’t swim.
The fatality might have been filed away as a tragic accident that could happen to anyone — if it weren’t for the fact that the £5 million house is owned by film star Demi Moore and is the family home to her somewhat wayward children.
Neither 52-year-old Moore nor Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Belle — her three grown-up daughters by her marriage to Bruce Willis — were at home at the time.
Indeed, the party was thrown by the caretaker of the house. But despite not being present, lawyers said on Tuesday that — as one of her employees hosted the party — Moore could be financially liable for the death.
The film star, travelling abroad, released a statement expressing her ‘absolute shock’.
However, her neighbours said that raucous gatherings were a regular feature at the property.
One revealed that Moore’s daughters had been staying at the house for weeks, throwing noisy parties ‘every day, day and night’.
Many of them, she added, were held around the pool — which had clearly become ‘party central’ for a young and somewhat wild crowd.
Two weeks ago, Tallulah posted pictures online of more than a dozen people playing in the pool late at night. ‘This picture doesn’t do justice to the glory that was our pool party last night,’ read her caption.
Police were told the young man had downed a couple of drinks and fell into the pool when the fellow revellers left him alone for 15 minutes.
Valle, who had gone to high school in Los Angeles, was a ‘great kid’, said a friend, Gabby Ventura. She added: ‘Never got into any trouble. Everyone loved him.’
Yet eyebrows will be raised by a death at the home of some of Hollywood’s most lively party hosts.
While other celebrities have reined back their behaviour in this age of instant exposure and shaming on social media, the Willis daughters — and even Demi, too — have earned a reputation as wild girls of the old school.
If any of the siblings could be said to be following most in their mother’s sometimes wayward footsteps, it is the baby of the family.
“Growing up, my parents did a good job of making me aware of how fortunate I was,” trilled 21-year-old Tallulah in a recent interview.
Given that she had just emerged from 45 days of being treated for an eating disorder, her statement sounded a little hollow.
Tallulah — named after the notoriously over-sexed Hollywood actress Tallulah Bankhead — was just six when her parents divorced.
Willis, the action hero star of the Die Hard films, later admitted he had “failed as a father and a husband by not being able to make it work”.
Willis owns up to having taken drugs in his youth, but said he worked hard with Demi to make sure their children were educated about the perils of narcotics. They “get it”, he claimed nine years ago.
The star’s optimism was somewhat premature. At 17, Tallulah was already a fixture on the Hollywood party scene when she was arrested for underage drinking.
When her sister, Scout, told their father that she had caught Tallulah snorting cocaine at a Los Angeles hotel last year, Willis allegedly threatened to cut her off financially. Tallulah responded by moving to New York and reportedly getting even more heavily involved with the drug.
Last July — following an ultimatum from her parents — she secretly entered an expensive Arizona rehabilitation clinic for cocaine and alcohol abuse.
Moore, said insiders, blamed herself — seeing her youngest daughter heading down the same downward spiral of self-abuse that she herself endured in the grip of cocaine and other drugs.
Tallulah later claimed she had struggled with body dysmorphia when she was younger, starving herself to the point that she weighed less than 44.4 kilograms.
Why? Friends say she never got over her parents’ divorce and, later, was ashamed of her mother’s alarming behaviour. A friend recalled her reaction when Demi went into a rehab clinic in 2012 after her divorce from younger actor Ashton Kutcher.
“Tallulah was very open about Demi’s issues and would sort of imply: ‘Of course I have issues, too — look at my mom,’” said the friend.
Her 24-year-old sister, Scout, is an exhibitionist more in the mould of their mother — Demi famously posed nude while seven months pregnant with Scout on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine.
Scout, who served two years of community service after being arrested for illegally buying alcohol, last year Tweeted pictures of herself walking topless through Manhattan.
She claimed to be fighting internet censorship and said she was raising awareness of the over-sexualisation of women’s breasts.
Three years ago, while a student at America’s smart Brown University, Scout was identified as the author of a highly salacious account on Twitter.
Under the name ‘Bougpunk’, she made a string of graphic and profanity-laced posts about sex, drugs and partying.
She boasted variously of having drug-fuelled sex with a stranger and harbouring suicide fantasies, and accused the controversial celebrity photographer Terry Richardson of trying to sexually assault her.
The oldest daughter, 26-year-old Rumer (named after Rumer Godden, the British author of the novel Black Narcissus) appears to be the most responsible sibling — an aspiring actress who complains bitterly at having to build a career in the shadow of her famous parents.
Some might argue that appearing on the American reality TV show Dancing With The Stars wasn’t everyone’s idea of striking out boldly on her own (she is far from a ‘star’ in her own right), but with acting roles thin on the ground, it has certainly kept her in work.
The Willis girls’ personal lives seem less chaotic than that of their mother.
A former model who went on to become Hollywood’s highest-paid actress with hits such as Ghost, Indecent Proposal and Striptease, she has struggled with accepting her advancing age. Now 52 but determined to look half her age and frequently posing in a bikini, the star has led a rollercoaster life. Raised by a mother who had a long criminal record and a stepfather who committed suicide when she was young, Demi has earned a reputation as a shameless attention-seeker. Her half-brother recalled that even as a teenager, Demi chose to wear outfits that were deliberately provocative.
Establishing herself as an actress, she plunged into a three-year spree of hard partying and cocaine abuse that was halted only when the director of the 1985 film St Elmo’s Fire banned her from the set until she could turn up sober.
Meanwhile, the men in her life have got ever younger. Ashton Kutcher, her third husband, was 15 years younger.
When they split up, she went into what Hollywood insiders described as a “downward spiral”. She was rushed to hospital after passing out and suffering “mysterious seizures”. According to reports, she had been hosting a ‘Whip It’ party at which people sniff nitrous oxide from the gas cylinders that restaurants use to froth cream.
Moore later checked into a rehab centre for treatment for anorexia and addiction to prescription pills.
Rumer subsequently introduced her mother to some of her friends only for Moore to take a fancy to one of them, 24-year-old actor Zac Efron.
She reportedly texted him continually, and later started a relationship with another of her daughter’s pals, 26-year-old gallery owner Vito Schnabel.
It was alleged that, with Rumer calling the shots, the three sisters at one point cut off contact with their mother after tiring of herways.
But whatever the truth of this, they are all back together again and were on Tuesday celebrating Scout’s 24th birthday.
They’re a family that likes a good time, but the festivities were surely muted.
With Hollywood wondering how exactly that body ended up in their swimming pool, the sisterhood may face some difficult questions.
Daily Mail