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A special report from Vanity Fair has revealed some dark details leading up to Ezra Miller's announcement that they would seek treatment for "complex mental health issues." In August, the actor was charged with felony burglary in Vermont after allegedly lifting bottles of alcohol from an unoccupied local home in May. Miller has also been accused of assault, abuse, and grooming.
Several sources who recently worked or lived with the actor on their 95-acre farm in Vermont, as well as longtime friends and an ex-girlfriend revealed that their erratic behavior first became concerning when the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a lockdown in March 2020. They also cite their parents' divorce as a catalytic event for their violent outbursts, two of which saw the actor put a man and a woman in chokeholds in Iceland.
“Ezra didn’t start freaking out and losing control of themselves in public until after this [the divorce] happened,” Miller’s friend told Vanity Fair. “The Iceland incident happened, and then it just kept going and going and going and going.”
During their time in Iceland, Miller was accompanied by a 55-year-old North Dakota medicine man named Jasper Young Bear who they hired as a "spiritual advisor."
"Jasper was telling Ezra that he wasn’t a part of the movement, he was the movement—that he was the next Messiah and that the Freemasons were sending demons out to kill him," a source told Vanity Fair.
This led to Miller believing they were "the Messiah" and often making false offerings to young people in crisis. “He was telling these kids, ‘You’re going to be in my band, and I’m going to produce your album and you can run my music studio.’ Whether they were visual artists, DJs, kids that were in college—or sometimes kids who might have been homeless—he would recruit them in a period of vulnerability, and promise them all of these things.”
One of these young people was an 18-year-old nonbinary activist, Tokata Iron Eyes. The two met in 2016 at the Dakota Pipeline protests when Iron Eyes was just 12 years old. Their parents filed an order of protection against Miller in tribal court in North Dakota and accused Miller of grooming, brainwashing, and emotionally abusing their teenage child.