It girl gone wild

Abigail Vona's stealing and lying led to a stint in a teen delinquent boot camp. Now 20, she's written a memoir about her experience -- and landed in the gossip pages.

By Whitney Joiner

Aug 31, 2004 | The media loves the barely legal girl with a troubled past and a memoir -- or a novel so thinly veiled you can see through it -- in hand. (See Elizabeth Wurtzel, Amy Sohn, Molly Jong-Fast). So it makes sense that Abigail Vona, the 20-year-old author of the just-released "Bad Girl: Confessions of a Teenage Delinquent," an account of her year at a Tennessee lockdown facility for delinquent teens, has received an ample amount of press already.

But it's not for her book: Instead, the attention on Vona has focused on her relationship with her ex-boyfriend and former agent, 48-year-old Doug Dechert. Two years ago, at a party in New York, Vona's aunt introduced her to Dechert, a staple at media parties and a consistent source for New York gossip columns. After hearing about the manuscript that would become "Bad Girl," Dechert offered to help Vona publish it. He introduced her to novelist Jay McInerney, who would connect Vona to her editor and publisher, Web Stone at Rugged Land Books. Dechert and Vona dated for a year, but the relationship ended badly in May -- both Dechert and Vona blame each other -- and Vona found herself the center of a New York media maelstrom. "Page Six," the New York Post's powerful gossip column, ran an item about Vona and Dechert's breakup -- an item unsympathetic to Dechert -- and in retaliation, he wrote a screed about Vona that he posted on his Web site and which was quickly picked up by Manhattan media blogs.

Dechert's piece about Vona, "Creation of a Bad Girl," claims, among other things, that Vona took advantage of Dechert to get her book published and dropped him when he was no longer of use to her. She didn't even write the book -- she dictated it to her mother, Dechert says; her editors had to completely overhaul the manuscript to make it publishable. As proof of her lack of writing skills, Dechert includes an unintelligible passage on his Web site that he attributes to Vona's "fractured prose." Oh -- and he also goes into great detail about her body and their sex life ("She had big hips and short piano legs supported by heavy calves like overstuffed sausages, but she was mine and I wanted her"), and claims she had an abortion after getting pregnant by him.

How did a teen troublemaker from suburban Connecticut end up here? Five years ago, Vona, then only 15, spent a year at a "lockdown facility" for troubled teens in Tennessee called Peninsula Village, participating in daily intensive group therapy with the drug addicts, prostitutes -- even barely teenage child molesters -- who made up her "Group." The patients were forced to do push-ups for infractions as small as dropping a food tray, and weren't allowed to watch TV or movies, read books, wear clothes from home -- or even talk to one another. (After a few months there, Vona is finally allowed some privacy from the staff and starts to amuse herself by creating shadow puppets against the wall with her hands.)

Next Page: "The book is a positive story. People are focusing on the fact that I royally fucked up with a boyfriend"

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