Who Is Julia Diaco and Why Are People Saying Such Terrible Things About Her?

Julia Diaco felt the first blush of fame in April 2004. She was walking down 8th Street in Manhattan. “I was right across from where I used to get my nails done,” she recalls. “And a guy walks up to me and asks me where I’m going.” A few others joined him, one grabbed her bag and she was rushed into a blue van. Ten minutes later, Diaco was in a holding cell.

“I felt like a monkey in the circus,” she continues. “It was a little cage — maybe four by four feet — and all these cops kept coming by and pointing at me and saying, ‘That’s her, that’s her.’” Four hours later she was allowed a phone call to her father. The police informed him that, after a months-long investigation, they had searched his daughter’s New York University dorm room and discovered marijuana and cocaine.

Soon after this it became apparent that quite a few people had been following the girl voted “most likely to be famous” by Rumson-Fair Haven High School’s Class of 2003. At 7 p.m. it was time to transfer her to jail. “As they were taking me out of the holding cell, one cop said to me, ‘You might want to put your jacket on, you might want to put your hood up,’” Diaco says. “I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. I thought, ‘OK, I guess it’s gonna be cold out.’”

Then they got to the door. “Right before he opens it, the cop turns to me and he says, ‘Get ready for the reporters.’”



By April 28, 2004, 24 hours after her arrest, Julia Diaco was a New York tabloid sensation: pretty NYU freshman, wealthy Italian-American family, New Jersey background, drug sting. A little Tonya Harding, a little Amy Fisher, with some Meadow Soprano thrown in. The New York Post led the media coverage, marking each new chapter of the story with headlines like NEW RAP FOR NYU POT PRINCESS and SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL — NYU ‘DRUG’ BRAT LIKE A LITTLE GIRL LOST.

As Diaco was arraigned, released on bail and plea-bargained into 18 months of behavioral treatment and vocational training, the local papers milked every moment for maximum rabble-rousing indignation. “The newly dethroned Pot Princess of NYU wiped off her sneer and rose to her full five-foot height,” went one article. “Julia Diaco approached the judge with anger raging in her ice-blue eyes … The defiant little outlaw has been taken down.” The tale of a nouveau riche beauty gone to seed was irresistible to the scandal sheets: “She was young, rich and she sold drugs,” explains Post columnist Andrea Peyser. “What more do you need?”

In the minutely calibrated world of celebrity status, Diaco was probably somewhere on the E-list — just below celebrity chef. Still, her story spread far and wide. “I had friends in Jersey who I didn’t even know could read,” says Diaco’s friend Melissa Timarchi. “And they were like, ‘Oh, did you know that girl, the Pot Princess?’” Another friend, Lara Sawczuk, relays an even more distant reach. “I knew someone from Illinois and they were like, ‘Oh, did you know that girl?’”

Coverage cooled a bit as Diaco withdrew from NYU and began her court-mandated stint in a behavioral center — first in a Montana group home she describes as “cult-like,” then in a more isolated place in Idaho, and eventually in a facility in Santa Monica, California.

But while her tabloid star might have dimmed, in the Internet world of do-it-yourself fame Diaco was just getting started. In California, where she was finally allowed a laptop, she began downloading mixtapes and, soon, recording original songs. With nothing but a Dell, a headset mic and Google, she started drafting her career as a singer-songwriter.

For 19-year-olds who have grown up in the age of Paris Hilton, American Idol and Us Weekly, stardom might not look like such a lofty, untouchable meritocracy. In May 2005, Diaco opened a MySpace page featuring early versions of her songs and sultry photos of her bikini-clad self. And by April of this year, she had reentered the spotlight as the hip-hop–styled singer J-Dia.

The tabloids were ready: BONGS TO SONGS — POT PRINCESS PUSHING FOR POP FAME AS SINGER J-DIA. But Diaco seemed unfazed — she flaunted her rep by signing with a small Jersey-based record label called Forget About It Music (after the wiseguy expression from mob film Donnie Brasco) and titling her upcoming debut album My Blue Heaven (after a film about a mobster in witness protection). As the Post put it, Diaco’s “Web bio crowed that she was ‘one of the decade’s most infamous drug dealers,’ but also whined that she was the victim of a ‘flawed’ NYPD investigation.”

Diaco doesn’t dispute selling weed — along with some coke, mushrooms and LSD specifically requested by a stranger who turned out to be a narc. (“I’d never even seen [mushrooms] before he asked me to get him some,” she says.) But she also knows that low-level dealing isn’t enough to land you on the front page of the Post. She still smarts over some of the coverage, especially by the Post’s Peyser, whose treatment of various subjects might be most charitably called “hardball” (as in calling Michael Jackson’s seemingly sweet-natured baby­mama an “obese, foulmouthed brood mare”). The paper even misprinted Diaco’s handle as the awesomely metal “J-Dio.”

But otherwise, Diaco seems inured to the standard rap on her thus far. “It’s always that I was a spoiled brat who didn’t give a fuck, who had torn everyone’s life apart, including her own,” she says. “I was so privileged and I blew it all. That’s the story.”

Needless to say, J-Dia has a story of her own.



Diaco enters the dim chatter of a Manhattan restaurant on a rainy May night, silently and sans posse — tiny, sweet-faced and obscurely intimidating. Tanned honey-brown from a recent trip to Florida, she’s sporting a mocha zip-up hoodie, tight jeans, leopard-print shoes and a Dolce & Gabanna bag. Five-foot-one and a youngish 20, she looks like the badass missing Olsen triplet.

Part of her edge comes from the eyes: coolly appraising and strikingly slate-gray, despite her family’s origins in Southern Italy. “We’re all from this one small town in Calabria where everyone’s got blue eyes,” she says. “Everyone else there is dark.” She also has a tough Jersey accent, a businesslike manner and — judging from her media vilification — a rather immense pair of cojones. But as Diaco sees it, she doesn’t really have much to lose.

“The thing is,” she says, “people can’t talk any worse about me. They have exhausted every bad thing that you can possibly say about a human being. People have called me crazy, a drug dealer. I’ve heard I have a gambling addiction — I’ve been called the devil!” In other words, she has the perfect résumé for a streetwise, hip-hop-styled pop diva.

Diaco says this bid for a singing career isn’t quite the reality-TV gag it might sound. “I’ve been singing my entire life,” she says over pasta a fagiole. “School plays, musicals, weddings, national anthems. I always planned to be in music.” (In fact, her older brother Nick also launched a music career, releasing a CD called Reflections in 1999 that consisted of songs he wrote at 13 and 14 and that was, per the Asbury Park Press, “among the top local sellers at Jack’s Music Shop.”) Julia started vocal training at age 7 — “everything from Broadway to opera to pop,” she says — although hip-hop soon became a competing passion. Her new music leans to strutting, don’t-fuck-with-me lyrics and hip-hop club jams, which Diaco compares loosely to “Gwen Stefani, a little bit Amerie, a little bit Pink.”

She grew up in the wealthy suburb of Rumson, New Jersey, in a castle-like multimillion-dollar mansion owned by her construction-magnate father Anthony. Her mother is active in charity work, hobnobbing with Rumson celebrities like Jon Bon Jovi (Bruce Springsteen is also a neighbor). While Diaco smoked quite a bit of weed in high school, the former gymnast, theater performer and top student was hardly a teen at risk.

“She was always participating in school activities, on the right path,” recalls her high school boyfriend Kyle DeVesty. While her brothers attended Harvard and Princeton, Diaco headed to NYU, partially to pursue her musical ambitions.

Diaco’s college life seems to have been pretty standard and low-impact — going to clubs, hanging in the dorms, watching movies, writing papers and smoking pot. “I’d say J sold less weed than most college kids I know,” says Melissa Timarchi, 21, one of Diaco’s dormmates at Hayden Hall and a close friend from freshman year.

Julia’s friends blame an unstable male acquaintance with a fixation on Diaco for setting the narc on her (following his own arrest for drug sales). After being approached one afternoon in Washington Square Park, Diaco agreed to sell the undercover cop some weed, and later agreed to get him more exotic drugs: mushrooms, LSD and cocaine. “I wasn’t, like, a dealer,” Diaco says. “I wasn’t running this business where I’m out on the street corner, like, ‘Yo, who needs weed?’ People just knew I had some and they’d be like, ‘Can I buy some from you?’”

She sees her arrest as a consequence of simple media manipulation. “I knew tons of people that sold way more weed than me,” she says. “I just look better on the front page.”





NYU’s admissions board probably should have known what they were getting into when they accepted a girl whose yearbook and application essay both quoted Tupac Shakur. Though an A-student from a prominent family, Diaco wasn’t exactly sorority material when she arrived for freshman year. In fact, she was oddly battle-hardened.

Inside a tin of personal memorabilia Diaco lent Blender, a sheet of vellum paper is filled with pullquotes from 1988 editions of the Asbury Park Press. They read almost like critical raves on the back of a paperback. “Rumson Fire Cause a Mystery.” “Rumson police said the girl suffered burns on her legs, arms, and face, covering as much as 30% of her body.” “If it were 30 seconds more …” “Fire fails to singe family’s spirit.”

The fire that destroyed her family’s home when she was 3 is clearly among the formative experiences in Diaco’s life — leaving her with burns serious enough to require years of surgery, and scars on her arm and legs visible enough to cause significant issues in a catty beachgoing community on the Jersey Shore.

“People are pretty harsh on each other where we come from,” says ex-boyfriend Kyle DeVesty. “It’s a wealthy neighborhood, so everyone’s got their little egos, everyone wants to be better than everybody else and everyone just rips each other apart. I think it was just a tough thing for a kid to get over.”

Her scars clearly don’t prohibit the bra-and-undies shots of a hopeful R&B hottie — “I don’t have them in the places that matter,” Diaco says — but they seem to have formed a core element in her personality. “I learned way too early about the power of image,” she says. “Which has good and bad sides. Before I signed with Forget About It, I talked with people at Universal and Sony, but they all wanted to turn me into Britney Spears. But that’s not in me, even before the arrest. I’m not your typical America’s sweetheart.” She laughs.

But hey, when life gives you lemons …
She nods. “You make lemonade.”



A few days later, lemonade-making is underway in a live-work studio in Philadelphia, home base to producer Simon Illa. The condo’s beige-carpeted room features a compact recording setup: computer, monitor, speakers, mics, two stacks of samplers. Diaco sits on a nearby sofa, a leg tucked up and tan skin showing through a kneehole in her tight jeans. She’s wearing a midriff-baring tanktop and a luxurious ponytail bound by a white scrunchie. (“Yes, I rock the scrunchie,” says Diaco. “I rock the scrunchie with pride.”)

As a twinkly, booming hip-hop beat plays, Diaco looks down at a lyrics-scrawled piece of paper and tries an idea for a club track she plans to submit to a former contestant on MTV’s Making the Band. “Move it slow, ’fore you dip it down low,” she sings. The beat stops. “I’m thinking on the fourth line, where it goes ‘de-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-NA-nu-nah’ — I’m thinking it might be better to just do it straight up. So it echoes. Almost like a Latin thing.”

“Yeah, that’s good,” says Simon.

Simon Illa, 30, is arguably Philadelphia’s hottest producer — having just signed with Timbaland — and inarguably its smallest. “I’m three-foot-one,” Illa says, his voice compressed like a regular dude who just huffed helium. “But that one inch is very important.” He slides gracefully around the console in his motorized wheelchair, operating the joystick control with one gnarled hand.

Born with osteogenesis imperfecta — a.k.a. brittle-bone disease — Simon Illa shares a Wikipedia entry with the French jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani and the world’s shortest woman, Madge Bester, adults roughly toddler-size and confined to wheelchairs. An easygoing cut-up, Simon (born Eric Bradly Gilbert) took his tag from the 1998 film Simon Birch, about a small-town boy with dwarfism who sees the beauty in everything. “A friend of mine told me, ‘Hey, that’s like you, except you’re ill,” he says. “And I realized that was a hot name.”

He was introduced to Diaco after his business partner met her at random in a south Jersey hotel. “He called me and said, ‘I have this really beautiful girl sitting here and she can sing. She’s looking for production and you’re the perfect guy.’ We met the next day. And it was love at first sight.”

Simon felt an immediate kinship with Diaco. “I think we’ve both been through a lot at a young age,” he says. “Her with the fire, me, obviously, in my … situation. There’s a whole outer shell people see first, and you want more than anything for people to look at you for the right reasons. I go out all the time and I get all kinds of ‘mini me’ shit. But we both realize that petty bullshit like that is just … stupid.”

Outside the Philly studio, we climb into Diaco’s black Mercedes-Benz C230 and drive across the Delaware River into New Jersey. A female voice from the dashboard says, “Turn slightly right in a half a mile.” We turn off the highway and into rolling farm country with deer crossing signs and soon pull into the driveway of a giant house on a sparsely developed strip — a former home of an associate of manager and label owner Chris Cardillo, she explains. “It’s just a place they’re keeping me since it’s so close to Philly.”

Inside the dramatic entryway, with a chapel-styled skylight and sweeping central staircase, two leopard-colored Bengal cats come running up to nuzzle Diaco. The place looks fit for a wealthy family of five and is furnished with showpiece sectionals, marble-topped coffee-tables and four-poster beds. Huge packed cardboard boxes also lie in every room. “It definitely doesn’t feel like home,” Diaco says, unnecessarily.

She divides all her time here between the kitchen and a second-floor bedroom — a room that does, in fact, look fit for a mafia princess: queen-sized bed with a clamshell-carved headboard, twin marble-topped night tables with gilded legs, huge matching vanity, widescreen TV. There’s also a stack of books: Bad Girl: Confessions of a Teenage Delinquent, Prophets of the ’Hood, Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists and 10-to-20 Minutes in Crochet. A pile of magazines includes an XXL with jailed rapper Shyne on the cover and a National Enquirer with the headline CRIME PAYS FOR J-DIA.

The kitchen, too, it must be said, is straight from the set of The Sopranos: central island, picture window, spacious counters. You can almost see Carmela making a salad. An avid cook, Diaco has a small library of cookbooks sitting on one of the counters. On the central island countertop there’s a manila folder labeled “Beats for Sale From Young Zavier,” an upright paper towel rack and — Blender notes in its recorder — a big pile of cash.

“It’s not a pile!” she says, pointing out that it’s merely two or three bills (although the bills do feature Ben Franklin). “Don’t make me look like I’m in the mob!”

OK, she’s not in the mob. But Diaco’s background — Jersey suburb, rich Italian family, powerful dad named Anthony — certainly does beg comparison to a certain popular HBO show. A comparison not exactly defused by a label name like Forget About It. We ask if, given her ambitions, these associations aren’t … helpful, in some way.

“I think it actually hurts me,” she says. “Because that’s not who I am at all.” She claims not to manipulate tawdry images for personal gain. “I personally do not play on the Italian thing,’” she says. “What I know to be Italian is just a big family where as soon as you walk in the room you feel love. It sounds corny but it’s true. That’s what I know of being Italian and what I’m proud of.”

Here in her echoing borrowed mansion, Diaco seems far indeed from the room-filling love she grew up with — although the cats are doing their best to make up for it. These days, she rises at 10, fields whatever correspondence her manager gives her and heads over to Simon Illa’s to record. When she’s done she comes home to this spooky house, cooks, watches The King of Queens and goes to bed.

This is not the lifestyle of a gangsta-brat partygirl but someone very focused on stardom. This is what manager Chris Cardillo says will make her succeed. “There are people just as talented, more talented, less talented,” he says. “But she has drive and she has star quality. She has ‘it.’ Like, if you ever read Randy Jackson’s book — the guy from American Idol — people who are stars have ‘it.’ And if you don’t have ‘it,’ you’re not gonna become a star. She has ‘it.’ That’s what she has.”

Maybe. She definitely has something — drive, brio, gall, insanity. Not every 20-year-old without a record to her name would be quite so poised fielding questions from a national magazine, quite so confident stating her case, managing soundbites and handling the various tasks of image maintenance. She really seems to feel she deserves it. Which, in some strange kind of post-E! calculus, may actually mean that she does.

We remind her of the fact that, without the arrest, we wouldn’t be here interviewing her in the first place.

“Mm-hmm,” she nods, serenely. “But you would have eventually.”