Julia Fox met Kanye West during a tumultuous time for the rapper.
Which doesn't really narrow it down as far as West is concerned, but in this case it was the very end of 2021, closing in on a year since Kim Kardashian had filed for divorce after six years of marriage. Though West had been spied in the company of several women in the interim, it soon became apparent he was having a hard time seeing Kardashian moving on with then-boyfriend Pete Davidson.
And into all this walked Fox, until then best known for her role as Adam Sandler's mistress in Uncut Gems despite her high regional profile in New York as a magnetic woman-about-downtown.
"Believe it or not, Kanye's not the most interesting thing that's ever happened to me," Fox told the New York Times shortly after their barely month-long but extensively chronicled romance ended in February 2022.
But he did make it into her memoir, Down the Drain.
"I feel like I went very lightly on it," Fox told E! News last month of how much West factors into the narrative. "I'm not trying to have bad blood or anything, it's all in the past."
That being said, the paramour who's obviously West is only referred to as "the artist," even though she readily admitted that he takes up "like six pages," so that's more style than an attempt to mask his identity. (And it's actually more like 16 pages.) Having described a number of harrowing experiences in the book, Fox has said that she changed the names of most of the still-living people she mentions.
So here is what Fox revealed in Down the Drain about the whirlwind month she spent as "the artist's" No. 1 muse:
How Julia Fox Really Met Kanye West
In her memoir Down the Drain, Julia Fox recalls a friend asking her a few days after Christmas in 2021 if he could give her number to Kanye West (referred to only as "the artist" throughout the book).
They spent hours on the phone, she writes, and he invited her to join him in Miami for New Year's Eve. She turned him down, saying she had plans, but he offered to fly her down on a private jet—and she said yes, so long as she could bring the friends she was supposed to spend the evening with.
Her group wasn't able to get into the party venue until shortly after midnight, Fox writes, so she didn't actually see West until the wee hours of New Year's Day, but she recalls feeling an immediate connection. After they talked for awhile, she continues, he brought her outside while he took a quick pee in a parking lot behind the club and then kissed her "passionately."
But then, Fox recalls, she lost track of West at the after-party and she and her friends went back to their hotel.
A Flying Leap to the Next Level
Fox writes of waking up later on Jan. 1, 2022, to dozens of missed calls and texts from West. She threw on some sweatpants and they spent the rest of New Year's Day playing UNO in his hotel suite.
That night at dinner, she continues, he asked Fox if she wanted to be his girlfriend and she "burst out laughing." Asked how she felt about taking their relationship public, she remembers telling him, "I think we should wait a few weeks."
Kanye Orchestrated Their Interview Coverage
At the time there was no reason not to think Fox was not the sole author of or otherwise provide her own synopsis of meeting Kanye for Interview magazine, which published a Jan. 6, 2022, dispatch with her byline.
But according to Down the Drain, she had no idea Kanye was going to send the photos from the night he treated her to a hotel suite full of clothes to the magazine.
She writes that he asked her to pen a piece describing how they met, which she agreed to do. But when she showed him her draft, she writes, he gave it a thumbs-down and offered something "completely fabricated"—which, West ultimately admitted to her, was written by a person referred to throughout this section of the book as his "annoying friend."
They compromised on what they submitted, she writes, but she cites this exchange as one of the red flags she spotted but ignored, still relishing the opportunity to be with West and hoping for the best.
E! News attempted to find a rep for West to respond to Fox's recollections of their relationship in her book, but hasn't heard back.
Kanye Offered to Get Julia a Boob Job
While she was trying on her new Diesel wardrobe at the hotel, Fox told West that she couldn't wear a particular slinky top with a bra and his reply was to offer to get her a boob job, she writes.
Fox recalls not being able to shake an uncomfortable feeling.
Forget Paris
Their denim-on-denim-punctuated excursion to Paris Fashion Week toward the end of January 2022 started off magically, Fox writes, but she and West fought after the Schiaparelli show about each other's traveling companions.
The rapper criticized her friends—who, according to Fox, he'd hired as stylists after meeting them in Miami—and she countered by telling him how much she disliked certain members of his entourage. Upon their return to New York, she writes, West stopped answering her calls and his assistant told her he was on a "month-long phone break."
However, Fox says, she was told the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy artist still planned to celebrate her Feb. 2 birthday.
Kanye Breaks His Silence, Julia Breaks a Tooth
Fox writes that West finally texted her again while she was on set shooting a Supreme ad with Harmony Korine behind the camera, a dream scenario for her to work with the Kids director. She sent West a picture of her sexy flight attendant outfit, which she says he criticized. “As I predicted, he hates it,” she wrote. “He starts commenting on it, and I can feel my anxiety rising.”
Rattled by the exchange, her account continues, Fox started chewing gum and cracked a molar—but not wanting to interrupt the shoot, she swallowed the broken piece of tooth and quietly noted to herself that she was "falling apart."
Julia Still Has Her Birthday Birkin From Kanye
Asked by the New York Times if she still had the Birkin bag Kanye gave her, ostensibly for her 32nd birthday, Fox said she did, clarifying to the outlet that an anecdote in the book about selling a Birkin was in reference to one "an older rich man had bought for me."
But on the night West gifted her and several of her friends with Birkins, she recalls feeling that it was more of a goodbye gesture than a birthday present. Still, she continues, she and her friends smiled big for the cameras that captured the moment.
How Julia and Kanye's Relationship Ended
Fox writes that she informed Kanye over text the day after her dispiriting birthday celebration that she was no longer having fun. He asked her not to leave him, she writes, but then on their next and ultimately last phone call, they fought about her past.
After she hung up, she continues, Fox told her publicist to let it be known the relationship was over.
Julia Refused to Sign an NDA
Fox's friends were asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement shortly after she and West met, according to the book, but she never had any intention of signing such a document.
Sometime after their final conversation, West told her over text that they couldn't remain friends unless she signed the NDA, she writes, and Fox's team started hearing from him as well. She says she then texted him a lengthy explanation as to why she wasn't signing "jack s--t."
Ahead of her book's release, Fox reiterated to the Los Angeles Times, "I'm not signing a f--king NDA just on principle. I never have, and I never will—unless it's a professional opportunity, then sure."