Access Exclusive: My Day With Redmond O’Neal

Farrah Fawcett is 62 years old and facing the toughest battle of her life. A few weeks ago, millions of people saw what she’s going through in a very personal documentary called “Farrah’s Story.” She is still so beautiful, even in the grip of cancer, and to watch her go through so much pain and frustration was difficult.

Farrah and her team of doctors (in the United States and in Germany) seemed to have tried everything and yet nothing has worked for more than short periods of time.

Here at Access Hollywood, Farrah’s story and the story of her long-time partner, Ryan O’Neal, had become a regular part of our daily work and I suppose we know about as much about what was going on with her as anyone. But there was another person going through a unique ordeal over Farrah: their son Redmond.

Redmond was born into a world in which everybody knew who his parents were and having money was a given. But instead of adding his success onto their success, his life has been a seemingly never-ending list of screw-ups. Instead of being at his mother’s side as she hopes for a miracle, he had to pray for her from a jail cell. And his father wouldn’t even post his bail because he knew (or feared) what might happen – Redmond would screw up again. And all the while, Redmond has been trying to get drugs out of his body and his head. He feels great shame at the mistakes he’s made. And he hopes to get one more chance to see his mother and hear her voice.

The first time I visited Redmond O’Neal was at the Los Angeles County jail facility known as the Twin Towers. It was a Monday afternoon. From the outside, Twin Towers looks kind of like an office building. But once inside the doors it’s a jail and a hard-looking one. The floors are made of that shiny kind of concrete and the smell of disinfectant makes it seem like it’s clean, but it’s still dark and gloomy. In the waiting room, there were a lot of people sitting around for a chance to visit a father, brother or loved one. After handing over my driver’s license at the window, I was escorted to a kind of holding area between the waiting room and the cells. If you’ve ever seen an episode of the HBO show “Oz” you know what this place is like.

When Redmond walked out, he was wearing an orange jump suit that was a little too big and house slipper type shoes with no laces that were several sizes too large for his feet. He is a tall kid, at least 5’ 11’, but not as thin as I expected. His teeth aren’t great but that’s a common problem with people who have done a lot of drugs over a long period of time. His red hair that day was kind of messy and a little bit of a beard had grown out.

I guess he wasn’t expecting visitors since he hadn’t had many, at least visitors who weren’t family or on his legal team. I wasn’t even sure Redmond would talk to me when he found out what I do or why I was even there, but I had nothing to lose and he at least had somebody different to talk to.

After I introduced myself, he warmed up and was cool about the visit. He was glad for any visit. A trustee brought three plastic chairs for us to sit on. First, I wanted to know what it was like for a kid from Malibu, with high profile parents, to be in a place like Twin Towers. I wanted to know if he was truly remorseful or if that was just an act that he and his lawyer put on for the judges. To my surprise, he was open and friendly and started talking right away. A lot of the time it was about a new rehab program he was trying to get into and how he was ready to move on and not just get out but also deal with his addiction problem. Redmond told me as much of it as he could in the time we had, which was about 23 minutes. It wasn’t your typical visit on a phone behind bulletproof glass. We talked face-to-face, so I got to see first hand his raw emotions when I asked questions about his life and his future.

He’s 24 now and said he has been into heroin since he was 18. He said this is the second time he’s been in jail for drugs and wants to get clean but seriously doesn’t know if he can. He told me he was on heroin and Xanax when he arrived at Twin Towers. He was arrested back in April for taking drugs into a jail facility while going to pick up a friend. He claims he didn’t have enough on him to even get anyone high so he thought the felony drug charge, which he pled no contest to, was a joke. But still, he knew he had messed up. Redmond told me when he got to the Towers medical facility they tried to wean him off the drugs by getting small dosages to control his cravings. The critical thing is when you are going to enter a rehab program you can’t be on “anything.” You have to be clean, cold turkey clean! He said getting clean was hard but it is what he has to do.

Redmond said he spends half his day kicking himself for getting caught while his mother is battling cancer and the other half asking God to send his son down to touch her. He admits he has never been a spiritual person but since being in jail, he has begun to read the Bible and pray hard, not for selfish s*** like get me out of here, but more like please help the doctors find a cure for her. According to Redmond, Ryan doesn’t know what to do to help Farrah any more and spends a lot of time asking why? Ryan even told Redmond he thought about bringing in some kind of “voodoo spirit doctor from South Africa.” Maybe his dad was joking but I can see how you can get desperate.

During the time he was in Twin Towers, Redmond did get to see Farrah once. The judge granted him a visitation because they all thought she had taken a turn for the worse. They showed it in the documentary that aired on NBC. He was wearing his prison jumpsuit and was in shackles, but Farrah was so out of it, he thinks she didn’t recognize him, at least until he was about to leave and return to jail.

In that scene where he was lying on the bed with her, Redmond told me that she whispered to him “I think they’re trying to drug me”. There were tears during my conversation with Redmond, especially at that point. One of the most emotional things he said was that the pain was so great she couldn’t even sit up to take her pills. This was shortly after a trip to Germany where she had undergone more surgery.

As for his daily life in Twin Towers, Redmond spent “twenty three and half hours” of each day in his cell. I got a look at it and you wouldn’t want to spend even two hours in there. It’s a five-by-eight foot room with a bed, sink and toilet. There are no bars, only clear, thick glass like the kind used to protect bank tellers. He gets up at five every morning and makes himself instant coffee with luke warm water from his faucet. For exercise, he does 150 pushups a day. He says the other inmates do know who he is. He is labeled with “K10” status which means that he is a high profile inmate and not to be touched. Another “K10” inmate, who happened to be Redmond’s next-door cellmate at Twin Towers, was Phil Spector, the music producer recently convicted of murder. While walking with Redmond back to his cell, I saw Spector myself. Despite that wacky mug shot — he is totally bald, but he does hide it with a yarmulke. The other half hour each day, Redmond is allowed to go out into the yard or make a phone call. He does speak to his dad on a daily basis, mostly to check on his mom.

His days are long and most of his time is spent reading. He got emotional again when he said that he reads the paper every morning and goes straight to the obituaries, praying that he doesn’t see his mother’s name. When I was there, he had just finished a book called “Maximum Ride” and likes books about old gangsters and the mob, but he also reads anything other inmates have finished.

There’s also a lot of time left in the day for self-reflection and for feelings of remorse about what he’s done to his dad, mom, and himself. Redmond O’Neal told me that if the judge gives him three years (which is what the District Attorney is arguing for) he knows he will never see his mom alive again.

Right now, I think this young man has a goal and that’s to be a shoulder for his mother to cry on, a pillar for her to prop her fragile body against. And to be the little boy that Farrah sees smiling at her. He doesn’t want to be a man who is battling demons.