'Child star gone bad' is a well-worn Hollywood road, travelled by everyone from Drew Barrymore to Macauley Culkin to Justin Bieber.
But among these cautionary tales, former Disney starlet Lindsay Lohan's story stands alone. It takes her out of Hollywood and to the desert cities of the Middle East, to a notoriously hard-partying Greek island, and most recently, to the streets of Moscow.
Who could have predicted her latest scandal, just one week ago? As she documented via her Instagram stories: after a night of clubbing, in the early hours of the morning Lohan, 32, emerged onto the streets of Moscow, apparently alone, reports news.com.au.
She stumbled across a homeless family of Syrian refugees, huddled for warmth on the street. She spoke to the wary family, offering to shelter their two young boys in her hotel room for the night.
Offering — then insisting.
Lohan stalked the clearly frightened family for blocks, taunting them in that baffling, intercontinental accent that first made headlines in 2016.
She accused the adult man and woman of human trafficking, insisting their two boys accompany her to her hotel room to "watch movies."
Finally, as Lohan reached out to grab one of the children, the woman turned on her heels and thumped the star, who fell to the ground, giving the whole family time to escape her publicly broadcast harassment.
And thus Lohan's 6.8 million Instagram followers watched the woman who was once one of Hollywood's brightest rising stars, completely alone and slumped in a Moscow gutter, crying out in shock.
How on earth did it come to this?
Born in New York to Wall Street trader Michael and former singer and dancer Dina, Lindsay's career trajectory was set when she was just a toddler: she started as a child model with Ford Models at the age of three, and by 10, was a regular on US soap Another World.
At 12 came her big break: playing twin sisters in Disney's remake of the 1961 family comedy The Parent Trap. The film was a huge hit, and Disney took notice of Lohan's talents: packaged as a 'teen queen'to rival Hilary Duff, Lohan starred in Disney fare Freaky Friday, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and Herbie: Fully Loaded in quick succession.
Then came the movie for which she'll always be remembered, the Tina Fey-penned high school comedy Mean Girls. Whip-smart and bitingly funny, the film was a massive hit and showed Lohan had chops far beyond the Disney mould.
Mean Girls was released two months before Lohan's 18th birthday, seamlessly ushering in a new era: Lindsay Lohan, grown-up movie star.
Lohan's movie career faltered after Mean Girls, as she made a string of middling films — the rom com Just My Luck, the kitchen sink drama Georgia Rule — that failed at the box office. Incredibly, it took just three years after Mean Girls' release for Lohan to stoop to the first in a string of truly bad roles: playing a stripper taunted by a serial killer in a B-grade horror flick with the oh-so-Jenna Maroney title I Know Who Killed Me.
By 2009, Lohan found herself starring in Labor Pains, a rom-com about a woman who fakes her own pregnancy that suffered the indignity of skipping cinemas altogether, instead screening in the US as a telemovie.
She found some success in music, though, releasing two well-received albums of Avril-lite pop-rock in the space of twelve months.
Her movie career slumped, but it didn't affect Lohan's time in the spotlight: If anything, she was more famous than ever — but for all the wrong reasons. In 2007 alone Logan was twice convicted of drunken driving, once for cocaine possession, went to rehab three times and spent 84 minutes in jail (!).
By 2010 — after more rehab stints and a period wearing a court-ordered alchohol-monitoring SCRAM ankle bracelet — Lohan was sentenced to 90 days in jail for failing to attend her court-ordered weekly alcohol education classes. She served just two weeks due to overcrowding.
In 2011, she was back in custody: This time after being charged with stealing a $2500 necklace from a jewellery store. That charge was bumped down to a misdemeanour, but around the same time a jury found that Lohan had violated an earlier probation order, sentencing her to 120 days in jail.
The following year, more brushes with the law: She was arrested for allegedly clipping a man with her car in New York and then leaving the scene, although no charges were laid. In October that year, police respond to a disturbance at the house she's staying with mother Dina, the result of a huge fight between the pair.
A turbulent dating life kept her in the tabloids, too: First came teen Hollywood Lothario Wilmer Valderrama, then a very public romance with DJ Samantha Ronson, sister to music producer Mark.
Later, she would dismiss their two-year relationship, insisting she was straight and saying that "when I was with Samantha, I didn't want to leave, because I didn't want to be alone. It was very toxic."
As more and more attention shifted to her personal life and numerous legal troubles, Lohan has made many attempts at a career resurrection.
In 2014 an eight-part docuseries on Oprah's OWN network, Lindsay, provided a fly-on-the-wall look at Lohan's life. It was, to be frank, a disaster.
The starlet was shown berating her staff, seeking advice from a tarot reading celebrity life coach and flat-out refusing to partake in her contractual obligations to the show (several bizarre scenes had the show's crew become its cast, as they filmed themselves outside her apartment).
It also gave the world this memorable scene — a clearly frustrated Oprah Winfrey telling Lohan to "cut the bulls**t":
Lohan pursued artier roles: She and The Mole host Grant Bowler played Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the world's least convincing celebrity biopic, 2012's Liz & Dick.
The following year, she acted alongside porn star James Deen in the ultra low budget erotic thriller The Canyons.
She even tried her hand at theatre, decamping to London for a West End run in the David Mamet play Speed-the-Plow. The reviews might have been lukewarm (The Stage said she was "out of her league"), but she made it through the run.
As the pressure on Lohan grew, she fled Hollywood and moved around the globe. She stayed in London after her West End stint, and has since settled in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai — a city she loves, she says, for its "silence."
"It's the safest place. It's less demanding. America is always like, 'Go go go go go!'" she told the New York Times this year, explaining the country's strict privacy laws mean she's never bothered by paparazzi. "I don't have to turn on the news and see about the Kardashians. I don't have to see anything anymore. I choose what I want to see and how I want to live."
A brief, tumultuous engagement to Russian heir Egor Tarabasov in 2016 played out in some of Europe's most exclusive hot spots, culminating in ugly social media spats and dramatic fights in her upscale London apartment. They broke up soon after.
In 2018, Lindsay Lohan's career is made up of a ragtag collection of business interests. There's Lohan Mykonos, a beach bar and club on the Greek party isle that she's lent her name to — and has fr6equented regularly, her meme-worthy antics filmed by revellers and shared around the world:
She's the face of online legal service Lawyer.com, a bizarre gig that sees her joking about her history of drink driving convictions in their ads.
"When Lawyer.com first reached out to me, I was confused and a little scared, because I thought I was in trouble," she says in one ad.
"But when they asked me to be their spokesperson, I was intrigued. After meeting with the team, I realised, Lawyer.com is just about helping people. From getting a DUI — let's not pretend I didn't get one. Or two, or three, or … some others …" she says with a laugh.
2018 has also seen her return to films for the first time in five years: She appears in Among the Shadows about a tough female private investigator who is descended from a line of werewolves. She has a supporting role.
That Lindsay Lohan refugee family video is the second weirdest thing involving Lindsay Lohan I've seen this week, the first being this trailer for her upcoming spy thriller that's also a werewolf movie: pic.twitter.com/dTmeI9ptwJ
— rob trench (@robtrench) September 29, 2018
And despite the abject disaster of the Oprah reality show, Lohan's already started shooting another reality series, this one set at her Mykonos bar and billed as a "cooler, hipper, edgier Vanderpump Rules." It's being filmed for MTV — no word of an airdate.
After her headline-making Moscow fracas, though, TMZ reports Lohan's loved ones want her back in the US, close to family and support networks.
Rob McCallum, a key voice in a new Netflix documentary, opens up on the tragedy.