After her mother’s release and the parents’ subsequent separation, Leighton lived with her mother and her siblings — an older brother, Douglas Logan, born in 1983, and a younger brother, Alexander (known as Lex), born in 1994. The younger brother was born with multiple health problems that would require ongoing care, a fact that added a specific dimension to the family’s financial circumstances in subsequent years, and that would eventually figure in the litigation between Meester and her mother in 2011.
Her older brother’s influence on her musical taste, though it belongs to a slightly later period, appears to have been significant. She described to Vice, in a 2014 interview, how his mixtapes introduced her to alternative and rock music that became more central to her identity than the pop music she was briefly known for professionally. The older brother, the shared music, the Florida childhood — these are the details of a biography that runs entirely counter to the Upper East Side universe that her most famous role inhabited.
When Leighton was approximately ten years old — still living in Florida, on Christmas break, while her mother had been out of prison long enough for them to have established some version of a routine — she attended a modeling convention in Atlanta. The convention was one of those industry scout events where agencies and management companies from larger markets come to look for talent from smaller markets. An agent signed her on the spot.
The signing of a ten-year-old at a scouting convention is not unusual in the modeling industry, which has always drawn from the available supply of photogenic children in ways that raise questions the industry as a whole has never fully addressed. For Meester, it was the entry point into a professional world that she would navigate, more or less continuously, for the next two decades. From that point forward, she was not simply a kid in Marco Island who had been through some unusual family circumstances. She was a working professional, small in scale but real in commitment.