The Troubled Life Of Simone Biles' Older Sister Ashley
Simone Biles had a difficult start to life. When the world's most decorated gymanst was 2, she and her three siblings were removed from the care of their mother Shanon Biles, who struggled with addiction. "I got a call from a social worker, and my response was 'Send them to me,'" Shanon's father, Ron Biles, told the Houston Chronicle in 2016. "That would have been in July or August 1999." Right after her third birthday, Simone moved from Ohio to Texas. "We finally got them in March 2000. The oldest was 10, her brother was 8, Simone was 3 and Adria, the youngest, was 13 months."
But the oldest children, Ashley and Tevin, preferred to stay in Ohio. So the Biles siblings were separated. While he adopted the two youngest, Simone and Adria, Ron's sister Harriet went on to adopt the older two and raised them in Cleveland. Understandably, Simone is much closer to her little sister than she is with Ashley and Tevin. "Thank you for being you and thank you for being the best big sister in the world ... you're the best human i know i love you sister," Adria captioned a 2021 Instagram post featuring Simone holding her Olympic medal.
The youngest Biles sisters went on to live successful lives — Simone as the best gymnast the sport has probably ever witnessed and Adria as a gymnast, dancer and dental hygienist. But life went a different direction for Simone's older sister Ashley, who has a lengthy criminal record.
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Ashley Biles has had several brushes with the law
Ashley Biles, legally known as Ashley Biles-Thomas, pleaded guilty to drug trafficking in 2015, a charge stemming from a 2014 traffic stop in Delaware County, Ohio, Radar Online reported in 2016. She, along with her then-boyfriend and a cousin, had 90 pills of oxycodone and 60 of oxymorphone on them. Biles-Thomas was sentenced to four years of probation and three months in jail, though she was released after three days.
Just weeks before her probation was set to end, Biles-Thomas was arrested again in April 2019 and charged with assault, The U.S. Sun reported. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in jail and two years' probation. Most of her jail sentence was suspended. Biles-Thomas was arrested again in July 2021, just weeks before the Tokyo Olympics. Biles-Thomas was still on probation that time around as well. In addition to violating her probation, Biles-Thomas was also charged with driving under the influence, driving with a suspended license and leaving the scene of an accident, among other minor traffic violations.
In August 2022, Biles-Thomas celebrated her release from jail on Facebook. "Just gt out the prison joint geeked to be home PERIOD," she wrote. Biles-Thomas hadn't posted since a few days before her arrest, suggesting she was in jail for about a year. Biles-Thomas has also experienced personal tragedy. In May 2020, she uploaded a Facebook cover post honoring the late father of her triplets. "Missing you like crazy," she wrote.
Ashley and Simone Biles don't seem to be close
Out of all her siblings, Simone Biles seems to be the least close with Ashley. While Simone has shown affection for Tevin on social media on several occasions, she never mentions her oldest sister. But she does seem to have fond memories of Ashley from childhood, describing how she played a mother-like role if her life. "As the oldest, Ashley helped out with Adria and me, getting us dressed, playing with us, and settling us down to sleep at night," Simone wrote in her 2016 autobiography, "Courage to Soar."
Ashley also makes little mention of Simone on her own social media accounts, though she has indicated being proud of her. "Ma sister is fire," Ashley captioned an April 2021 Facebook post that featured Simone in a "Tequila Kills" T-shirt and a matching red hat. "She is the real G.O.A.T." But Ashley also seems conscious of the abyssal difference that exists between Simone's reality compared to hers and Tevin's.
"Yea maybe our family has been [through] alot and maybe ma sister did beat the odds but at the end of the day we are strong," she wrote on Facebook in June 2021, after Tevin was acquitted of murder in the shooting death of three people in 2018. She went on to defend her brother and urge people to refrain from passing judgement without knowing the full story. "Please dt judge a book by its cover read more into the book," she wrote.