i accidentally became a meme and this is
that story
my name is jeremy meeks but you might
know me from my mug shot
life is crazy if anyone would have told
me
10 years ago that i was going to be
traveling the world
walking on fashion shows acting in
movies
i don't know what i would have done it
might have been a fight because it just
wouldn't have made sense
this all started in the 90s so i had
come from
washington state when i got to vacaville
i didn't know
anything about anything it was
eye-opening there was a lot of gang
stuff going on
i learned really fast about colors and
neighborhoods
and that's where a lot of my troubles
started and
going to juvenile halls and there was a
lot of fighting
a lot of shooting i've just been in the
streets i've been locked up
you know like half of my life i was
picking up my little brother for work
at six in the morning we left out of his
court
and probably went three or four blocks
we got pulled over
and i'm thinking this is just a routine
style it's so early in the morning
and so my little brother asked me like
do you have anything in the car
i'm like no there's nothing so they take
us out the car
they search i didn't think he was going
to be able to get my trunk open
to be honest um it was kind of tricky
and he got it open
they pulled a gun out asked me whose it
is i'm like i don't know who that gun is
like well the car wasn't in your wife's
name so we're gonna go take your wife to
jail uh
so i was like no it's mine they take us
back
to my little brother's house and that's
when we see
all of the alphabets the fbi's there the
dea
the atf the gang task force you know
operation ceasefire so when they cracked
us it was a lot more serious than i
thought it was
and they take us in for processing
that's when i
saw they raided 13 houses at once a lot
of people asked me what was i thinking
about
in that moment to be honest i wasn't
going to be able to pick my son up from
school
fall asleep with him every night like
you know all that was over
so i got locked up i fell asleep kind of
i woke up the next day like 7 45 in the
morning i hit the bus
my door pops and i'm standing up already
pacing because i'm
stressed and they said meeks i walk all
the way down to visiting
it was one of my really good friends he
was just like man you went viral
and at this time before my case i think
i had one myspace
account back in 2003 so i had
zero idea what viral meant and he was
just like you're
all over the world after that every day
i would look out of my little door and
i'm on every single news station
it doesn't matter what channel you flip
to i was on it
daytime tv you know almost everything
within
72 hours of going viral i literally
had between three and 400 letters come
in
every single day they used to have to
pass
letters down the tier and everyone used
to read them out loud
one by one you know you find a crazy
letter you read it over the tier
and that's how i was going through them
all because it was too much
i couldn't sit there and read every
single letter there was a lot of nudes
a lot of beautiful women sent a lot of
beautiful pictures
so to all the ladies that sent those
pictures
thank you you helped me through a lot of
my time
it was actually the stockton police
department they posted all of our mug
shots
on their facebook page and a couple of
the guns so they can try to show the
progress they've made
on the gun violence and that's where my
mug shot went by real far
so they weren't very happy about that i
used to kick my ass in county jail
because of it
while i was still incarcerated i
received
belief 45 contracts whether it be
modeling management movies and i had
never ever in my life even seen a
contract before it was like trying to
read
french very overwhelming when i got out
it went crazy from that it's a whole new
world
and i like really hit the ground running
i've walked the biggest fashion shows
milan paris the list goes on i shot
five movies in 10 months some of the
biggest campaigns
it was just crazy i'd spend my whole
life in the streets you know
now i'm on a photo shoot you're telling
me to hold my arms like this
and it was just hard to adjust like to
this new life
it's been a while wow rob and i'm so
grateful
you have to do right by it i'm not
taking anything for granted there's a
lot that needs to change
in the judicial system in california
wheat is legal
yet we still have thousands and
thousands of inmates
sitting in there for simple weed
possessions a lot of cases need to be
overturned and looked at again
because since the laws change people
should be released
but they don't want to let them go
because they're making money off of them
charles johnson he is in new folsom
state prison
with an unjust three strikes case well
den angelo been out for some years
he's doing a lot of incredible work when
it comes to prison reform people say the
system's broken
it's not it's working perfectly fine
that's how it's designed
so go watch trigger on b-e-t
plus dutch true to the game part two
and thank you to the stockton police
department
for posting my mug shot and i'm not
saying that in an
actual way i'm being honest it helped
change my life
[Music]
you