Model Citizen

September 16, 2024
In this unvarnished debut, Meeks traces his unlikely arc from recidivist criminal to professional model. Meeks was born in 1984 Washington State to heroin-addicted parents. After Meeks’s mother escaped his abusive father, she got clean, but Meeks’s struggles to control his temper left him believing he’d inherited her “wild, impulsive anger.” When Meeks was a teenager, his rage regularly landed him in schoolyard fights and, eventually, juvenile detention, where he joined the Crips. Though gang life was “a constant battle,” Meeks took comfort in the mutual support it offered, and shuffled in and out of prison for a decade rather than give it up. In 2014, he was arrested in Stockton, Calif., on a weapons charge. The Stockton PD posted his mug shot to their Facebook page and it went viral, with Meeks becoming known across social media platforms as the “hot mug shot guy.” After he was released from prison two years later, Meeks took a paid gig at New York Fashion Week, which led to a full-time modeling career and lead roles in a handful of made-for-TV movies in the 2020s.While Meeks’s rise is astonishing, his prose is often flat, and he has a tendency to dispatch with complicated issues in a sentence or two. Still, it’s an intimate glimpse of a real-life rags-to-riches story.