By RODNEY HO/ rho@ajc.com, originally filed Friday, July 3, 2015
Mimi Faust doesn't live and die by "Love and Hip Hop Atlanta."
When the cameras are not trained on her, she tries to "live my life as normal as practically possible," she told me in an interview Thursday.
Sure, it pays well. And she said she is under contract for up to nine seasons. (The show is in the middle of season four.)
In other words, Mimi can't just walk away even if she wanted to. The producers would have to boot her, like they did with Benzino last year.
We only see a sliver of her life, the sliver the producers massage and aggrandize and prod. For the past season and a half, it's been mostly two words: sex tape.
And boy, did that tape blow up. The most popular blog entry I have ever written was about her sex tape: 800,000 views. But I suspect 99% of them were disappointed folks who actually wanted to see the sex tape, not something written about it.
Mimi has managed to stretch the sex tape story well into season four as her cover story about how it happened unraveled.
She herself was partially responsible for the sex tape story going as long as it did because the truth came out in dribs and drabs, forced partially by Margeaux, Nikko Smith's wife.
"I thought it was over last year," Mimi said. "All Margeaux wanted to talk about every five minutes was me and the tape. I'm not mad at her. She helped sales of the tape!"
When I asked if she regrets the tape, she went for a broader sweep: "I regret ever meeting Nikko."
Mimi has not talked to him in a year. "I have blocked him from calling. I don't do anything with Nikko. I want nothing to do with Nikko."
While the sex tape has paid off handsomely in the bank account, she said she isn't sure it's really been worth it long term, mostly because her daughter Eva will eventually know about it. "She's going to get ridicule for it," she said. And the insults online have been over the top, she said, using insults like "whore" and "slut" when she was merely making love to one guy.
On the bright side, she is on good terms now with Stevie J. "This is the first time we've gotten along in years," she said, noting that rehab helped him, though she thinks he should have stayed longer than 30 days.
She also goes out of her way to avoid Joseline Hernandez, Stevie J's jealous squeeze. Since last season's crazy reunion show where Joseline attacked Mimi, among others, she has had just a single scene with Joseline, who was supposed to apologize to her but didn't. "Why am I here?" she said she thought. "This is stupid."
Bottom line: "I never cross paths with her unless I'm going to the zoo," she said, her "shade" switch popping up for a moment.
She refuses to watch the show: "To keep my sanity, I stopped watching midway season two."
But she admits social media fans will fill her in. "I can't escape it all," she said, with a sigh.
Her justification this year to get into the music management business was simply because she's been around it for so long. "We have artists on the show. It could be a win-win situation. Or so I thought." (Indeed, her client Jessica Dime was so dissatisfied with Mimi's work in the most recent episode, Jessica was about to defect to someone else.)
Even after all the drama the past couple of weeks with Margeaux, she said she and her BFF Ariane are on good terms. And she gets along with Rasheeda and Kirk Frost. She hardly ever sees some of the other cast members, such as Yung Joc and Khadiyah. She also agreed with me that Karlie Redd gets into other people's business because she has no story lines of her own.
Mimi, by the way, still has her cleaning business and she raises her daughter. Those are aspects of her life far too boring for creator Mona Scott Young to deal with. Bottom line, Mimi said: "They want the BS and the drama."
And Mimi can dish that stuff out.
She has other business plans that are probably not going to end up on the show: she'd like to create a home decor line and get into the lucrative hair business.
Ultimately, she understands that people who don't know her will judge her based on the crumbs that "Love and Hip Hop" parses out (and that sex tape). "Mind you, there are two hour scenes edited and chopped down to five or six minutes," she said. "How can you judge a person's character in five or six minutes?" (Answer: Easy!)
While anonymous haters have mocked her incessantly online, she said not a single time has anyone had the guts to ever confront her face to face. It's very possible the people who ask her for a selfie one moment may slag her the minute she's out of earshot.
When she signed on for this show, she clearly did not anticipate how popular the show would be. Now that season four is halfway through, "at this point, it's part of my life. I've accepted it. It's crazy that the public take 'Love and Hip Hop' as the Bible."
I told her that shows like hers have replaced traditional soap operas. They now just use real people. She agreed.
And while there are now people who live and die by being on reality TV e.g. Kendra Wilkinson, the Kardashians, Spencer and Heidi, the Situation, I don't sense Mimi will shrivel up and die if a camera is not trained on her.
"Love and Hip Hop," if anything, can be a grind. They film 10 months a year. She said she had only three weeks out of 44 when she didn't get filmed doing something.
"I don't think because I'm on television, it makes me better. It doesn't define who I am."
It merely defines what perfect strangers think of her.
ON TV
"Love and Hip Hop Atlanta," 8 p.m. Mondays, VH1
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