One afternoon in March, Jessica Rae Swiatkowski, a bisexual 21-year-old blonde with collarbone tattoos, walked into Hooters for lunch with a friend. She recounted each episode to her mother with a mix of wisdom and world-weariness. At one point, she and another dancer fell in with a gang of credit card thieves. She saw a bouncer get shot, and was briefly involved with an older guy who, while they were sleeping, got raided by the police.
Zola was quickly earning up to $1,000 a night in tips, but the job came with its share of trouble. And don’t do anything outside of your dancing.”
“I can’t tell you to stop, but what I can say is you need to come to me if there’s any trouble. “You got to be careful,” Watkins told her. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m coming!'” Her mother, a successful paralegal, balked, but also treated Zola like an adult. “She’s like, ‘I make two grand a weekend,'” Zola recalls. She wanted to be a singer and was saving money to move into her own place, when another waitress told her about the lucrative world of exotic dancing. On her 18 th birthday, while still in high school and living at home, she began waitressing at Hooters. “It’s common and it happens,” Zola tells me, as she cracks open a crab leg at Hooters. There are currently an estimated 4.5 million victims of sex trafficking worldwide. That’s the one thing each of the participants agree upon: the real story behind #TheStory, of how young girls and women are held against their will by sex traffickers, is more fucked up and unconscionable than any one person could invent. “I made people who probably wouldn’t want to hear a sex trafficking story want to be a part of it,” she says, “because it was entertaining.” To garner more interest this time, she made it darkly funny while preserving the gist of what happened. She had posted and removed the story twice before and no one cared. When she posted the story on Twitter, she was caught up in the moment, she explains, riffing on the reactions of her followers who were responding in real time. Zola admits to embellishing some of the more sensational details - Jarrett’s suicide attempt, Z shooting the pimp - for entertainment value, but denies the allegation that she sold sex for money on the trip. Jessica insists she has never prostituted herself, and says that Zola was the one who wanted to turn tricks in Florida. “She’s ruining my life,” Jessica tells me.Īs outrageous as #TheStory seems, many of the details line up, though a few key points don’t. I went to Detroit to meet with her and her tight-knit family, and also spoke at length with the other main players, many of whom are eager to set Zola’s story straight.
#GIRL STRIPPING TO IM IN LOVE WITH A STRIPPER MOVIE#
There were Zola Halloween costumes, Zola feminist think pieces, Zola comics, and parody movie trailers for a rumored Hollywood project: In a world where stripper fingers turn to Twitter fingers… One of her 108,000 followers anointed her the “Queen of hoeism.” To which, Zola replied: “Title of my autobiography.”īut what really happened that weekend in Tampa? Here, for the first time, is Zola’s exclusive account. “There’s so much untapped talent in the hood.” (“I’m not from the hood tho Ava,” Zola replied. “Drama, humor, action, suspense, character development,” Ava DuVernay, the director of Selma, tweeted. Missy Elliot, Keke Palmer, Solange Knowles joined the legions obsessing online. The saga got hashtagged #TheStory and trended worldwide. Singer Paulette McWilliams on Her Years With Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, and Steely Dan “That nigga lost in the sauce,” Zola wrote in one of her more popular tweets, “& that bitch lost in the game.” It reads like Spring Breakers meets Pulp Fiction, as told by Nicki Minaj. Tricks get turned, a hustler gets murdered, Jarrett leaps from a four-story window. So I met this white bitch at Hooters…” What followed was an epic 148-tweet tale about her harrowing road trip to Florida with said “white bitch,” Jessica Jessica’s maudlin boyfriend, Jarrett and Jessica’s violent Nigerian pimp, “Z”. The week before, on October 27, Zola tweeted, “Okay listen up. As the petite 20-year-old beauty in a pink blouse and tight blue jeans clacked her high black heels past the hostess stand, a curvy bartender shouted, “Zola!” It was her first visit back since she quit her waitressing job three months earlier, not long after finding out she and her fiancé were pregnant, but that wasn’t the reason for the excitement. On a recent night in Detroit, Aziah “ Zola” Wells returned to where it all began: Hooters.