Jeremy Meeks was sitting in a cell at Sacramento County Jail when his face was already a meme across half the world. It was June 2014, and the Stockton Police Department in California had uploaded his mugshot to Facebook as part of a routine operation. In one week, the image racked up more than 95,000 comments and 20,000 likes. The reason: his blue eyes. They called him “the hot felon”, and modeling offers started coming in before the judge had even handed down a sentence.
But the path that led Meeks to that cell had not been easy. He grew up in a home marked by heroin, his father committed a murder when he was just nine months old, and he spent more than a decade in juvenile detention centers and prison for various crimes. In February 2015, he was found guilty of illegal weapons possession and sentenced to 27 months. He signed his first modeling contract while still incarcerated. “I got, I think, 45 contracts”, he recalled years later.
Today, 12 years after that photo, Meeks has walked the runway for Philipp Plein and Tommy Hilfiger, signed a 15 million dollar deal to launch his own clothing line, starred in five films in ten months, and published his autobiography in 2024. He has spent three years celibate by choice: “I don’t want to get distracted”, he said in 2025. From police booking sheet to the runway, in one of the strangest trajectories the internet has ever produced.