Aquaticat Fight from p7 2018, Fair says, she overheard Mia talking about her nearby with another Aquaticat, repeatedly referring to her as an “asshole.” This time, Fair boiled over. “I’m tired of hearing you yap, yap, yap, yap,” she recalls telling Mia. “Well, you hate everyone here,” Mia responded. “I don’t hate everyone here,” Fair retorted. “I hate you because you’re a bitch.” “That’s it, you’re done,” Mia said authoritatively. Fair then said the words she says she has beaten herself up about ever since. “Well, why don’t you lose a few pounds and then call me?” she told Mia. That was over the line and all the mer- maids knew it. Fair says the words came out of her mouth only because Mia constantly spoke of “losing a few pounds.” She says she didn’t consider Mia to be overweight, but she knew it was a verbal blow that would land. “I just snapped,” she says. “I’d been gaslit and bullied.” The argument was quickly quelled, but it marked Mia’s last day as an Aquaticat. An- derson, the owner of the mermaid show, fired her for what Fair says was an accumula- tion of issues. Anderson declined to comment for this story. Mia herself recounted the blowup and her firing in a video posted last year. She claimed Fair, whom she routinely called “Crazy Eyes,” was a “twist” who had instigated the dissen- sion in the group. She said Fair made the weight comment knowing that she has body dysmorphia, a condition that causes its suf- ferers to obsess over perceived flaws in their appearance. “Fucking evil cunt,” Mia said of Fair. “Anyway, I was so pissed off, I jumped out of the pool, and I didn’t swim. I called [Anderson] and told her what happened. Couple days later, I was fired. That bitch is still swimming.” After the firing, Mia and Jeff began attack- ing both Fair and Anderson (and, to a lesser degree, mermaid Smiley) on social media. In November 2018, Jeff published a Facebook post that Fair found particularly mortifying. “And to think we had all of [the mermaids] in our home and treated them like family,” he wrote. “We never held the fact that Whitney was a convicted-felon drug dealer who spent time in prison against her.” In a subsequent TikTok video, Mia claimed Fair was restricted from owning a company because of her criminal record. “She can’t really have a business in Flor- ida,” Mia claimed in the video, “because she has had previous law enforcement entangle- ments which required her to spend a lot of sleepy overnights at a big institution with prison bars in them. You know what I mean? Like, I’m not talking about ‘I got arrested on a weekend.’ I’m talking about hard time.” Fair, however, does own a legal business in 8 8 Florida. She’s registered to vote and hasn’t done “hard time.” She says the only arrest in her life was a marijuana charge at the age of 18 that involved a small amount of cannabis — about a quarter-ounce. It occurred during a traffic stop on a road trip from California in the tiny panhandle town of Guymon, Okla- homa, where the book was thrown at Fair and Mia Mellies took to TikTok to rant about Whitney Fair, whom she referred to as “Crazy Eyes.” Screenshot via TikTok a friend; she says both spent about a week in the local jail. Part of the deal, she says, was that the fel- ony case would be expunged after two years — meaning the record is now inaccessible to the public. Law-enforcement personnel, however, would likely have access to it via the restricted National Crime Information Cen- ter database. Fair suspected that Jeff used his law-en- forcement status to access the hidden infor- mation and smear her with a distorted version of it. When she requested the DAVID information from the state last year, she also submitted a request from the Florida Depart- ment of Law Enforcement for criminal back- ground checks conducted on her. FDLE refused to release the results, citing an active criminal investigation. Nei- ther Fair nor Kollin knows what that investigation might be. Smiley, the co-plaintiff in Fair’s lawsuit, did receive her FDLE results, and they showed that Jeff Mellies had run a criminal background on her the same day in March 2018 that he’d run the DAVID check. Despite repeated online attacks from Jeff and Mia, Fair didn’t return fire in kind. Instead, she says, she did her best to avoid the couple com- pletely. Then in November 2019, more than a year after Mia’s exit from the Aquaticats, the unthinkable hap- pened: The couple moved into a rental home right next door to Fair in Fort Lauderdale. Suddenly only a six-foot-high fence sepa- rated her from the Mellieses. “I was like, this is a really bad joke, because already at this time I was looking over my shoulder all the time because of these peo- ple,” Fair says. “I was already scared.” Separately, both Jeff and Mia Mellies have claimed — Mia in videos, Jeff in a police report — that the move was coincidental, but Fair says she felt as though she were being hunted. She initially looked for other places to live. “This is super weird and it’s super scary,” she remembers thinking. “But it’s clearly happening for a reason, and I’m not going to run from these people. So I stayed.” WHAT THE SECURITY CAMERA SAW Fair installed a security camera on the side of her house that faced their property, a decision that itself resulted in more conflict. Mia com- plained in one of her TikTok videos that she felt “violated” by the presence of the camera, in part because she and Jeff were sometimes “skyclad” — a tterm for nude associated with witchcraft — while in the backyard. "I won’t stop... until they discontinue their fucking hate campaign against my husband." “We are two practicing pagans, so we do ritual work and practice and celebrate holi- days back there,” Mia said. “Sometimes sky- clad — you know what I mean.” Fair says she never spied on the couple next door, but in August 2020 the camera did capture Jeff on her property at night, then scrambling back over the fence back into his yard. She says another video caught MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2008 APRIL 21-27, 2022 NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | MIAMI NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | ART | STAGE | NIGHT+DAY | METRO | RIPTIDE | LETTERS | CONTENTS | miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com miaminewtimes.com
