him looking over the fence in an area near her bedroom. A few days later, the same camera caught the BSO lieutenant not only on her property but scaling a ladder he found there up the side of her house. The video clearly shows the bald, white-bearded Jeff, wearing a military- style T-shirt, climbing up to the security cam- era and placing duct tape over the lens. Fair says that although she found this ter- rifying, she didn’t go to the police because she feared they might protect one of their own. She did, however, remove the tape from the camera and affix a “No Trespassing” sign to the side of her home. On Thanksgiving 2020, the camera cap- tured someone on the Mellieses’ side of the fence reaching over with a rake to knock down the sign. That was when Fair decided to go to the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. “I had no choice,” she tells New Times. “It was getting worse.” The department issued Jeff a verbal no- trespass warning — meaning that if he came onto Fair’s property again, he could be crimi- nally charged with trespassing. She also went to the Broward Sheriff’s Office’s internal af- fairs division, which in January 2021 sent Fair a letter confirming that BSO was investigat- ing her complaint. The next major flare-up occurred on April 4, 2021, when the Mellieses confronted Fair at about 8 p.m. at the foot of her driveway, complaining about colored lights Fair had in- stalled on her property. Fair was accompanied by her business partner, Pablo Caceres, who recorded the confrontation on his phone. When Caceres brought up Fair’s trespassing allegation, the lieutenant went on the verbal attack. “Trespassing is a misdemeanor, you stupid fuck,” he said. “You can’t do anything about that. You have to show intent.” Mia piped up, “He’s a cop, you douchebag.” Jeff then called Fair a “nefarious fucking cunt.” “Lying piece of crap,” Mia added. “Felon.” “Get rid of these lights because they are bothering us,” Jeff demanded. “We’ve done nothing to you. If you want your house to look like a fucking whorehouse, do it on the other side of the property.” Caceres told Jeff he was intimidating Fair. “How’s it intimidating?” Jeff responded. “You’re a pussy. You’re a pussy. We can’t talk amongst ourselves?” “I can talk with somebody that is not screaming at me,” Caceres countered. As the couple walked away, Fair’s security camera captured Mia yelling back at Fair. “You fucking dirty sullen cunt!” she screamed. “Oh, by the way, how was prison, Whitney? How many months did you do in prison, you piece of shit? I fucking can’t stand you. I hope you fucking die!” The encounter marked the first time they’d interacted since the fracas at the Wreck Bar pool. The following day, Jeff approached Fair once more, this time walking onto her prop- erty, where he again complained about the lights. When the allegation about being on her property at night near her bedroom win- dow arose, Jeff called her insane and told her she wasn’t “pretty,” according to subsequent police reports. Mia Mellies, erstwhile Aquaticat social media, coming onto her property, tam- pering with her security camera, shouting ob- scenities at her out in the street — didn’t at least constitute conduct unbecoming a law enforcement officer. But there was positive news in the same letter. Broward Sheriff’s Lt. Johanna Palacio wrote that a new internal investigation had been opened into the alleged abuse of the DAVID system. According to Palacio, Fair would be notified when the investigation was complete. No word has come from the agency, which doesn’t discuss open internal affairs investigations. Though Jeff Mellies was ordered to leave Fair alone, that didn’t stop his wife, who con- tinued posting attacks on Fair, as well as on Anderson and Smiley, on social media. “I won’t stop talking about them and mak- Photo courtesy of the Aquaticats Believing it was an explicit trespass on Jeff’s part, Fair again called the Fort Lau- derdale Police Department (FLPD). Be- cause she didn’t want the Mellieses to see her with the cops, she met Ofc. Kerri Hagerty on April 5 at the Galleria mall. There she told Hagerty the entire story and voiced her opinion, then unconfirmed, that the Mellieses had used restricted law-en- forcement information to attack those whom they didn’t like. Fair also shared the new developments with BSO internal affairs. On April 8, the agency issued a letter to Jeff Mellies ordering him to cease and desist from any contact whatsoever with Fair, including on social me- dia, and to refrain from “personal visits, ha- rassment, annoyance, threats, telephone calls, or intimidation.” The day Mellies received the letter from BSO, he called the FLPD to get his side of the story “on the record.” He told police that the problem with Fair stemmed from a motion light on her security camera that was so bright it was an annoyance. He also claimed Fair was using the camera to record him and his wife in their backyard. He admitted he’d gone back onto Fair’s property and argued with her. He also admit- ted he had climbed the ladder at her home months before. He said he intended to un- screw the light bulbs from Fair’s motion sen- sor but noticed the camera and decided to tape it over. The Mellieses also had a lawyer send Fair a “cease and desist” letter of their own. The May 6 missive from attorney Bruce Trybus demanded that Fair remove the security lights and camera from her property because they violated the couple’s “reasonable expec- tation of privacy.” Fair responded in a letter to the attorney, asserting that her security equipment was law- fully placed and had never been used for voy- euristic purposes. Jeff Mellies’ documented intrusions on her property only proved the se- curity measures were necessary, she wrote. “I am trying to live my life without en- countering daily hostility and harassment from you and your clients,” she stated. It was a low point for Fair. She says she’d become so plagued by anxiety that she couldn’t eat; her weight dropped to 105 pounds, and she fell into despair. “This is never gonna end, I can’t get away from these people,” she recalls thinking. “I literally have to move out of state. I didn’t know what to do. I felt stuck. You just feel helpless when this is happening to you and nobody can help you.” Desperate, she searched online for local lawyers with experience in police miscon- duct and landed on Kollin. But after hearing Fair’s story, the attorney told her that as terri- ble as it may seem, a civil trespassing case wasn’t worth filing. As he broke the news to Fair, he made a last-second suggestion that she investigate whether Jeff had improperly checked her driver’s license information and criminal background. “That little remark at the end of the phone call changed everything,” she says. “OKAY, WE HAVE A CASE” In May of last year, Fair submitted her public- records requests for the DAVID and criminal background searches performed on her. She also persuaded fellow mermaid Smiley, whom Mia also occasionally attacked on so- cial media, and their boss Anderson to submit identical requests. When the results came back in June, Fair called Kollin. “Okay, we have a case,” Kollin told her. The first order of business was to report the findings to BSO internal affairs, a procedure that marked Fair’s third visit to the agency. Shortly thereafter, on July 16, BSO sent Fair a letter informing her that her previous com- plaint was being closed on the grounds that “no misconduct issues can be identified.” Fair says she was shocked that BSO found everything Jeff had done — smearing her on ing fun of them until they discontinue their fucking hate campaign against my husband,” Mia says in one TikTok video. “You would think they would come after me, but that’s not what evil people do. Evil people want the person they are attacking to suffer watching their loved ones suffer.” In a September 4, 2021, Instagram post under the handle “fire_witch_siren,” Mia wrote ominously that the “north remembers bitch, and it’s coming for house Zen.” In a TikTok video, she painted Fair, Smi- ley, and Anderson as anti-American and anti-law enforcement. Mia, who hasn’t been shy about her support for Donald Trump, says in the video that she was offended that in an Instagram post that coincided with the end of the war in Afghanistan, Fair didn’t mention the deaths of 13 soldiers in a terrorist attack. “They hate this fucking country and everybody that serves it,” Mia said. “We need to stop supporting these people...and they’re fucking businesses...and the Wreck Bar. Stop supporting them. They hate this fucking country, and they’re not shy about admitting it.” Fair says she counts law-enforcement members in her own family but believes po- lice officers must be held accountable when they do wrong. She has more recently moved away from the house next door to Jeff and Mia, and she’s still performing each weekend at the Wreck Bar with Anderson, Smiley, and the other aquatic dancers. She worries about how her ex-neighbors will react, now that they’ve learned of the lawsuit. “I’ve told people that if anything happens to me, then it was definitely them,” Fair says. “Who knows how she’s going to retaliate? Who knows what’s going to be online next? There’s no accountability. “For a long time, I just wanted them to leave me alone. Now I want justice.” Bob Norman serves as editor-in-chief for FLCGA News, a publication focusing on investigative reporting produced by the nonprofit Florida Center for Government Accountability. This story was reported in partnership with the FLCGA. [email protected] 9 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | NEW TIMES APRIL 21-27, 2022
