Let’s pretend there are only two types of people in this world; those who go swim and those who walk through the fire. The swimmers cut through life as if slicing cleanly through the waves; treading and diving and barely making it through shallow waters to find themselves ashore. They take deep breaths. They are soothed by their surroundings, no matter how choppy it gets. But the firewalkers have to navigate cautiously lest they get burned; taking a while to find the right footing, often failing the first few times. Firewalkers have to either adapt or suffocate as they stride forward. The fire threatens to strip them bare to the bones. And sometimes it does. But the places that get burned, get harder and stronger. They learn to not rush, but they learn it slowly. And when they reach the end, they’re often amazed, as they stand with the swimmers, that the water and fire were running alongside each other the whole time.
Jaimee Foxworth is a former firewalker who’s decided to learn how to swim.
She had to do her walking differently than most of us. Her fire was lit in front of the entire world, whereas our wobbly steps or strokes have been private showings. But now, her audience gets to see a new woman emerge. If I were overdramatic, I might even call her a phoenix. It’s still not a bad description.
This isn’t a sob story of redemption. We’re not going to delve into the things you may think you know about her, but she is going to talk about it. She’s had to be brutally honest in recent years, to herself and to the public. She’s earned her truth and, in the process, has fallen back in love with God. So this is her story.
The facts: she was Judy Winslow, the sister who went upstairs and never came back down after four seasons on the hit ‘90’s sitcom, Family Matters. She sings with her sisters in the group S.H.E., briefly signed with T.W.is.M Records (Shaq’s just as briefly owned label) in 1997. She’s been on Oprah and on Celebrity Rehab. She gave birth to her first child earlier this year. She currently has a book and a reality show in the works. And, okay, then there’s the porn thing. It is, unfortunately, unavoidable.
We’re not starting with that.
There are time zones between us, so when I speak to her, half of my day is gone while hers is just beginning. Her son makes little noises in the background. On my first attempt at reaching Foxworth, her agent let me know that she was grocery shopping. It’s just a normal kind of day.
First things first
Even though acting wasn’t an original desire of Jaimee’s, she’d missed it during her absence from it. “My oldest sister wanted to be an actor…she always wanted to be on TV. To this day I’m shy, but I was extremely shy when I was a child. I didn’t want to get into acting, but after I hit the set and started doing commercials, I noticed that that was where I was most comfortable. Gradually, I learned to love it more and more.”
After several commercials and small parts on Amen and TV 101, she landed her role on Family Matters. After the rise of Steve Urkel’s popularity, she was written off the show due to budget constraints. Okay, “written off” sounds like a nice thing. The character went upstairs and never came back. And they never gave her warning. “For a couple of months, my mom didn’t tell me. She didn’t know how to tell me. I was thinking that I was going to go back onto the set. I wasn’t used to being in a normal school. So I saw myself going into another semester at school, and I was like ‘this is new to me, I just want to know when I’m going back to work’. So she had to sit down and tell me it that wasn’t going to happen.”
By the time she left the show, Jaimee was 14. She dropped off the radar for a little while before reappearing in a vocal group with her sisters called S.H.E. They signed to Shaq’s label T.W.Is.M (under Trauma Records, which was then under Interscope) and did a few performances, sang the National Anthem at Lakers home games, and released one CD, 3’s a Charm. Once T.W.Is.M. dissolved, she tried to jump back into acting, but, she says, “Things weren’t really coming in because…I’ve always looked younger than my age, so everything they were trying to give me wasn’t really a fit for me.”
In the meantime, Jaimee had pushed her way through adolescence. She admits she began smoking weed at age 16, two years after she left Family Matters. Once the singing group disbanded, the occasional smoke got a little more frequent. At 18, she was still living with her mother and, while she was trying to find work acting, “bills were piling up and I was really uncomfortable being home, I was just rebelling, just wanted to get away because my household was a very strict [one]. So I moved away, started…hanging out with the wrong people…”
At this point in most of her bios, they’ll claim that her family declared bankruptcy and absorbed the monies from her stint with Family Matters by a judge’s decision. This isn’t true. “It’s funny, because I don’t know where they got that. I think [that came] from the National Enquirer. But we never filed for bankruptcy. We were almost to the point where we were just completely flat broke, but we never filed for bankruptcy.”
And then
Here’s where it gets interesting because happy stories aren’t good tabloid fodder, and we all know what we read when we’re in line at the supermarket. But guess what? Jaimee’s already talked about this in better venues. Oprah’s got the scoop. 20/20 did a profile on this. (And if you don’t know what “this” is referring to, God bless you.)
But we did talk about it. Her appearance in adult films unfortunately garnered more attention, in whispers and headlines, than in her acting days. Even still, it’s popping up on the internet as if it’s something new. Foxworth maintains that it was a wrong decision made by a young woman who was trying to make ends meet.
“From the beginning,” she says, “I didn’t want to do it. But I kind of masked my feelings. My main goal was: you’ve just got to get money. And if you get money, you’re going to get as much, if not more than, what you were making before. And at the time, to me, it just seemed like for an hour of doing this, and it would bring me this much money, it can’t be…” She trails off for a moment. “I just didn’t expect it to blow up like it did. I really thought that I would have a couple years in hiding.”
“I grew up in a Christian household, and if you’re a Christian, you can feel the negativity and you can feel the darkness of it…I didn’t like who I was becoming. I felt very degraded. I didn’t feel like myself.”
Even in the dark, she felt the call of God. But she chose not to listen. “God, He was always in the background for me. It was me not trying to hear Him. I wasn’t reaching for Him anymore, I wasn’t trying…I knew what was right and what was wrong. I just chose to play it off as if I didn’t know. I didn’t want to hear the warnings that He was giving me. I didn’t want to listen to that, because I was like, ‘this is something that I’m gonna do, and I’m gonna be a grown woman’.”
When she covered her ears to that voice that cried out, Jaimee turned all the way around to alcohol, in addition to marijuana, in order to “feel okay”. And the adult film industry coddled her want to forget, putting drinks and drugs out there next to the bagels and fruit at craft services.
But even after she managed to free herself from the money and the lifestyle, she didn’t stop. She instead began to drink more. “I was really never a drinker, but I started drinking [as much as I] was smoking. I wanted to feel okay. I didn’t want to think about what I had done and how people were going to react to it. I didn’t want to think about anything, any of that.”
In 2008, Jaimee showed up on the first season of Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew on VH1 in order to deal with her addiction to marijuana. On viewing, Jaimee managed to keep a fairly low-profile, not that it was much of a choice, given her cast mates. She did break down and talk about her relationship with her father, who also had dealt with alcohol abuse. Jaimee had managed to rid her life of drinking, but she’d been smoking since her late teens and didn’t know how to stop. Nor did she initially want to.
“The couple of days before I left rehab, I was extremely agitated because the center had turned into a set. I was just thinking, ‘okay, now it’s a set, I’m going to walk off the set and I’m gonna go back into the real world and I’m gonna want to smoke again’, which I did. But if I [hadn’t gone] to rehab, then I wouldn’t have known how many problems I had in my life, and I wouldn’t have learned about myself, and the reasons why I used…I learned that it all stemmed from my childhood and that I did have an addiction. And marijuana can be an addiction.”
It didn’t take long for her to quit when she left the show. “I was hiding it after I got out of rehab because I didn’t want people to see that I [had been in] rehab and being, like, ‘obviously she’s smoking again, well, that didn’t work for her’. I wanted to show people that I can be okay…and to me it was dirty. I thought I was getting to be a little too old to be smoking weed like a little girl. It wasn’t cute anymore.”
Letting go and letting God
In the background, as we’ve been talking, Jaimee’s son coos and cries. She takes a moment to apologize for rambling (although she’s not), because she’s paying more attention to him than to what she’s been saying. She begins to open up and talk about her son and God.
She didn’t exactly walk out of rehab and directly into a church. But when she was low, she remembered when she was high in a different way. “When I was younger till when I was about 18, I used to be in the choir. We used to go to church four to five days out of the week! I noticed that, through the years, those were my happiest years. That’s because I was with God. I was praying. I was…around people that loved the Lord as much as I did, and once I strayed from that, that’s when the downfall came…when I chose to not listen to what He was telling me. I got back into church and it made me feel totally better. It made me feel like didn’t have to answer to anyone…He’s the only one that I should be worried about.”
Throughout our conversation, she mentions words like “choice” and “choosing”. In fact, she’s written an essay for the book Souls of My Young Sisters about the power of choice. Many people who’ve made bad choices, who’ve steered down dark hallways, like to place blame; it’s society’s fault, it’s pressures, it’s this thing or that thing. Jaimee knows her truth, and she admits it, and she owns it. “Whatever you choose to do, you have the power over it. Meaning that I had the power to say no to drugs, I had the power to say no to adult films. But something in me, something was holding me back from feeling that I could take control of that whole situation…You can have the power over your decisions.”
And one of her greatest choices lets out a small cry. And she laughs.
“I thought motherhood was gonna be something…I thought I was going to be extremely stressed out. Of course I was scared, a lot of new mothers are scared, but I learned that I have a lot of maternal instinct.”
Her son was born in May of this year. She had left much of her old life behind before she became pregnant, but the knowledge of him, the gift that God gave to her after everything that had hit so hard, cemented her new ways. Jaimee has had difficult relationships with men in the past, but this little man isn’t going to be an issue for her. “I’m really grateful I had a boy, because I can teach him how to…treat a woman in this day and age. Not [just] traditionally…but teaching him how to treat a girl…that kind of went down the same path, or is going down the same path, that I did.”
Now she and her son attend church together, but his lessons in the Lord don’t begin and end there.
“I want him to know the Lord and have a relationship with Him. It’s great to go to church and to get the Scriptures, but to have your own relationship with God means so much…He will talk to you and you’ll be able to listen. [My son will learn] things that he can actually take through life, that will make him a different man. I want him to be spiritual, not ‘religious’. I want him to take God with him wherever he goes.”
A new chapter
Nowadays, Jaimee is a busy woman. On top of wrangling motherhood, she recently began shooting a reality show, following her as she’s writing a new chapter in her life, a new chapter with new rules, and that too she touts as a personal triumph. After so many years being dependent on drugs or on other people, she’s finding that she must depend on herself as this next chapter in her life begins. “Me being dependent on my mother as far as my career, I always thought that…if she was around, she would always take care of me financially. Now I’m breaking off from that, I’m living my own life. I have my child now.”
She’s also literally writing a new chapter, recently clearing a book deal. The autobiography, entitled Lesson Learned, will go more in depth than any interview can and covers everything; the dark and the light. Hopefully, she says, by opening a window into her life, she can “change someone’s life in the process”.
Acting hasn’t appeared on her radar yet, although that step might be hesitant from having been burned in the past. She still has hope that there’s a part out there, waiting for her. “I accept that [some networks are hesitant], because I’m a grown woman. I did what I did and now I have to live with the consequences. I do believe that, how this world is now, that sooner or later somebody…is going to see past that. And they are going to cast me for something that might change my career all over again.”
Either way, she’s still got her hands full now. And on top of that, between her son, her show, and her book, she’s interested in jumping back into music. Not singing this time, though. “I don’t showcase my singing, but if my sisters wanted to do something and if they really needed me to back them up, I would do that…But as far as me just going out there singing, no. But I do have a passion for hip-hop and rapping. I want to do that very near in the future. But we’ll see…”
She does have a few words that she wants to share with young actresses. A warning, perhaps. “Just make sure you study your craft. Don’t do it to get fame. Don’t do it to get the big checks…When I was growing up, it was all about being an actress and knowing how to take direction, the professional side of it. Nowadays…women will get hired off of their looks. Looks only go so far…don’t be fooled by the Hollywood you see on TV. Just study…and if that’s something you know that God has called upon you, then go through with it. Otherwise, be happy with what you’re doing, wherever you are.”
So there she is: Jaimee Foxworth. Unwilling to let the gossip mill run idly, she has been willing to face the public head on and unafraid. Maybe I was wrong, slipping that clichéd phoenix metaphor in earlier. Mythical creature, she isn’t. She’s human, just like the rest of us. And she’s a grown woman – her own woman – and she’s learning how to swim. |
