Confessionsn of THE HOT FELON

When Jeremy Meeks was arrested in 2014, police released his mugshot... and it went viral. Signed up by a modelling agency, he was thrust into a world of superyachts and the super-rich. He talks to Helena de Bertodano about a life you couldn’t make up

Jeremy Meeks – better known across the internet as “hot felon” – was already notorious as a convict, internet meme and catwalk model. When his blue-eyed, pouting police mugshot – replete with tattooed teardrop, scar, and five o’clock shadow – went viral and he was signed up by an agent while still in prison, he seemed to epitomise a new level of madness in our celebrity culture: not just famous for doing nothing, à la Kim Kardashian, but for looking really good while doing something very bad.

As it turned out, there was another chapter to come. Three years after being arrested on weapons charges, he met Chloe Green, the daughter of the disgraced British Topshop tycoon Philip Green, in (where else?) Cannes. It wasn’t long before Chloe, a former star of posh reality show Made In Chelsea, was pregnant. Here was the story that just kept on giving. For months the tabloids followed the ultimate dysfunctional super-rich family around the Mediterranean – the Topshop billionaire now beleaguered by stories of sexual harassment, his pregnant, bikini-clad daughter and Meeks, the ex-con and son of a convicted murderer who had spectacularly landed on his feet. Superyachts! Tattoos! Babies! Billions!