This story was originally published on 11 October and was updated on 8 November after Trisha Denise Meyer surrendered to authorities.
Move over, Joe Exotic, and make way for Mimi Erotic – the fugitive, false-eyelashed, lip-plumped blonde animal dealer who’s been weaving a path of destruction through man and beast alike for well over a decade.
Her real name – and she goes by many aliases – is Trisha Denise Meyer, and she’s currently on the run from the law after being charged with four counts in relation to the illegal transportation and sale of a jaguar.
That jaguar, named Amador by Meyer but renamed Hades by one of its subsequent shady owners, is currently resting happily at an animal sanctuary in southern California. But Amador has fared far better than many of the exotic animals in Meyer’s care – and better than many of the humans she’s had dealings with, it seems.
The 40-year-old mother, wherever she is, has been raising, advertising and selling animals for years across various states from Texas to California to Colorado. She uses different names; some know her as Emily, some Mimi, some Trissa, some Trisha. On Instagram, she utilised two known accounts: @mimisexoticworld and @mimiseroticworld.
The latter, which is still active, features racy images and videos of Meyer in animal-print barely-there lingerie – and links to a now-defunct account on OnlyFans, a site where subscribers pay for content that is often erotic. Meyer makes clear on her Instagram account that that is exactly the type of content featured on her OnlyFans, which she started last year.
But her apparent history of animal mistreatment and con-artistry dates back far longer.
It was in 2010, in fact, that one unfortunate Texas landlord found himself dealing with Meyer’s chaos – and nearly losing his house.
The now-52-year-old man, who asked to be identified only by his initials AP due to his federal job, had only recently gotten divorced when his path crossed that of Meyer, who was a single mother in her 20s at the time.
He allowed her to move into his rental home with her young children and what she described as “a couple of dogs”.
“And then four months goes by, she has never paid me one dollar in rent,” he tells The Independent. “And I say, ‘Hey, listen, you’re either going to get out, or I’m going to legally evict you, and that’s going to be that.’”
Meyer reacted, he says, by packing up not only her things but his – stealing what he describes as up to $30,000 worth of tools from a storage unit on the property. He claims she destroyed personal items of his, such as baby photograph books, and even tried to burn down the property as she left in a U-Haul with her stash.
The number of dogs in the house, he says, had ballooned to a shocking 104.
“How in the hell do you have 104 dogs all in my living room?” he asks, relating an unbelievable story of his friend’s response to the site when he accompanied AP to survey it.
The friend “came over to look at the property and the damage and he goes, ‘Hey, man, that is the strangest-looking coffee table I’ve ever seen in my life,’” AP says. “And I said, ‘That’s not a coffee table. That’s dog****.’
“Disgusting isn’t even close to how bad it was,” he tells The Independent.
AP says he’s been contacted over the years by other landlords or people dealing with Meyer – and always tries to warn them off.
But it’s clear that, after she left his property, her behaviour towards humans and animals escalated.
An online complaints board is filled with people outlining disastrous dealings with Meyer across multiple states. In 2016, internet users really went after her, charting where she’d allegedly moved in Texas and writing about transactions-gone-bad across the Lone Star state and as far away as Colorado – where one woman wrote in June 2016 that she had “just purchased a dog Saturday and it’s not what was advertised and she is fighting for her life.”
Meyer was going by the name of Trissa, the poster wrote.
The following month, another person wrote on complaintsboard.com that Meyer, using the name of Emily, had agreed to sell the poster an exotic cat.
“Had no paperwork once I drove 10 hours,” the author wrote. “And wasn’t going to refund my deposit so I just bought the cat. All was well I just got over it cat is find (sic) but is a boy when I requested female. Paid 1800.”
Meyer, it seems, was travelling around arranging these four- to five-figure transactions, whether it be allegedly selling kinkajous out of Texas or – it would turn out – raising even larger, deadlier animals in her residence.
Because it was in autumn 2016 that Meyer was found to have tigers, a skunk, a fox and several monkeys wandering through her Houston home – where she also homeschooled her minor children.
Officers had arrived to investigate claims that Meyer had scammed a California man trying to buy an exotic Savannah kitten; he wired $3,000 to an account in her daughter’s name, but the cat never materialised.
So a Texas game warden and officer with the Houston Police Department visited the Meyer residence to question her – only to find a menagerie roaming free that included a large male tiger, which Meyer admitted she only locked up when leaving the house.
Facing charges, Meyer fled to Las Vegas, then about an hour west to Pahrump in Nye County, Nevada – where she was eventually located and her tigers confiscated, according to Chron.com.
Meyer was initially charged with child endangerment, but the count was dropped, and in 2017 pleaded guilty to a theft charge with two years deferred adjudication, according to KSAT.
"It’s been a nightmare for my kids and I because I’ve been portrayed in the media as having had a mountain lion in the house, tigers in the house, foxes, skunks all loose together, which has never happened,” Meyer told reporters after entering her plea. "It’s just been a nightmare trying to prove my innocence.”
She was booted out of the Houston rental property in question, with the landlord telling the Houston Chronicle she’d destroyed the place almost instantly – much like she’d treated AP’s home years before.
“I don’t know how someone can put that much damage in three weeks,” the Houston landlord said.
And while Meyer protested her “innocence,” there are a string of other online victims who would beg to differ. After her plea in 2017, it appears she got right up to her old tricks again.
One social media user, Randall Spring, posted online about buying a monkey from Meyer for $6,500 – only for it to die two hours into the drive home, with Meyer advising him to throw the poor animal’s body in a dumpster.
Another, using the name Adrian Rodriguez1212, posted on complaintsboard.com that he’d purchased a wolf from Meyer in June 2020.
He wrote: “4 days later, the pup died. It took me hiring a private investigator to get to this page.”
Two months after that, another user posted on the same complaints forum that she and her boyfriend had flown to Houston to purchase a bengal cat from Meyer, whose Instagram page she’d found “through a celebrity hairstylists page she sold two monkeys to.”
When Meyer arrived, “the cat was in a blacked out bag and she wasn’t letting me hold or touch him,” the user, going by the name Mina Blair, wrote. She handed over $6,500 in cash to Meyer, who then left.
“The cat started growling and not sounding like a cat at all,” the user wrote. “He was so violent inside the bag, I told my boyfriend just set him down in the room and let him relax.
“After about 30 minutes, I told my boyfriend he cant be in there all night he needs to bond with us. Open up a can of the chicken she gave us she said he eats, and unzip the blacked out carrier and let him come out on his own.
“Ten minutes later he was out and about and being very weird. He looked/walked like a wild animal and not the way she described in person at all. So, being curious as to what we have on our hands, my boyfriend who’s owned exotic pets since childhood did some research.
“While he googled, I went digging through her Instagram for the first time that day. She posted the animal stating it was from a zoo and a geoffrey leopard. We had a full grown leopard in our hotel room.”
The user said the leopard attacked her so she hid in the bathroom; it took up to an hour for her boyfriend to wrangle the cat back into the bag as he sustained “a lot of bites and scratches.”
Meyer took the animal back but said she’d already spent the money, according to poster Blair, promising to provide a substitute animal – then blocked her.
It’s impossible to know just how many people Meyer may have scammed given her changing names, states and appearances – and particularly because many of her “victims” may be looking for illegal deals themselves.
By March 2021, she diversified to other sources of income, if her Instagram is to be believed; that’s where she announced she’d started her OnlyFans account.
The following month, she embarked upon a transaction that would ultimately make her a fugitive today.
She agreed to sell a jaguar cub for $30,000 to a man named Abdul Rahman in California, transporting the endangered animal from Texas to the Golden State for an additional fee, according to court documents. He’d become interested in buying the jaguar after taking pictures with it in a hotel room in Austin during a car show.
“Rahman did not know how to take care of the jaguar and ... quickly became dissatisfied and wanted to get rid of the jaguar by selling it to someone else but was concerned that he would lose money in the transaction,” according to affidavits.
He did sell the growing cub on, though – at a loss – but that man’s live-in girlfriend was pregnant, and they became concerned (unsurprisingly) at having a jaguar in the house with a newborn.
A friend eventually convinced the new owners to let him drop the animal off at a sanctuary called Lions, Tigers and Bears, where the jaguar was left in a cage after hours.
Investigators, through the jaguar’s markings, social media and good, old-fashioned legwork, eventually traced the abandoned animal to Meyer.
The Houston woman was charged last week with interstate transportation of an endangered species in the course of commercial activity, interstate sale of an endangered species, trafficking prohibited wildlife species, and trafficking endangered species.
Rahman was charged with interstate transportation of an endangered species in the course of commercial activity, trafficking prohibited wildlife species, and trafficking endangered species.
The charges stem from violations of the Endangered Species Act, under which jaguars are protected, and the Lacey Act, which prohibits wildlife trafficking, according to the Department of Justice.
Now authorities can’t find Meyer.
Her original OnlyFans is gone, as is her @mimisexoticworld Instagram account. The last post on the other, @mimiseroticworld – which remains active – was made in April 2021, featuring near-nude pictures and a video clip of her backside and urging people to visit her OnlyFans with the hashtag #zookeeper.
The Department of Justice on Tuesday confirmed to The Independent that Meyer remained a fugitive.
Her old landlord from 2010 in Texas, meanwhile, has been charting Meyer’s misdeeds this entire time – and thinks her comeuppance is on its way.
“The position that she has put herself in is ultimately not going to be good for her,” AP tells The Independent, adding that he’s “actually extremely happy” about the new charges.
“I knew it would just be a matter of time before she sinks her own battleship – and that’s exactly where she’s at.”
