From sexual abuse survivor to Oscar winner to Hollywood outcast: Mo'Nique's unflinching journey

Monique Angela Hicks, known by her stage moniker Mo'Nique, grew up as the youngest of four siblings in Woodlands, Baltimore, on the East Coast of the US. She was the daughter of Alice Imes, an engineer, and Steven Imes Jr, a counsellor. From the ages of seven to eleven, Mo'Nique was sexually abused by her brother Gerald, who was later sentenced to 12 years in prison for defiling a different girl.

From childhood, Mo'Nique developed a valiant commitment to speaking the truth and an outspoken, brutally honest, searing conviction to stand for what was right. In the 11th grade, she was violently assaulted by her female classmates after she revealed to one of their boyfriends that the child his girlfriend was expecting wasn't his.

When Mo'Nique was growing up in Baltimore, she admired a young, eloquently knowledgeable, plump Black TV reporter named Oprah Winfrey. Oprah was then a presenter of a local Baltimore television show called People are Talking, for WJZ-TV between 1978 and 1988.

Mo'Nique was greatly inspired by watching a fluently articulate, full-figured Black woman—a rarity on American television stations, which constantly glamorised skinny blonde white women as the ideal of beauty.

Portly Black women received little attention. In her quest for fame, the imposing image of Oprah provided an extra element of motivation for Mo'Nique and inspired her painstaking ascension to stardom.

She first earned recognition as a stand-up comedian, leading to her breakthrough role three months after arriving in Los Angeles, California, on 30 August 1999, as Nikki Parker in the sitcom Parkers.

The show opened doors to a plethora of opportunities. She was subsequently contracted for a nationwide touring stand-up comedy show called Queens of Comedy in 2001, accelerating her performances in legendary New York City comedy venues Show Timeat the Apollo and Def Comedy Jam. The exposure reinforced her commitment to excellence, which elevated her appearance in the films Phat Girls and Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins in 2006 and 2008 respectively.

Also read: Did the Oscars snub women? Decades-old debate rages on

On October 5, 2009, her late-night, Atlanta-taped talk show, The Mo'Nique Show, debuted on Black Entertainment Television (BET). In the same year, she signed a contract with Hollywood producer Lee Daniels. She began filming Precious, the film bankrolled by Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey, where she portrayed a cruel mother to her sexually abused daughter, who was played by Gabourey Sidibe.

She received 17 different awards for that role, including an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, becoming only the fourth Black woman ever to win an Oscar and earning the validation of the mainstream movie audience.

When Mo'Nique received her first massive cheque as an actress whilst filming Parkers in 1999, she relished the respite and was grateful until she discovered that other actresses were being paid significantly more than she was. Her intuition and scrutiny led her to discover how other, favourably skinnier women with lesser talent were being treated, and she was outrageously appalled. She openly voiced her protestations against it, creating a myriad of adversaries within Hollywood.

She bore the brunt of how overweight Black women were undervalued, disrespected, exploited, mistreated, underserved, and violated in the film industry. The implicit message she perceived was that she was a fat Black woman who should simply be grateful for her meagre earnings and a few murky movie roles.

After the filming of mainstream movies, actors and actresses are expected to make premiere and promotional appearances in prominent cities and events organised by studio executives to promote each film. Mo'Nique had earned a measly $50,000 for her role in Precious, and when Tyler Perry approached her for a promotional tour, she rejected the offer due to the lack of additional compensation.

Following her rejection of Perry's offer, false rumours reverberated around the industry that Mo'Nique was peevish, obstinate, and excruciatingly difficult to work with. She started losing roles over the lies that were circulating about her, and to her dismay, Oprah—who Mo'Nique had confided in about her traumatic childhood abuse—hosted her brother Gerald, who had molested her, on her daily talk show on November 6, 2009.

After she won an Oscar for Precious in February 2010, Mo'Nique was offered another leading actress role for the hit movie The Butler, but upon hearing about it, Oprah demanded it and was eventually awarded the role. Consequently, Lee Daniels offered Mo'Nique another lucrative role to star as Richard Pryor's grandmother in the iconic comedian's biopic, but Oprah used her Hollywood seniority and financial influence to convince the producers to grant her the role instead.

Also read: Bias against dark-skinned black actresses in Hollywood

Mo'Nique was subsequently offered a multimillion-dollar contract to star as the leading character Cookie Lyon in the Fox Network series Empire. Unfortunately, the producers ended up dropping her due to the whirlwind of concocted false rumours that she was difficult to work with and awarded her role to Taraji P Henson.

She ended up losing a total of ten million dollars' worth of film and TV roles, and consequently had a tumultuous meeting with Tyler to address his complicity in inaccurately labelling her difficult to work with. For legal purposes, she recorded an audio admission of Tyler taking accountability for ruining, barring, and ostracising her career and eventually blackballing her.

Skinny Women are Evil: Notes of a Big Girl in a Small Minded World is a forthright, candid, and frank memoir about how outrageously the public treats overweight Black women and how the derogatory discrimination permeates the corridors of Hollywood studios.

Jeff Anthony is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre @jeffbigbrother