Jasmine King | More Than What You See

Behind the image of Slim Gawd is Jasmine, a self-described lover girl whose story of survival, reinvention, trust and creativity reveals just how much gets lost when we mistake being seen for being known.

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When we spoke recently, Jasmine had been spending her days watching old-school romance movies from the ’90s. And I’ll be honest, I didn’t find that surprising. If you’ve been following the Slim Gawd for even a few months, you can probably tell she’s a hopeless romantic. I mean that with all due respect.

I don’t think that’s a bad tag to have, especially in this day and age. Dating isn’t easy, and I can imagine that for someone like her, who’s successful, possesses beauty, brains, substance and sex appeal, finding something genuine comes with its own complications.

Now, you might ask, how did I come to that conclusion?

It only takes a few scrolls through her Instagram before you start noticing a pattern. In one reel, her caption criticizes relationships while a video flickers through a couple’s text threads. The word “lies.” overlays the video.

In another, she asks, “What will happen if I fell in love with the right person?” before Kanye West’s infamous Grammy speech supplies the punchline. “I guess we’ll never know.”

There’s a contradiction there that I find interesting. Jasmine talks about love like someone who still believes deeply in it, even while acknowledging all the reasons she probably shouldn’t.

She describes herself as a “lover girl,” and the movies she gravitates toward make the designation even more fitting. Love Jones. Poetic Justice. Jason’s Lyric. Love & Basketball. Brown Sugar.

Even newer additions like The Photograph and Queen & Slim. Interestingly enough, Fifty Shades of Grey makes her list too.

Romance, intimacy and the complicated dynamics between two people seem to fascinate her, whether she’s watching them, writing about them or experiencing them herself.

But she isn’t approaching relationships entirely from fantasy. There’s experience behind some of her perspective, and there’s pain too.

Jasmine is a survivor of sexual abuse. She tells me she was eight years old when a man who was supposed to be a father to her violated that trust.

For years, she carried what happened privately. Eventually, through therapy and the difficult work of confronting what happened to her, silence stopped being the only way she knew how to protect herself.

Her mother believed her immediately. “My mom did the best she could. I can never say anything negative about my mom. My mom was the greatest person growing up. When I told her about what happened to me, she was there for me and she believed me right away.”

Earlier this year, Jasmine publicly identified the man she says abused her. She’d seen other survivors on Facebook sharing the identities of their alleged abusers, and something about seeing those stories gave her the courage to tell her own.

She had no idea how far the post would travel. It spread across Facebook and Instagram, and soon Jasmine was hearing from people who knew the man, people who had never imagined him capable of what she described and, perhaps most importantly, other survivors.

“I got emotional,” she tells me. “It was so many people that cared.”

Some began sharing their own experiences with her. Reading them wasn’t always easy, but Jasmine listened. What began as one woman deciding she was finally ready to speak became a point of connection with other people who had spent years carrying stories of their own.

“The step of healing from something like that is literally just talking about it,” she says.

We don’t get too far into the weeds. Some things belong to Jasmine, not to an interview, and I don’t need every painful detail to understand the significance of her willingness to speak publicly.

What interests me more is what she’s chosen to do with that voice now. She talks about what happened. She advocates for survivors. She comments on public conversations surrounding abuse and relationships from a perspective informed by something deeper than whatever happens to be trending that day. And that’s only one corner of her page.

Keep scrolling and another theme becomes impossible to miss. Jasmine is unapologetically Black. She embraces her dark skin, the “chocolate doll” description and the history attached to it without making herself smaller for anyone else’s comfort. There’s an obvious pride in Black culture and Black history throughout what she shares.

Then there’s the Jasmine who just likes being outside. She travels, visits amusement parks and state parks, and seems genuinely drawn to places where she can get away from everything for a while. Her page can move from a funny voice-over to a monologue about dating, then into commentary on whatever conversation has taken over social media that week, before suddenly giving you a meticulously shot fashion editorial; her visuals are hard to ignore.

Jasmine has modeled everything from urban fashion and denim to swimwear, lingerie and outerwear. She’s appeared in more than 20 print and digital publications, including Shoutout Atlanta, CanvasRebel, 6XMagazine, VoyageATL, Le Désir and Vionne Magazine. It’s an impressive body of work for someone who only relocated to Atlanta a couple of years ago, particularly when you learn that modeling wasn’t some childhood dream she’d been chasing her entire life.

Acting followed. Jasmine has worked on productions connected to Tyler Perry Studios, taken background roles on projects including Beauty in Black and Straw, appeared as a background actor on P-Valley, and landed a speaking role playing a bartender in a Tubi production.

She’s still building that part of her career, but there’s something fitting about acting becoming another extension of a woman who seems increasingly comfortable allowing herself to be seen.

The more we talk, though, the less interested I become in the résumé. There’s something else about Jasmine that’s harder to quantify. She’s tapped in. Genuine and remarkably self-aware. She seems to enjoy life and make the most of it, but there’s also an empathy to her that feels almost deliberate.

She pays attention to people. She seems capable of holding the good and bad in someone at the same time without immediately reducing them to either one. Not quick to judge; she’s willing to listen to both sides of a story.

Maybe that comes from experience. Maybe I’m reading too deeply into her. Either way, it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile the woman I’m getting to know with whatever assumptions someone might make from a few photographs/videos on Instagram. Which, as it turns out, is exactly her point.

Javan: Tell me something people get wrong about you when they’re only going off your Instagram.

Jasmine: That I’m mean or I’m stuck up. When you actually get to have a conversation with me and talk to me, I’m probably the sweetest, most down-to-earth, outgoing girl you would ever get to know.

I don’t really let a lot of people in, so people get the perspective that I’m not that bubbly, friendly girl, but I really am. It just takes a lot to bring that out. I have to really, I would say, trust you to see that side of me.

Trust. That word will come up again.

Jasmine grew up in Miami with two brothers and lived in Florida for most of her life. Eventually, she reached a point where leaving felt necessary. She’d also been in a relationship for seven years, something she doesn’t particularly want to discuss, and I don’t press her about it.

“I just wanted to move to another state where I could start fresh,” she says.

Georgia became that fresh start. Somewhat unexpectedly, it also became the place where the shy tomboy from Miami began turning into a model.

Javan: When you were younger, what did you actually see yourself becoming? Was modeling something you always wanted to do?

Jasmine: I mean, growing up, I was literally a tomboy. I really had no desire to want to model, but everybody always told me that I looked like I could be a model. Don’t get me wrong, I did want to model at some point, but I just had to break out of my shell because I’m really shy and quiet in real life.

When people would see my pictures and tell me that I should model, I kind of took that advice and just started getting into it. Ever since I’ve done modeling, it’s kind of built up my confidence because I had a little bit of low self-esteem.

The irony isn’t lost on me. Today, much of Jasmine’s public identity is built around being seen, yet she remembers growing up feeling like the “ugly duckling.” Modeling forced her to reconsider the image she had of herself. The attention that came with it, however, introduced another problem.

Javan: What do you think has been the hardest part of building your career in this industry as a woman, whether that’s modeling, content creation, acting, all three?

Jasmine: Honestly, working with certain men. I have big trust issues when it comes to working with men in the industry because of how I look. I never know if there are men that really want to work with me or they want to sleep with me.

Growing up, I never really had that type of attention from guys. I grew up like the ugly duckling. So I guess you could say, to blossom into my looks and get the attention that I get now, that’s been hard with the industry.

There’s something complicated in that transformation. Attention can affirm you, but it can also make you suspicious. The same appearance that helped Jasmine find confidence can make professional relationships harder to decipher. Is someone interested in the work, or interested in her? Is an opportunity actually an opportunity?

Still, when I ask what advice she would give the younger version of herself, or another young woman struggling with the kind of self-esteem she once had, her answer is simple. Don’t allow the negative things people say about you to become the things you believe about yourself. Don’t let somebody else decide what you’re capable of doing.

At some point in our conversation, I ask Jasmine what keeps her grounded. I’m expecting something conventional. Maybe affirmations, music, working out, traveling. She hesitates, so I start throwing examples at her, and somewhere in there I mention journaling.

“I do write,” she tells me. “Because I am also a poet.”

Now, that catches my attention. For everything Jasmine puts online, writing is one of the things she’s kept remarkably close to herself. She’s been writing poetry for most of her life, long before modeling or acting entered the picture, but she rarely shares it publicly. She journals. She writes poems. She writes stories. There’s an entire creative life happening behind the photographs that you could follow her for months and never know existed.

Javan: How long have you been writing?

Jasmine: I’ve been writing poetry all my life.

This revelation makes something from earlier in our conversation click into place. Jasmine had already called herself a lover girl. She’d told me about the romance movies she loves and the imaginary “loverland” she occupies in her head. Apparently, that world doesn’t end when the movie does. She creates her own.

She tells me she writes on Substack, although she hasn’t been as active there lately. Some of what she writes deals with confidence. A lot of it, unsurprisingly, deals with love.

“Because I’m such a lover girl and I live in loverland or la la land in my head,” she tells me, “I write a lot of love stories.”

I laugh because, of course she does. After our conversation, Jasmine sends me one of them. The piece centers on a woman who is willing to surrender control to a man, but only because he has created the kind of relationship in which surrender feels safe. “She wasn’t submissive to everybody,” Jasmine writes, “only to the man who earned it.”

That becomes the foundation of the entire piece. It isn’t submission imagined as obedience. Jasmine writes it as reciprocity. Her woman softens because she trusts him, but the man is also allowed to soften when he needs her. They alternate between strength and vulnerability without either one becoming permanently responsible for carrying the other.

One line immediately stands out to me. Their connection, Jasmine writes, “lived in the space between a whisper and a touch.”

Then there’s another.

“The words alone could pull the air from the room.”

I told her afterward that the second line stuck with me because of its rhythm. Read aloud, there’s something naturally musical about it. Jasmine writes poetry, so perhaps that shouldn’t have surprised me.

Even in prose, she has an ear for the way a sentence sounds, not merely what it says. The story itself sits somewhere between conventional prose and prose poetry. It’s succinct and rhythmic, moving through images and emotions without becoming overly concerned with traditional narrative machinery.

But what interests me even more is what she chooses to write about. I’m careful here not to confuse a writer with her characters. Fiction isn’t confession, and Jasmine never tells me that this woman is supposed to be her.

Still, the preoccupations of the story are difficult not to notice after our conversation. Safety. Trust. Certainty. Vulnerability. The ability to be soft without being powerless. The ability to surrender without disappearing.

At one point, the man simply tells the woman, “I got you,” and she believes him. Jasmine writes that this is what makes her fold. Not pressure, or demands. Certainty.

“And God, she loved certainty.”

That line sends me back to the woman I’ve been getting to know. Jasmine has already told me that trust doesn’t come easily to her. She’s spoken about surviving abuse. She’s talked about trying to distinguish between men who genuinely want to work with her and men who are simply attracted to her. She’s described herself as someone who doesn’t immediately let people in.

Yet the stories she gravitates toward aren’t cynical. Quite the opposite. She imagines relationships in which vulnerability is possible precisely because trust has been established first.

That doesn’t make her fiction autobiographical. It does, however, make “lover girl” feel like something more substantial than a cute description.

There’s a romantic idealism in Jasmine that has survived alongside everything that could have extinguished it. She can criticize dating, joke about never finding the right person and post about relationships with the skepticism of someone who knows better, then turn around and write about two people creating a private world where each feels safe enough to put their defenses down. Maybe that’s the contradiction I noticed when I first scrolled through her page. Or maybe it was never a contradiction at all.

But there are still pieces of Jasmine I haven’t accounted for. Near the end of our conversation, I ask her what she thinks she would be doing if there were no modeling, acting or content creation. I expect another creative pursuit.

“Probably be a track star.”

That catches me completely off guard.

“You fast like that?”

“Yeah.”

Apparently, very much so. Jasmine ran track throughout middle and high school. She was sporty, tomboyish and, according to her, fast. Not taking the sport more seriously is something she says she’ll “forever regret.”

For a moment, another possible version of Jasmine appears. Somewhere in another life, maybe she kept running. Maybe there’s no Slim Gawd, no modeling portfolio and no film sets. But that’s the strange thing about getting to know someone beyond the version of themselves they’ve made public. The deeper you go, the more possible versions of that person you discover.

There’s the girl from Miami. The tomboy. The track runner. The girl who struggled with her self-esteem. The survivor who eventually found the courage to tell her story publicly. There’s the woman who moved hundreds of miles away to begin again. The model who learned to enjoy being seen. The actress still finding her footing. The homebody watching old Black romance movies. The lover girl living in loverland. The poet almost nobody knew existed. And, of course, there’s Slim Gawd. None of those women cancel the others out.

Before we finish our conversation, I want to know what Jasmine wants someone to walk away understanding about her. Her audience will read this. Mine will too. When they reach the bottom of the page, what does she want them to know about Jasmine that they couldn’t learn by scrolling through her profile Slim Gawd?

She pauses before answering.

“I guess that I’m a really wholesome person.”

Then she gives me the sentence that, in retrospect, our entire conversation had been working toward.

“Don’t look on my page and judge a book by its cover, because you could be wrong.”

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