Kat Stacks, a former South Florida stripper and infamous hip-hop groupie, is now facing deportation. Stacks, whose real name is Andrea Herrera, has been ordered by a judge to return to her native Venezuela.
Stacks came to prominence a few years ago with a Twitter account and YouTube channel on which she dished dirt on just about every rapper under the sun, many of whom she claimed to have slept with.
Riptide wrote up her exploits back in 2010, and since then she's gone on to be an infamous and divisive figure in the hip hop community. Nicki Minaj and 50 Cent have even dissed her in their lyrics.
But for about the past two years, Stacks has been locked up in a Louisiana immigration detention center.
Last month from behind bars, Stacks told XXL that an immigration court date had been moved up two days without her notice. Stacks missed the date and a warrant was put out for her deportation.
"I got apprehended at the airport in Nashville and they took me to the cell detention facility in Louisiana," she says. "They didn't give me a bond, so I had to fight my case there. The judge didn't like my Kat Stacks persona. He didn't like it at all. That's the reason he told me that I'm not allowed to stay in the country, even though I showed him evidence of underage sex trafficking and domestic violence."
Stack's mother, Johnyelsi Cardenas, has custody of Stack's two-year-old soon and is fighting to keep Stacks in the country and out of jail.
Cardenas, who runs the website MamaStacks.com, says that Stacks was a victim of underage child sex trafficking, and adopted the Kat Stacks persona as a way to deal with the trauma.
"The Social Worker Melinda Flynn explained in court the psychological abuse that my daughter step for 4 years with the pimps she demonstrated symptoms associated with trauma and signs of post-traumatic stress disorder associated with major depression also explained *KatStacks* as persona/character was away to claim a little bit of the power that had been repeatedly taken for her," she writes on the website. "It gave her a sense of empowerment and sense of being able to control her own destiny, but it did not take away from the trauma that she experienced over the years. She acted one way on the outside but suffered on the inside."
Stacks also tells XXLMag that she just wants to get on with her life and raise her own sons. She says that if she's allowed to stay she'll drop the Kat Stacks persona entirely.
"I was just messed up in the head and I just lashed out on hurt, on pain, on being mad," she tells XXL of her controversial YouTube videos. "I just wasn't right back then. I just had gotten out of the pimp scene. I was in that scene since I was 14 years old. I didn't know any better."
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