Move over Jeremy Meeks, there’s a new mug shot hottie in town! Or is there? Is this very wanted viral sensation even real?
California electrician Josh Jeffery has built a social media empire simply by sharing booking photos of attractive women. His @mugshawtys Instagram and Twitter accounts have more than 750,000 combined followers after launching in 2016, which was two years after Jeremy Meeks took the internet by storm with his arresting mug shot.
On Saturday, both @mugshawtys accounts shared a mug shot photo of a young lady that was quite striking, as were her alleged charges of possession of a machine gun, possession of a firearm silencer, and possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute.
possession of a machine gun, possession of a firearm silencer, and possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute pic.twitter.com/H1coIOJzsS
— mugshawtys (@mugshawtys) February 18, 2023
Numerous Instagram comments joked about how attractive the woman is, and some openly questioned whether or not she was too striking to believe.
“Is it just me or does this look like an AI generated image?” asked @strange.as.angels, which got more replies than any other comment on the post. Here are a few examples of the comments in that thread that kind of run the opinion gamut:
It’s AI enhanced. There’s software out there that can take low resolution images and upscale them.
Mugshawtys running out of bad baddies to make content from so they’re making them up now.
Fake image. Caption is the profile for a video game character.
It turns out that one of these theories was exactly right. More on that in a minute…
Is the Mugshawty’s name Reilly?
Further down in the Instagram comments a young woman claimed that she is the person in the mug shot photo.
“Omg it’s me,” wrote @reillyjaz, adding crying and skull emoji.
One of Reilly’s friends, Sacramento area singer Jacy, shared her shocked reply. “REILLY PLEASE IM LOSING MY MIND THIS IS SO ICONIC.”
“LMFALOOOOOOO,” Reilly replied. “B*TCH SO AM I IM DEAD AF.”
@eldermejia77 interrupted the all-caps gal pal Shookethpalooza to address the “real versus fake” controversy. “@reillyjaz why do you look ai generated 😭.” he asked.
“It’s just edited cuz the original quality is so sh*t 😭,” was Reilly’s reply. She iterated her point in her own Instagram stories:
A quick look at Reilly’s Instagram leaves NO DOUBT that the woman in the Mugshawtys mug shot could be her:
My initial searches for any record of Reilly being arrested or wanted by police turned up a huge blank. Could it be that @mugshawtys shared a fake mug shot photo and Reilly was just taking advantage of the fact that she looked a lot like the woman in the booking photo? It’s also interesting to note that the image was the 1,000th post on the Instagram account. Hmmm…
Realizing that this controversy is of huge cultural and historical significance, I donned my detective hat and online magnifying glass once again in an attempt to solve the mystery.
I can now confirm Reilly IS the woman in the photo, and her explanation for why the mug shot looks to be AI is spot on. Reilly’s claim that “the original quality is so sh*t” is quite accurate. Here is Reilly Azevedo’s original mug shot photo:
I can also confirm that the charges listed by @mugshawtys are correct. The entry for her “wanted” post explains that Reilly “was accompanying an associate at the time of his arrest” in February of 2021. “A large quantity of pills were located, along with a machine gun and a firearm suppressor (silencer).”
There is an active court case for Reilly in Sacramento Superior Court. The post about her being wanted was made one day after she failed to appear for a hearing in August of 2021. The bench warrant for her arrest was recalled the following month.
Reilly, now 22, had a mandatory settlement conference last month, and there is a hearing described as “progress report, other” scheduled for March 23. Perhaps once she gets her case all cleared up Reilly will be able to follow in Jeremy Meek’s footsteps with a modeling career?
UPDATE Reilly, Starcasm and Onlyfans
Reilly saw our tweet about this article and she reacted in her Instagram stories:
The story immediately after the one about this article indicates that Reilly is planning to cash in on her 10 minutes by launching an Onlyfans account! We can’t link directly to her account for advertising reasons, but her username is @mugshawtyy 😂
Go Reilly!! Hopefully her subscribers will be able to see some super sexy photos with a machine gun!
Who runs @Mugshawtys on Twitter and Instagram?
As mentioned above, the @mugshawtys accounts are run by an electrician from California named Josh Jeffery. Josh has been very open about his connection to the social media accounts, including numerous interviews with major media outlets like The New York Post, Oxygen, and The Times UK.
Where do the mug shot photos shared by Mugshawtys come from? “A lot of people send me their own mugshots — I get probably 15 to 20 plus [direct messages] a day of different ones,” Josh told The Post in 2020. “A lot of what I post is submissions.”
Josh added that a lot of the women whose mug shots he posts want him to shout them out for exposure, and often times to help raise bail money.
However, it wasn’t always like that. “When I first started, I was going through these databases and doing all the work myself, copy and pasting everything,” Josh admitted.
Of course, Josh receives his fair share of criticism — often being accused of exploiting the women or promoting bad behavior. “I’ve had some people, a few, get upset with me and DM [direct message] me about it,” Josh told Oxygen in 2020.
“I can see where they are coming from, but I’m not trying to cause anybody harm or make it harder for someone to find a job,” he insisted. “There’s definitely no ill intent behind anything and if someone wants their post taken down, 100 percent I’ll take it down right away.”
At the time of his 2020 interviews, Josh was not making any money off the @mugshawtys accounts. That may be changing soon because there is a link to the Mushawtys Shop on both his Instagram and Twitter accounts. However, the shop doesn’t appear to be open at this time and it’s unclear what will be sold there if/when it opens.
Asa Hawks is a writer and editor for Starcasm. You can contact Asa via Twitter, Facebook, or email at starcasmtips(at)yahoo.com
