Kat Stacks Hasn't Changed

UPDATE: Kat Stacks did end up writing that book, Admire Andrea: Surviving Savagery to Saving Lives, with the help of a hired writer, Tessie Patrick. But when WorldStarHipHop decided not to release it, Kat Stacks gave the book a new title, Becoming Kat Stacks, and released it anyway. Now, Patrick is saying she was ripped off, claiming she was "pimped by Kat."

Andrea Herrera slides headphones off her sleek black mane and steps out of a recording booth. Wearing a tight blue dress and pumps that are a half-size too big, she's anxious as she leans against a nearby pool table — or at least as anxious as one can be after drinking half a bottle of cognac.

It's late October, and just the day before, the 23-year-old had released her first single, a repetitious dis track called "Bitch Who," but on this Tuesday, she's more interested in her day job: instigating. Inside a dimly lit Miami Gardens office complex, she spends a half-hour crafting a perfectly composed photo for her 68,000 Instagram followers to tear apart.

Courtesy of Mohammad Abdollahi

Andrea Herrera, AKA Kat Stacks, with her baby.

Courtesy of Mohammad Abdollahi

Kat Stacks, her mom, and the family dog.

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The former Tootsie's stripper looks up from her Android phone and bats her cartoonish eyelashes before relaying, "Someone just said I look like I was born with a dick."

Inspiring this sort of vitriol is exactly how Herrera — better known as Kat Stacks — became a public figure. By trash-talking every rapper who appeared in videos on WorldStarHipHop.com, she amassed 250,000 followers on Twitter.

But then an immigration judge threatened to deport her to her native Venezuela, and she spent two years locked up.

After she was released, Herrera went on a media tear, declaring her alter ego a thing of the past on local and national television, in hip-hop rags, and to anyone who would listen. Kat Stacks the swaggering, universally loathed video star had been replaced by an advocate for sex-trafficking victims and the DREAM Act.

But a year after her release, not much has changed. She subsists mostly on Skittles, Hennessy, and Instagram hearts. She spends her days watching VH1 reality shows about rappers. And she hasn't really done much to better the lot of the immigrants she said she would help.

Then there is Admire Andrea: Surviving Savagery to Saving Lives. Her book is rather like the Chinese Democracy of memoirs: It has been set for release at least three times but has yet to be published. After a series of management changes (ping-ponging from WorldStarHipHop to a talent agency and back, and getting a slew of tattoos and coverups in the process), the author is betting on a vague date of 2014.

"Her book is coming out as soon as possible," says Seth Copenhaver, her PR manager. "But we don't have a firm release date."

Andrea Stephania Herrera was born in Caracas. Her father died when she was 10 months old, and she moved to Aventura to live with her mother, a permanent resident, when she was 8. But her childhood was marred by what she describes as an absent mom and a mentally ill grandmother.

By age 12, she had a tattoo on her leg that read, "Show No Love." Two years later, she was a Highland Oaks Middle School student running with a gang called the 71 Jag Boys and swooning over an older man who called himself only "Prince." He was six-foot-one with light-caramel skin, long dreads, and a pretty face.

Herrera's mother, Johnyelsi, did not like her daughter's new beau, who said he was 19 but turned out to be 22. As Johnyelsi puts it: "I felt I was in the presence of something evil."

By the time Herrera was 14, Prince was selling her body to johns for $200.

By April, 24, 2006, when Prince gave her a ride out of South Florida, she didn't care that it was only to a cheap motel in Cocoa Beach. "When you're in the game, you think your pimp is your boyfriend, your dad," she reasons. "Someone has to open your eyes to how it really is."

It was normal in her neighborhood for kids to run away. "Let's say if I drop rice on the floor, it's two punches to the face," Herrera says of how she was raised.

Soon, Herrera's mother came looking for her, so Prince moved the 15-year-old first to Atlantic City and then to Brooklyn. He gave her one directive: "Make stacks" of money outside a White Castle burger joint. Her new first name came from Prince's pet, Kat.

"He was a predator," she says of the man who let her sleep in his bed but also beat her with stripper heels and liquor bottles when he was drunk. "He had two other minors before me." Despite everything, they remained a couple for half a decade.

Then, when she was 19, police caught Herrera with a firearm in Broward County. A judge sent her to an immigration facility in Pompano Beach after discovering her visa had expired. Because she was two months pregnant by Prince, she was allowed supervised release at her family's home in Aventura. There, she began blogging under the pseudonym "Kat Stacks" before giving birth to her son, TJ, on November 26, 2012.