Mimi's Path to Crossroads and Back Again
This originally appeared at the first incarnation of Munch My Benson back on 9/19/2011. “Possessed” is the subject of Munch My Benson Episode 97.
I'm sure that for you—just as it was for me—what is slowly revealed to have happened to Mimi in Crossroads came as a shock.
Britney Spears and her two best friends (Kit and Mimi) embark upon a cross-country road trip to seek out her mother and then meet up with Kit's fiancée in Los Angeles. Without a discernible reason for tagging along, Mimi's presence in the crew seems a bit out of place. She's pregnant, an outcast. Her sole purpose for going on the trip seems to be that she wants to go to California. She’s running, but from what we cannot be sure.
As their journey runs its course, we come to find out that the bun in Mimi's oven was the product of a rape. No one has to wait too long before they find out that it was Kit's fiancée, Dylan, who raped Mimi at that party, but in the fallout from the ensuing kerfuffle Mimi falls down a flight of stairs and loses the baby.
If you, like me, spent the past nine years searching far and wide for an answer, it finally revealed itself in the SVU Season 12 installment "Possessed." Operating under the alias of Larissa Welsh, it is discovered that she has been sexually assaulted in her own apartment by a monstrous obese man in his tighty-whiteys and a weird mask.
As her background is looked into, it is discovered that Mimi had been a foster child in New York City who was kidnapped while playing hide-and-seek in the street. Her captor, Orville Underwood, then drugged her and forced her to perform sex acts in front of the camera in videos that were ultimately distributed through an underground pedophile trading ring, The Coventry. She was the most popular of all of the stars of the Coventry films, thanks in large part to her unique birthmark. It was only through the help of her sympathetic co-star, Daniel, that she was able to escape.
From there, we can only guess where she set off to, but it seems clear that she has been cast into the role of the classic schlemihl.
Clearly she made her way to small-town Louisiana, where the cycle of victimization continues. Dylan (not McKay) rapes and impregnates her. She is shunned and leaves on a cross-country trip with Britney Spears, who was hurtling towards her own stop in a personal Hell.
After losing the rape-baby, she finds herself back in the Dirty South as documented in Hustle & Flow, doing sex work for a pimp/rapper who shoots Fin Tutuola's step-son apparently fatally (but clearly not as Darius is magically alive in "Venom" and "Screwed" in Seasons 7 and 8) but ends up having a huge single.
As we find out in Sons of Anarchy, Mimi leaves Memphis at some point and makes her way to the West Coast where she falls in with a biker gang and gets passed around like a joint in a freshman dorm room at Evergreen College. Having been given the nickname of 'Cherry,' she eventually finds her way into the arms of a uni-testicled prospect before she gets shipped off to Northern Ireland.
From Belfast, we can assume she made her way back to New York only to run into Orville and his acolytes, completing the circle of victimization in bringing it back around to its origin.
In the end, though, she finds the strength to do what the legal system couldn't and silences Orville Underwood, who she finds out is still holding young girls captive and filming their escapades in pedophilia for the grotesque masses to sop up with their tissues four-week-old loaves of Wonder bread. With one pull of the trigger, she finally takes back the reins on her life, killing her initial predator like he rightfully deserved.
