You may of heard of Kimberly Smedley. She’s a business owner, reality tv star on the Centric show From the Bottom Up, and an author of her book entitled The Back Side of the Story. Her book chronicles her life of 12 years as the owner and operator of an illegal butt enhancement business.

Smedley was sentenced to 3 years in federal prison back in 2012 for conspiracy, but served 17 months of her time behind bars.

I was curious as to what influenced her to start this business that she operated for 10 years before getting investigated and she told Urban Girl Magazine that her black market business of butt injections began after a friend of hers who was trans-gendered and passed away. He left the million dollar trade up to Smedley to continue.

“I got started through a friend of mine, a gay guy who’s name was Lonzi. Lonzi and I actually worked in a hair salon together and he was very well known in the trans-gendered community. For a long time I did not know what he actually did, how ever one time we went to a pageant together in Chicago and it was during that time that I actually learned that he was doing the silicone injections… The business was passed on to me after he passed away. He died from complications of AIDS.”

From here Smedley took over her friend Lonzi’s illegal silicone injection business in 1999 and began servicing clients injections around the country. Smedley would travel to different cities throughout the U.S. and have her clients meet her in a hotel room for their scheduled service. She operated her business for over 10 years before anyone had ever complained of any ill effects. The young lady who did complain had previously received injections from a trans-gendered man in Philadelphia as well. So it was difficult to tell which person improperly injected her with the silicone.

“…there was a young lady that I actually administered injections to in Baltimore and she called me and was saying that she wasn’t feeling well, she was feeling ill. I told her to go to the doctor. Unbeknownst to me I wasn’t the only one that had given her injections. She had actually gone to a transgender in Philadelphia. Because I was the one that was talking to her on the phone she actually did give his name as well as my name. However he was on the run because someone had actually died who he’d given injections to. They started investigating me and opened an entire case.” 

Smedley said she’d worked on hundreds of clients over the span of her 12 years in the silicone injection business, and it has been reported that she generated over $1 million dollars before being arrested.  To keep her black market business professional she consulted doctors in the Dominican Republic who’d been administering silicone injections for years before it became popular in the United States.

“…my clientele started to grow so rapidly that I started running across Dominican women and Costa Rican . People did not know this but injections have been around for a very long time and they started doing them in the Dominican Republic. So I started to travel to the Dominican Republic and I would sit and have conversations with Dominican doctors and they would give me so much knowledge on the injections.”

During our conversation Kim touched on facing women who became addicted to the injections and would try to continually enhance the size of their butt.

Kim said she’d often have to turn women away who would become addicted to the injections, “Those were the ones I would actually let them know like listen this is not something that you can have done continuously. There were times I would turn away money because at that point it wasn’t about them wanting to look good and feel good about themselves there were deeper issues.” 

Believe it or not Smedley said her ideal clients were working class women who wanted to become more physically appealing to their significant other. “My ideal client was the one that had gone to the strip club with their boyfriend or their husband, and he would see something that he’d like and they didn’t have it. They would ask the stripper ‘did you get injections?’ and sometimes the stripper would give them my information…” 

Smedley’s book “The Back Side of the Story” dives much deeper into her business as the ‘go to woman’ for illegal silicone butt injections. She says it was time for her to tell her side of the story, after reading so much false information about herself in the media.

“The Back Side of the Story is a book about the black market world of silicone injections…When I went to prison there were so many questions that went unanswered. The media had portrayed me as this person that was injecting paint silicone, paint thinner, what ever. Every crazy thing you could name the media had me as that person that was injecting this particular material into women. I just felt like people needed to know me  and hear my side of the story. So while I was in prison I actually took the time to sit down and write ‘The Back Side of the Story’.” 

Smedley now owns and operates the ‘All About Waxing and Threading’ spa in Atlanta, Ga, she’s soon to debut an all natural skin care line called ‘Kimbali’, and is featured on the Centric reality show From the Bottom Up. 

Tune into to‘From the Bottom Up’ which airs on Saturdays at 10 pm on Centric. To purchase Kim’s book ‘The Back Side of the Story’ visit Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com 

Follow Kimon Instagram: Kimberly Smedley . Visit her website Kimberlysmedley.com

Listen to our FULL conversation below.

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