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Welcome to the not so fabulously. You know, some people's stories just never leave you. We were honored to meet model and actress Dominique Jackson in 2016 at a rooftop party in Tribeca in New York City. Dominique graciously agreed to come on to our Queer Money podcast, which was a brand new show at that time and share her story, and nearly 10 years later, get this, 10 years later, that is still one of our most downloaded episodes of all time. So we're excited to have Dominique back today.

Dominique Jackson went from Trinidad and Tobago to Hollywood, proving resilience, fierceness can turn dreams into reality. She's popularly known as Elektra abundance from FX Po and has graced Mercedes Benz Fashion Week and Vogue Espana. Beyond the glitz.Dominique champions trans rights, making every runway and every room her own.

We'regoing to do a deep dive into Dominique's story today, the successes and challenges she's experienced over the last 10 years, and her thoughts on today's incest and attacks on the transgender community. Welcome to the show, Dominique.

Hi, it is a pleasure to be with you again, and thank you so much. I do remember meeting you at the rooftop party Tribeca, but I had no idea that um our episode went that far.

Yeah, it's gone very far. I you might remember too that I think I go up to your hip.

Yeah. Yeah.That the girl I.Yeah, I girl, I just have to say, you are one of the hardest women in in the world to nail down, because we have been trying to get you on this show since day one, all the way back in August. So finally, here we go, 6, almost 7 months later, we finally have you on the show.

Mhm.Well, I have, you know, with everything that has happened, I, I've had to take that time to be able to still to, to, how should I put it, toNot get caught up, and you can get caught up really quickly, and it was a whirlwind from 2016 when I did uh strut 17 when I did strut, then into polls, and it was just a whirlwind, even working at a destination tomorrow, becoming director of program, then going to to uh polls. So it was a whirlwind and for me there was a lot to process, um.I took the high road, and when I realized that everything was happening like so fast and I was put into this position of being this out immigrant, black trans woman, you know, it, it, it was a lot, so I had to take the space, the thing, so I don't just, I, I don't just pop up at the opening of envelopes, you know.

Unless there's an award attached to it, right?

Exactly.

We, we get that. So let's do a little bit of an origin story here. Would you mind sharing with our audience a little bit about um how, how and why you'd left Trinidad and Tobago and what were your emotions in in in that moment?

So in in in Trinidad and Tobago, think about this, one of the most beautiful islands in the Caribbean, and they're all beautiful. And um so when I say most beautiful, I'm talking about people, I'm talking about culture, I'm talking about carnival, I'm talking about the Larea Pitch Lake, I'm talking about not having to leave your country to go somewhere else to uh live, and especially where my family uh came from and my family station on the island.I had nothing to worry about until molestation and rape. And so my plan for life was drastically changed because it was for me to complete my London Cambridge exams and then move on to um to university here in the US. My aunt was already here at university, my mother was here.But with that molestation, it it I said no, I got a phone call and uh one of the acolytes passed away. They did not say why, but I knew why and um.And um I don't think the family has ever been able to deal with that, but so I'm not gonna put that out there, but the reasons, the complications, whatever, uh it happened it scared me, and I turned my life plan upside down, and I decided to stay, and staying in the US meant that I was now going to be living, uh, not in poverty, but with my mother that was below the poverty line.Because when you leave the island, my mother was an accountant for the magistrates, the courts in in Trinidad and Tobago. Uh, my grandmother had great stations, she was the registration officer on the island, so my family had very well, very well taken care of on the island, so people always wonder why would you leave?I was upset with my mother for leaving the island because I thought she had everything. We have houses, we have lands, we have, you know, and then to come to a country where your currency now $700 on my island is $100 here.And you're coming here to live in an apartment withPeople upstairs, downstairs complaining, and because of that currency exchange, you lose your ground, your station, and now you're living in an apartment with roaches because that's what you can afford. So for me it was like a whoa, but I was safer here because of the laws because um.At that time, I believed I was HIV positive because of the molestation, and so I believe that in the US I they would have given me the medication that I needed, but I also had to process that and get it to my family and then through that realizing that I'm friends and and not having the language for it, but knowing this all my life.You know, so for some people, your trans identification comes at a certain time, like you live the way your parents assign you, but for me, I knew from 3 or 4 that look, this is not it. I was not planning when I found out that I could not give birth, I was so ecstatic because I did not want my body ruined and I was only like 5 years old, and then they explained it to me and it was even more depressing.So, I get to the US here and I realized that life has changed, and now I have to start from the bottom to get to the top.Then I leave my mother because she doesn't understand my identity, and I come into New York and that's a whole different ball game. And you know about that from the sex work to doing shows to to everything, so it was quite, it was a it was a push, it was a struggle to to understanding my finances, but understanding that, yeah, you have no job, yeah, you're not supposed to work because you have no green card, but yet you're supposed to survive and pay taxes.

Mhm.

Mhm. OK.

Yeah, so you had a confluence of traumatic experiences going on and you're moving across the world in a whole new land that you, it doesn't sound like you had necessarily planned on landing in necessarily. What were your emotions? What were you feeling as you were sort of starting this new life?

It was disastrous. It's like your whole life is turned upside down. Now I'm not being picked up by a driver to take me home. Now I don't have uh.You know, someone doing my laundry and ironing my clothes for me. Now what I have is I'm going to the basement to do the laundry, and we have to have enough quarters in order to be able to do it and and and my mother is taking care of all that, so it was beyond upsetting, it was something that I felt that could have crippled me because I could have given up, because here's the thing, in your lowest time, people will provide you with alcohol, drugs.Uh, everything like that, but they will not provide you with a solution on way out, and I had to figure that out on my own. So my emotions were all over the place and um, actually I, I think I was quite strong because I didn't go into therapy until about 2012, 2013.

Awesome, hold that thought please, Dominique, we'll be right back after this quick break.Welcome back to Living Not So Fabulously with our interview with model and actress Dominique Jackson. So, Dominique, you tell an amazing story and and your life is an amazing story. A question I wanna ask you, you experienced homelessness for a period of time.Trying to find a job when you're homeless is near impossible.What was it like trying to find a job in the modeling and entertainment industry while being homeless? That's I don't even know how you put those two together.

You, you don't, but you make it work. Remember, I'm France, this is resilience. This is when they tell you have two choices, when they tell you no, you can either accept it or you can go against it.And so I knew where it was a gut feeling and was something inspired of me, it was my passion. It it was modeling is it everywhere I went. I even had people that were in the house and ballroom scene that would say designers that would say to me, you don't belong here, you have to travel, you have to get out of this. You have to move and I'm there, not being able to tell them, well, the reason I'm not doing anything is because I don't have a green card.And I pushed and I pushed and I got so many nos and rejected so many times, and as soon as I saw that line that said,Are you a citizen or resident of the United States? That was the most discouraging, but what happened was when you work for free.People let you in. So I did a lot of Mercedes Fashion Week, uh, with no pay because Ms Mercedes Benz Fashion Week with no pay, and many of the shows I did as a model, I never got paid for. The first time I really got paid was uh when we did Strut and when we did, um.Uh, polls, and from polls I was able to do Moullair where um I was compensated and and Valentina stuff like that, but I didn't get paid for work as a model. That was many times I was leaving those shows without even coffee or to get home. Like sometimes I would go to the train station and the lady at the train station was kind enough to give me uh a metro card or pass to be able to get to these uh spaces.

Nice, nice.

So it, it this is it.I, I'm, I'm bothered by that. You know, we here, here we are looking at an industry where literally people are paying in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars for an item of clothing or a bag or something like that. And, and the people who are wearing that and promoting that and are walking down the runway are not being paid. How is it that you were able to cover the costs of all these different things that allowed you to finally get to the place where you could check that box.And say, yes, I am a resident of this country. Yes, I am a citizen of this country.

I, um, well, the green card situation that was with the lawyer. I had to wait for immigration to say, yes, this is your time, and when they said this is your time, it was 2013, I was about to turn 40, uh, 2015, I was about to turn 40. But when they came to me in 2013 and told me that my case was open now and I could, you know, get the paperwork done, then I had to come up with the money and there was no one there. SoA girl had to do what she had to do. I wrote my book. I, my community helped me, you know, I, I danced on a pole at 40 years old, um, I, I, I, I needed this, yeah, and you know what, the body break. So it is, yes it is. I, I, I tap into what society marginalized me into in order to be able to get out of it.And so once I got the green card, it was just, I have to say it was.I believe in God, so that's where I'll take it, right? That's my faith, no offense to anyone else, but it it it had to be God, it was my faith because from the time that green card came in, um, I met up with uh an agent in in uh.In LA, I ended up doing Shrut, Whoopi Goldberg, and Tom Leonardo with the executive producers, and then from there I was like, yes, this was my 15 minutes. Thank you God. I got it out of my system. And then calls came along. I went back to being director of programs at Destination Tomorrow, I translate.Organization in the Bronx. And once that was finished, it, it, it wasn't even finished, it was like polls came along and here was director programs of polls and TV, your passion. So what happened for me was I knew where my passion lied, but I knew where I had to survive. And so working was survival, but I still, I, I did the work. I sat, I watched CSI, I watched.Um, all the CSI crime scene investigations because I thought that the drama that they gave off was amazing, um.Viola Davis, um, Angela Angela Bassett is like my, that's like my big sister in in my in my head between Angela Bassett, Viola Davis, Meryl Streep, and Whoopi Goldberg, and learning of Vera Wang not making her first wedding dress until she was after 40, it gave me that motivation and, and, and that strength. And then I looked at people in my community who had made it and were successful and lost it.And heck the um extravaganza, my dad before he passed away, he said to me one day, he said, whatever you do, you make sure that you secure yourself. When you get things together, you're not going into the club and partying and hanging out, you're gonna find a place for you to live, and you're gonna make things work for you. You're gonna separate yourself, not leave your community, but separate yourself so that you can focus on continuing to live a life and set an example for others.

That's so powerful. Yeah, I, I, I love this, this idea of you can be a part of the community, but you can also be outside the community so you can lead the community. There are certain things like you just said, there's certain things that you, you can do as a member of the community to show that you support the community, but your leadership in the community is probably could be one of the best things that you.Can do not only for yourself but for the community. It's, it, it, uh, it, it's a, it's a completely different world for the vast majority of us. The things that you're talking about are some are things that most of us have, have no clue, we'll never even experience. So we really appreciate you sharing this. One of the things that many of us do experience though, is, um, the, the excess that we see in the industries that you're in.Whether it's fashion or entertainment, we aspire to that, right? We all want to be that glamorous and fabulous and have the things. How do you find a way to avoid the lifestyle inflation that could easily, you, you could easily get caught up in in something like that that could end up ruining you financially?So it,

I went through the yes it I made it situation, and um I had to I tried to, I was in that space of compensating for everything that I didn't have, and then I had to stop and check myself and thank God for therapy, my therapist, she was absolutely amazing and thank God for her because it was, she was able to show me the reality of it. And yes, you didn't have these things before, butDid you still thrive? Where was your heart? Where was your head? And so now it was a sense of, am I going to be wearing Gucci every day so that I can go to social media and show people, or am I gonna buy the pieces from Gucci that I like, that I love, that I can put in my closet and keep, right? And then.Go to Macy's and and and and buy stuff like I normally do, you know, where my shoes are concerned, I, I don't play with that. It's they have to be high end. That's like I'm a size 43. I don't play with that. But when it comes to other things, and, and I think that's the grace that I've given to myself, but you don't get into that space of or get caught up in having.To be like anyone else, because a lot of times you're looking at that person that has the the $2 million house and the, the cars in the driveway and you're like, how do they enjoy it because they have to work hard to pay for it. Now some people are blessed with the gold spoon, so I went for, I remember when I was purchasing um the house, my house, um one of uh the people that I love dearly says to me.Your house is only like $400,000. Why don't you go for the million dollar house? You're on TV, get a million dollar house like that. And as I was driving home with my fiance, he looked at me and he was like, our budget is $250,000.I don't care what you're doing. And in my head I was like, this is why I love you, but I was like, hell no, I've been working hard, I understand what it's like to live in an apartment with roaches and Mike. I understand what it's like to live in a space where you have no kind of ofOf say, right, in, in an apartment, they would just send me notices and and you just felt like you were controlled, so I didn't want that anymore. And so I thought, OK, yes, about 400,000, 500,000, maybe I would do that, and that was that also that I made it, um, part of me that was going, yeah, well, you know, half a million is is is is is gonna be it, but then I looked at my finances. I looked at uhI looked at so many stories of people again who made it and got the houses with tigers and and and stuff like that I'm like, yeah, I don't need a tiger. I I don't even want a pussy cat. I, I'm good. I'm good. I, I want comfort. I want it cozy.And I don't want people in my house. I'm, I'm, I, I didn't, I didn't purchase a house for everyone to come over and party. I purchased a house so I could run around naked. Not at neighbor, neighbors, look at me. I purchased a whole so that I wasn't spending uh $3000 a month in rent, and let me tell you.What was really amazing, and this is why I do believe that for me it's God and and and a higher faith, a higher power, because when I purchased that when we got the house, we're at a uh a 4.something% interest rate.And a few months ago, well, I haven't been on television in uh a few years, I'm still working on stuff, but uh nothing has been as the impact of polls. Then we had a strike in 2023, and that strike has led over on to many things, so I couldn't go to colleges, colleges on hiring and then after the strike, we, we come to this fire in LA and then from the fire in LA we go to the inauguration where trans people are supposed to be totally erased and we don't.Exist and everyone that was supposed to be an ally, we realized we're just on trend. And so now things are difficult. So by having that intuition, listening, listening to my grandmother, listening to my elders, looking at other people's stories, not as, uh, OK, I have to have that, but looking at the good and the bad of those stories, looking at the rise and the decline of actors, of entertainers, of all that stuff, it led me to believe you're not going on here to be flashy.You're you're you're not gonna do that.

I love that. We have about 30 seconds here, Dominique. What is one piece of financial advice based on your own experience that you would give to others in the community?

Save your money. All the things that you feel that you must have. Ask yourself, do you need them because they bring you joy, they're giving you satisfaction, or are you doing it? Because your girlfriends or your friends or you see everyone else with it. And if your response is that you're doing it because you wanna match someone else, stop right there.Right, you have to live within your means and have dreams at its best because the stuff that goes that's in style right now goes out.And you will constantly be spending money. Don't buy things because I don't go to uh showrooms and purchase gowns or anything that are current season. I go to Woodbury Commons and I get my luxury items on sale at a discounted price. That is really amazing for that, and I feel fantastic in them.Um, and, and, and that's it. You have to understand if you want to get to a certain place in the future, you have to plan now, and what you have now is your lesson for the future, not as something that's against you.

I love that. I love that so much. So what are your closing thoughts there, Mr. Ser?

I think that one of the things that is probably my favorite thing here is, here's a woman who has walked the runway, says it is OK to go buy something on a discount. Thank you verymuch.

I, I agree with that. I'll I'll kind of rephrase that a little bit though, but I, I'd love the confidence in who you are and the humility to say, my budget is this.Not what everybody else's expectations is, and I think having that confidence in yourself and the humility of what your actual budget is can go a long way. So thanks for tuning in. Thank you for joining us, Dominic, we appreciate it. Catch new episodes of Living Not So Fabulously every Wednesday at noon Eastern Time on Yahoo Finance.com, YouTube or wherever you binge watch your favorite podcasts.

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This content was not intended to be financial advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional financial services.