Helaine Cared for Young Mimi Faust for Years—and the Truth is Nothing Like the Claims on Aftermath

Mimi Faust’s “tragic” childhood as dramatized on Aftermath is belied by the truth, as told by family friend Helaine, who cared for Mimi for years.

TRANSCRIPT:

Mimi and Diana, my stepdaughter, went to school together, the same school. They had the same friends. They would go to parties together. They would go out on dates together and, you know, with their respective boyfriends. And they just were close friends for years.

Her mother remarried and Mimi didn’t get along with the fellow that Olaiya had married. So, she was—Mimi at the time was friends with my stepdaughter Diana, and they cooked up this plan where Mimi could come and live with us and wouldn’t have to be there with the new husband who she didn’t, you know, get along with that well.

So, she wanted to live with us, and Olaiya was very, very happy for Mimi to be moving in with us. And we took care of her—it was for two or three years. And we took care of her and took care of her schooling and made sure she went to school. You know, made sure she had food and a bed to sleep in and friends and everything. And she was doing great.

I remember one time she came home and she said, “I want to get some glasses.” I said, “Oh, you want—you’re having a problem with your eyes?” She said, “No, I don’t need glasses. I just want them ’cause I want to look more studious.” So, she ended up getting some glasses with just plain glass in them so that she would look more studious. And she did quite well in school.

And she would be in communication with her mom quite often. And they’d have lunch together. And Olaiya would call and find out how she was doing. And Mimi would talk to her on the phone quite often, you know. Mimi said that she loved her mom very much.

Olaiya had this huge, warm heart. She loved people. She was very, very affectionate. She was very, very outgoing. All she wanted to do was help. She wanted to help people. She loved Mimi. She wanted to make sure that her daughter was doing well.

Every time we talked, all she talked about was Mimi. And how was Mimi doing? And did she need help? And could she bring something over to Mimi? And was she eating properly? Was she going to school? Did she have friends? Was she enjoying her life? And was she doing well? And she was constantly asking about Mimi, which is—her attention was, you know, she was Mimi’s mom. She was the mother. She wanted Mimi to do well.

And they got together quite often, in fact. They’d have lunches together, they’d talk, they’d talk on the phone. It was—she saw her mother probably more times than a person who would go off to boarding school.

And after a couple of years, she decided that—since she was very, very close with her family and her cousins and her aunt—she wanted to live with her cousin and her aunt who lived down in South Central LA. And so we said—we talked with Olaiya again, made sure everything was okay with that.

And we’d take her down there, we’d pick her up, we’d take her places. She came to visit a few years later—after she moved to Atlanta, she came to visit us and she stayed with us for a few weeks. And then years later, she sent me pictures of herself and her daughter. Never over these thirty years has she ever mentioned anything about being upset with Olaiya or anything bad about Olaiyia. She always talked quite well about her mom.

She was happy to be with her mom when she could be with her mom. She was happy to be with us when she was with us. She was happy to be with her aunt and cousin when she was living down there with them. Mimi had a very non-eventful life. She went to school. She had boyfriends, she dated. She pretty much did what she wanted to do and was happy about it.

I saw Olaiya, we were—right before she died. We were both living in Clearwater, Florida. And she wasn’t looking too good and I asked her what was happening. And she said that she had liver cancer and that it was terminal, and she wouldn’t be living too much longer. And the thing that she really, really wanted to do was to go visit Mimi and tell her how much she loved her before she died. So she did. She went up to Atlanta to see Mimi right before she died and just to make sure that Mimi was doing well and that she would be taken care of and there wouldn’t be any problems—that Mimi would be okay. And to express to Mimi how much she really, really loved her.

It’s totally disgusting that a person like Leah Remini would use the life of a person who is now dead, a person that was very, very warm-hearted, very, very affectionate. All Olaiya wanted to do was help people. And for Leah Remini to use the name of this person in such a way, to make money, is just completely wrong.