Overcoming Abuse & Rising Strong: Janine Marie’s Journey to Empowerment

On this episode of Hustle Zone 2.0, host Ryan Perez welcomes model, actress, and businesswoman Janine Marie for a conversation that starts light — how the two met on the set of Fargo, where Perez was doing extra work and struck up a conversation with Janine and a friend at craft services — and moves quickly into one of the more candid stories the show has featured.

Janine, 24 at the time of the interview, opens by describing what it was like growing up. She calls herself “a nerd” and “a geek” who didn’t have many friends, left competitive dance without fully understanding why, and describes eating lunch alone in the school bathroom to avoid being teased. She remembers a girl throwing apples at her, and says some of her high school bullies still find her online to needle her today. That same period of her life included getting into trouble alongside a friendship she now sees as a bad influence, which she frames as “retaliating against my parents for attention.” By high school she’d redirected that energy into band, choir, and drama — the beginning of the artistic path she’s still on.

The heart of the conversation is the relationship she describes as taking her life “a turn for the worst.” Janine tells Perez she experienced emotional, financial, and physical abuse, and that she became homeless twice while trying to leave — once immediately after getting out, and again later when she couldn’t keep up with an apartment and the lifestyle she’d been used to. She recalls the moment she decided to walk away for good: an ultimatum that came down to him or her. “No man who cares about me would ever make me make that decision,” she says.

What got her through that stretch, she says, was the kindness of strangers. She names Reverend Mike Cruz, a Calgary artist and musician, as one of the people who let her sleep on a couch when she had nowhere else to go. Another friend of a friend took her in and, in her words, “changed my life like completely.” That young man — she called him Angelo, though his name was Louie, because Angelo means “angel” in Italian — was shot and killed the year before this episode was recorded. Janine says his belief in her is what pushed her to finally take her career seriously, and that she still has days where she cries thinking about him.

From there, the conversation turns to how she built what she has now: beauty pageants and car shows (she was crowned Miss Driven at Calgary’s Driven car show), background work on Fargo, an Instagram following she estimates at around 60,000, and time at an acting school in Hollywood under instructor Adrian Rante. She’s candid that she still doesn’t feel taken seriously in rooms full of men — she recounts being told to “be quiet little girl” — and pushes back on the idea that being a woman, or being pretty, makes success easier. She also addresses her height directly, joking that she relies on well-angled photography rather than the traditional model frame, and says she’s built her image around being herself online rather than chasing a specific brand deal.

The two also spend time on lighter territory: a debate about Kendall Jenner’s widely criticized Pepsi ad (Janine’s take — that Jenner was simply doing the job she was handed, and that better writing, not intent, was the problem), and a rapid-fire round covering her favorite drink (an old fashioned), her tattoo (“With every mistake we must surely be learning,” a line from the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”), and her admitted OCD tendencies, which she says she manages with a prescription.

She closes by circling back to why she agreed to share so much of her story: she believes other women in bad relationships need to hear it. “I’m living proof that there is better,” she tells Perez — a line that sits at the center of an episode less about the “glory,” as Hustle Zone frames it, and more about the story that got her there.

Janine also tells Perez she’ll be working with Hustle Zone behind the scenes going forward, ahead of what Perez describes as a bigger announcement about the platform’s plans, including its upcoming magazine.