She has corrected this. In multiple interviews she clarified that she was born in a hospital, delivered there by a mother who was serving a federal sentence, which meant that the birth happened outside the prison facility and that a hospital room rather than a cell was where her life began. The distinction matters both as a factual correction and as a register of how celebrity biography tends to simplify and sensationalize in one direction.
The more substantiated facts about her origins are striking enough without embellishment. Her mother, Constance Lynn Haas, was serving a federal prison sentence at the time of Leighton’s birth. Her father, Douglas Jay Meester, was also serving a federal sentence at the time. Both parents had been convicted for their roles in a drug ring that smuggled marijuana from Jamaica to the United States. This was not a minor or informal arrangement; it was a federal operation, and the convictions that resulted carried the weight of federal criminal sentences.
Constance gave birth to Leighton and then cared for her infant for approximately three months in a halfway house — a transitional facility that allows people serving federal sentences, under certain conditions, to live outside a prison while completing terms or preparing for reintegration. She then returned to prison to complete her sentence.
Leighton went to live with her paternal grandparents, who were settled in Marco Island, Florida — a barrier island community on the southwest coast of the state, in the Gulf of Mexico, known for its beaches and its relative isolation from the major metropolitan centers of Florida. It is a place where people go to be away from things. For the infant who would eventually play the most recognizable Queen Bee on American television, it was where life began to settle into something that had the texture of home.