As the sun sets on a booze-filled day during the first weekend of Schoolies celebrations in Surfers Paradise – on Queensland‘s sunny Gold Coast – British OnlyFans ‘content creator’ Bonnie Blue has just wrapped filming a marathon sex session with 32 school leavers.
That was a year ago. Bonnie had planned to be back on the Gold Coast for round two in a few days’ time, promising the sequel would be even more outrageous. But in a shock eleventh-hour decision, her visa was cancelled on Friday.
The meteoric rise of Bonnie Blue (a pseudonym – she’s cagey about her real name) has dominated headlines in Britain and Australia for weeks.
Her 2023 Schoolies stunt has helped make her one of the top earners on OnlyFans, where she claims to make up to $300,000 a month selling her X-rated content.
Since its inception, OnlyFans has amassed four million creator accounts and 305 million fan accounts, a spokesperson for the company confirms. Most of the ‘creators’ earn less than the average wage due to their small followings; it takes notoriety to break through and amass the fortune Bonnie has.
She tells me the secret to her success is being ‘relatable’. Her videos allow the viewer to ‘imagine themselves in those situations with me’.
For four debauched hours, young men aged 18 and 19 queued up outside Bonnie’s hotel room waiting their turn to have sex with her while cameras rolled nearby. The sex, brief and awkward as it was, didn’t cost the boys a cent – but Bonnie gets to upload it online and reap the profits from her 180,000 subscribers.
By the end of the ‘shoot’, after Boy No. 32 has cleaned up and shuffled off, she is feeling sore and tired. ‘I have fluid coming out of my ears,’ she says.
The 25-year-old’s life took a dramatic turn in 2020 when she decided to become a webcam performer to supplement her income from her full-time job in recruitment.
‘I got to a point in my life realising I would be doing this job up until I retire unless I make a drastic change,’ she explains.
‘I wasn’t inspired and I didn’t want to keep going to the office and working for someone else, getting told I would only have 22 days annual leave a year and be stuck on a restricted pay.’
Her marriage ended the following year – she doesn’t talk much about her ex-husband – and, in 2022, she moved from webcams to the dominant adult creator platform, OnlyFans.
That decision was a turning point in her life.
In my years as a journalist, I’ve encountered my fair share of OnlyFans creators.
One thing they always tell me is that it’s a slippery slope from the ‘implied nude’ selfies they upload to begin with towards the more extreme content that is required to keep subscribers paying.
The customer may be satisfied by ‘softcore’ content at the start, but their interest soon wanes unless you keep pushing the envelope.
‘Before I started OnlyFans I’d only slept with five people, now I’d guess it’s somewhere between 500 and 700 men,’ Bonnie says, although she admits that’s a ballpark figure and she couldn’t really say for sure.
‘If I was to fall pregnant, I’d never know who the father was. I wouldn’t even recognise them if they walked past me in the street,’ she laughs.
Bonnie’s breezy attitude to having sex on camera with hundreds of men is confronting at first. But she’s also friendly and disarmingly polite. Chatting over the phone and exchanging WhatsApp voice notes, it’s hard not to like her.
I learn she hails from a quiet village near Derby, a city in England near Nottingham – the university town where she would achieve notoriety for one of her sex marathons with teenage boys during Freshers’ Week.
