Transcript of We’re All Born Naked and the Rest is Drag | 4 New

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If you're there just to make money, you're not going to make it at all. You got to actually want to help the patients.

This is Tyler. He started working nights as an aide in a psychiatric center in Virginia after graduating from college in May of 2020.

I was excited to finally start making my own money and just finally having a job and a career. I was in a great mental space and I was surprised by how my anxiety wasn't as bad as I would've probably thought.

Tyler had been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder during his sophomore year of college. So he wanted to go into a field where he could help other people going through mental health issues.

I just like helping them at their lowest point and helping them get stabilized and get back on their feet.

Back when he first started the job, Tyler felt good at work, but in his personal life, he struggled with loneliness. He worked nights, so it was hard to make friends.

And of course, it was 2020, the height of COVID and Tyler was working with patients. Even if his schedule allowed it, he couldn't really spend time in person with anyone.

I was used to being in college where I'm around people my age, even though like I wouldn't say I had a lot of friends, but it was easy just to find people to talk to. Like I could go to the bar easily and watch the football game or watch a basketball game, and then there'd be people next to me and I could kind of have conversations with them. So when I graduated and COVID happened, and then I was working at a hospital I would have to just be locked in my room. And so I just got extremely lonely, and I was just getting to a low point.

And then Tyler found OnlyFans. He was one of the millions of new subscribers who stumbled onto the site at that time, when the company's revenue jumped more than 550% in one year.

As I started messaging creators and the messages started getting more personal and stuff, that's when I, I was like, oh, this is different. This isn't like any of the other sites.

You can probably hear Tyler's anxiety in the timbre of his voice. He told us he once had to quit a job at a smoothie place because it was so hard speaking to customers while working the drive-thru.

I'm definitely a lot more comfortable writing in text. Like, for some reason, when I'm— when I'm, like, messaging and writing, I'm more of a yapper than I— than I am when I'm not. It's kind of like a complete opposite.

So as you might imagine, chatting with creators on OnlyFans opened up a world of social interaction that Tyler had never gotten to explore.

I had like zero experience like flirting or anything like that, and so it was kind of— it was also kind of a new experience. Like, I never had someone who tried to like flirt with me before, and so that was definitely one of the things that, um, I did like about about it.

Tyler subscribed to and chatted with several different creators, but there was ultimately one who stood out. Her name was Katie.

Our messages were kind of a little different with the other creators, and then we did have a lot in common, like with sports and stuff. That was the big thing that kind of drew me specifically to that creator. Like, her Instagram showed she went to the Super Bowl.

Oh, wow.

And so I was— I would ask like, oh, how is it going to the Super Bowl? 'How's the vibe and stuff in the Super Bowl? Like, is it just celebrities?' And just stuff like that.

Tyler says he routinely tipped and bought content from Katie. It seemed like the best way to keep her attention and to keep their daily chats going.

I kept thinking like the more buying content or tipping I did, the more that the person would want to respond to my chatting and stuff.

Between tipping Katie to chat and purchasing her pay-per-view content, The charges added up fast.

I first subscribed in July, and then it was probably like late August. Like, I was spending an absurd amount of money on not just her, but just everyone. Like, I maxed out one of my credit cards, so I stopped for a little bit. Then in December, I was just bored, and then I just opened the app and started talking, and then kind of got hooked on it again. By January 2022, I was messaging every single day.

As you're starting to talk to her every day, what are you imagining her as? Like, what attracted you and kind of what kind of— what her personality was like?

She seemed like someone who was kind and hardworking and someone who, I guess, knew who they wanted to be and was like, I guess, lived live their life how they wanted, and someone who I felt like I kind of felt like I could learn stuff from, whether it was like learning stuff socially or even like learning stuff like sexually, and just someone who I felt I could trust.

How did it go from, you know, just talking about sports and like everyday stuff to things that were maybe a little bit deeper and more personal.

Like I talked about my loneliness and just like how I'm, for some reason, it's hard to meet friends. And without even like tipping or anything, she was responding quickly and like doing what I would say to my patients who were struggling with anxiety and loneliness and stuff like that. And so I felt like it was genuine, like she actually felt bad that what I was going through and wanted to do something to help.

We usually associate OnlyFans with sexual and romantic. This almost more sounds like a friendship.

Yeah, I thought it was like a long-distance friendship, I guess you could say. Like people who play video games and they have like friends on, kind of like that. I like the sexual content. I'm not gonna like deny like I— that I didn't like it. I liked it and I enjoyed it, but That wasn't why I wanted to like message her and stuff. I genuinely had like a friendship.

When was the first time you started having doubts?

It would have been a year after I started, which was like August of 2022. That was the first time I saw articles about like how they use chatters and how the chatters kind of make it seem like you're chatting with the actual model instead of the chatters. That like, I guess, kind of shocked me a little bit.

Chatters are essentially ghostwriters on OnlyFans, usually hired by agencies to respond on the creator's behalf so they don't have to. I don't use them. I run my own account personally and respond to all my subscribers. Then again, I don't have hundreds of thousands of them. But for creators who do use Chatters, it's not something they really advertise to subscribers like Tyler.

I just couldn't understand it, how anybody could, like, lie to someone like that.

That's because the whole premise of OnlyFans is authentic connection. And creators know that their subscribers are there because they think they're really talking to them. And even though ostensibly everyone on OnlyFans knows it's a fantasy, what happens on the platform can have real consequences.

This is Only Fantasy. Episode 4: We're All Born Naked and the Rest is Drag.

My name is Amanda Torry-Meeting. I'm a drag artist, an actress, a writer, a diplomat, a CEO. And I used to be an OnlyFans chatter.

Amanda Tori Meating is a drag performer who came into the public eye as a contestant on season 16 of RuPaul's Drag Race.

But before she got famous as a Ru girl, she worked for a large LA-based OnlyFans agency as a chatter.

I was just, like, in their OnlyFans account talking to their subscribers, selling, you know, pictures of their titties or their asses. And making them lots of money while I was making— maybe it was like $20 an hour. It was kind of fierce.

Amanda told us she sat through a training, PowerPoint and everything, and was surprised at how similar it was to the onboarding process for any of the other corporate jobs she'd had in the past.

Honestly, when we got into, like, the training, it was a lot more sales than they were telling us that it was gonna be. Like, you are a salesperson and you are 'expected to hit, you know, a revenue goal, and like, these are the ways that we try and do it. We have the paid posts, we have the subscription fees, we have like pay to chat.' So yeah, it was, it was honestly just a lot of sales.

Amanda and her fellow chatters were assigned to specific creators' accounts. She thinks she worked on at least 10 over the course of her 7 months at the company. The team was given weekly sales goals to reach. Amanda was pretty sure that one big account had a goal of $100,000 a week.

$100,000 a week! That is a house a month. I mean, it's a small house in, like, Missouri, but still. This agency that Amanda worked for represented top-tier creators with massive followings, and they were raking in the dough.

I think our craziest day was, like, We must have made like 50K on her page one day, and it was like, "Sound the alarms!" Like, "We can take the rest of the day off!" Open the champagne. Yeah, exactly.

Amanda was also given a sort of style guide for each creator: which emojis they liked to use, which ones they would never use, how explicit you could be when speaking on their behalf, and what their sexual boundaries were when subscribers requested custom content.

It also included a dossier of sorts on the creator's likes, dislikes, and basic personal information. Amanda had to be prepared for anything a subscriber might ask about.

The men would ask a lot of, like, personal questions, right? So, like, they wanted to know where these girls grew up. They wanted to know what kind of movies or music or TV that they liked. They wanted to know, like, just measurements. Like, Bust, waist, hips. Like, they just needed to know. I was like, that's so nuts to me.

I've gotten pretty used to these questions in my DMs. My subscribers have asked me everything from what type of lotion I use to what my recurring nightmares are. But just like Tyler, there are a lot of men on OnlyFans looking for something more than get-to-know-ya icebreakers.

Some were just there to jerk it fiercely. Some were there for, like, the girlfriend experience. They wanted a girl to say good morning to, you know. They wanted to be asked how their day was. They wanted to ask about her day. They genuinely just wanted, like, someone to connect with, like, in that way. Which, yeah, it's— it's— I mean, that's, like, a very simple thing to need, and, like, like, everybody needs that. But it's just, like, they hadn't figured out how to make that happen organically, I guess. You know, people talk about the male loneliness epidemic, and it's like, the— I've seen the patients. I've treated them, actually.

Even though Amanda was being somewhat cheeky in comparing herself to a doctor, she did genuinely feel like a caretaker at times, and she understood why her patients were so eager for her services. I've certainly felt like a therapist when my subscribers tell me about a bad day at work or a recent heartbreak. And in my noble and ongoing quest to save men, I found myself leaning into that role when presented with the opportunity. And there are a lot of opportunities.

Like, if you are a person who is very lonely and, like, starving for connection, and you think you're talking to this beautiful girl who is, like, literally a model and sends you, you know, pictures and videos and audio messages all the time and, like, asks you how your day is and says good morning and good night and, like, genuinely, like, pretends to show an interest in you. Like, you're gonna believe that, like, that is real if that's something that you're, like, desperate for, you know. But, like, you could look around and put the pieces together.

Yeah. You believe what you want to believe.

You believe what you want to believe. And that is, like, that was one of my big takeaways.

I knew it was not real, but the conversations were real, or so they seemed.

This is Rick, who you met at the beginning of our series. While Amanda was chatting away from her company-provided laptop in LA, Rick was in deep with Jenna, the slender blonde creator he had formed a bond with.

Just talking, non-sexual. That was the part that I liked, and I think that was the part that kind of appealed to her as a model, is that she had someone who found her attractive and appealing in a non-sexual way.

Eventually, as Rick told our producer Sam, Jenna's messages to him seemed to breach the boundary between fantasy and real life.

Things continued to move forward, and she was talking about how that she would really like to have a relationship with me. She'd like, you know, me to be her, her man, I mean, her boyfriend, and she'd be my, my girlfriend. Uh, in person or like online? Well, that's the thing that was discussed. Of course, she was very coy, you know, no personal details, which, you know, OnlyFans, they're not allowed to give personal details. They have a lot of protections in place that, you know, a girl in that position is not going to want to give her, her details out to anybody anyway. But I kind of felt like the way our relationship had gone, that surely she could at least talk to me on the telephone.

Instead of phone calls, Rick says that Jenna encouraged him to stay on OnlyFans and buy more of her pay-per-view content.

She started asking me to, uh, let her make a custom video for me. Well, you know, that sounded pretty interesting because it would be something made just for me, and, you know, she would probably use my name and what have you in it, so it becomes much more personal and more real, right? And so I'm, you know, I'm interested. And for a 7-minute custom video It was $2,000. $2,000? Yes, ma'am. Wow. The total that I invested in her, uh, in the entire time was over $12,000. Holy shit.

Sorry, part of my French, but okay.

You know, things like, my girlfriends are going to this spa this weekend and blah blah blah blah blah. And it is going to cost me $1,000 if I sign up with them. And I really, really want to go, but I just don't have the $1,000. Can you help me? Okay, so I help, but she doesn't go to the spa. I changed my mind. I'm going to use that for something else that I want. Or I need a weekend away and I've got this hotel and sends me information about the hotel and how it's really a special place and she just needs some time to herself. Blah, blah, blah, and $1,500. And it went on like that, on and on.

OnlyFans has a strict policy that you're not allowed to use the platform to arrange in-person meetings with subscribers. But according to Rick, Jenna had managed to connect with him on a third-party app and started messaging him on there. She said she wanted to become a real-life couple, and Rick was buying what she was selling.

I'll tell you how, how much I was into this and believing it was real. The week after Thanksgiving, I was scheduled to arrive in Miami on Monday and leave on a Friday. I had already booked my hotel, and on Saturday evening she said that I should cancel my plans to come because she just wasn't going to have time to spend with me. And that she probably wouldn't even see me the entire time I was there. But it had reached the point that we were supposed to meet in person, and we were going to sit down and talk about things and how steps going forward, you know, marriage was discussed. She had discussed wanting to marry me and be my wife. That's how far it got. Wow. Wow. And she was doing it strictly to scam me, to get money out of me.

When OnlyFans became a billion-dollar company after the pandemic, it introduced what Marlo from The Wire would have called "one of those good problems." Because all those new subscribers meant an explosion in the number of messages and content requests that creators were receiving from fans. In response, creators with large followings turned to agencies for help. And according to a Reuters investigation that looked at more than 160 agencies in 2024, chatters play an essential supporting role in the business.

Very little of that chatting work is done by Americans like Amanda, who we heard from earlier. A huge amount of it is outsourced to developing nations overseas, where there are large workforces already trained as online customer service reps who can be paid a few dollars an hour to chat on a creator's behalf. They often work on commission, so they're incentivized to upsell customers. I talked with one guy based out of the Philippines who showed me a whole training presentation deck that gave newly recruited chatters tips and scripts on how to respond to their subscribers. Okay, Leon, let me share some screenshots with you.

Please.

Yeah.

Okay, here's the first one.

Okay, well, this is pretty tame, I would say. Uh, it's labeled Knowing the Order of Operations, and it says, sometimes there can be a lot of different things going on when you log on to an account. but you should use our strategy to focus your attention to get the maximum payment from each fan. Follow these tips and you will never miss a sale opportunity.

Yeah, it does sound very like corporate and buttoned up. Uh, or like this one: Understanding your job, why it matters. You must remember that you are the model. You should always try to convince the fan that they are talking to the model in the content to get the best outcome.

The best outcome meaning, uh, take all the money?

Yes.

Take all the money.

Exactly. Best outcome. It says, quote, the training material will help you understand the strategies we use to maximize the profit while providing a good fan experience.

Okay, so at least they care about the fans having a good experience.

Yeah, get that 5-star Yelp review. Uh, this is one of my favorites. Sexting guide.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so of course I could read these out loud because I feel comfortable doing that, but it would be so, so much more fun to have you read them and pick your favorites.

Okay, I was just about to say, you know, I think these are ones that you should read.

No, no, no, I've already been way too comfortable on this podcast. This is part of your education.

Okay, okay. Uh, all right, this one's funny. Uh, "Stop everything. Stop what you're doing. Lipstick emoji. I want to show my body off." That's insane.

It sounds like a sexy fire drill. So I— so I guess the idea is you can just copy and paste this.

Yeah, I mean, seems really easy in a way. Uh, I will say the others in here that I did not elect to read are significantly more explicit.

Okay, okay, I'm gonna let you off the hook. Uh, but of course there's last slide, which is my personal favorite.

Um, oh my God. And this is the thank you slide, which says, "Leon, good luck on your chatting.

Let's empty their balls." Followed by a bunch of very tasteful emojis.

Yes, very tasteful. Uh, bullseye, eggplant, devil, uh, kissy face. Uh, I mean, the thing that makes me wonder is like, Does OnlyFans, like, know that these kinds of documents exist? Like, is this— is this allowed?

Well, I mean, they don't encourage it, but here's the thing. OnlyFans' terms of service also don't explicitly prohibit using chatters. They don't mention chatters at all.

Hmm.

But if the chatters are paying off for the creators, they're also paying off for OnlyFans.

I imagine, yeah.

Yeah, because remember, the site takes a 20% cut of all the money a creator brings in.

Right.

So in 2024, that money, that collective 20%, was $1.4 billion. So without these chatters who are trained to get as much money as possible out of every subscriber, OnlyFans would be making a lot less.

All that success has predictably brought a lot of scrutiny, and the tactics used by OnlyFans, as well as its creators and the agencies who represent them, started receiving press attention that eventually became hard for subscribers like Rick and Tyler to miss. It was in the summer of 2022 a couple of years into subscribing to Katie on OnlyFans, that Tyler first came across articles reporting that OnlyFans models were hiring people to impersonate them in private chats.

I guess at the time they called them ghostwriters, which is what I guess what chat— what they call chatters now. But at the time it was ghostwriters. I was definitely anxious and my mind was like, I was running through all these scenarios about Well, if I'm not actually talking to her, I just told someone stuff that, that was like extremely personal.

Tyler logged into OnlyFans and asked Katie directly if that was something she was doing. He shared screenshots with us of the conversation that he had with Katie, confronting her about it.

Yeah, and I have to say, he was extremely polite. Uh, he said, and I'm reading here, as someone with generalized anxiety disorder, not knowing whether I'm talking to the person I thought I'd been talking to or if I was talking to random people answering the message that person's behalf. That idea is horrifying to me, and it's making me think about every conversation we had and overanalyzing whether there were signs. And then he said that if he wasn't talking to Katie, he wouldn't be mad and he wouldn't try to get revenge, but he would be disappointed. He says, I just want the truth so I can ease my anxiety. That's really all I'm trying to do. You got a pretty definitive reply from her when you put the question to her in this very respectful, non-accusatory way. Can you just summarize sort of how she responded?

Basically, she said that, of course, it's her and that she doesn't let anybody on her account, let alone talk to her subs, and that she knows there's rumors that go around and that people hire agencies or outsource and that that couldn't be her.

And did you believe her?

Yeah, I just trusted that she was telling the truth. I didn't think that she would be lying to me about it, so I just kind of I believed what she said. And so I kind of— I guess you could say I let my guard down, right? I stopped kind of worrying about it and just focused on keeping chatting. And I started tipping a little bit more too.

So I kind of want to talk specifically about this one subscriber we talked to. We talked to this person for, like, 3 hours. Wow! And he seemed super sweet, super soft-spoken. Spoken. Okay. And he really, like, fell for this person and spent, like, tens of thousands of dollars. But then he would be like, "I don't think it's you." And then they would respond immediately with, like, "No, babe, of course it's me," and, like, a video.

That might have been me.

A voice— honestly.

And they would get really mad at him, and they would act offended.

And we would also do that. Like, that was sort of like the emotional stance they wanted us to come from. Which was being mad at them? When they, like, confronted us about not being the real person, like, we would have to get like a little indignant with it and, like, be like, "What? How could you ever, like, question me?" Like, there was so much gaslighting involved.

Okay, so Gracie, this is where I have to confess something, which is that when Amanda was talking to us about this, like, gaslighting script that she used, I was like, I know about this, I experienced this, I remember exactly how it feels to be on the receiving end of this.

Wait, on OnlyFans?

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So, okay, do you remember Willow, the model I briefly subscribed to years ago and then panicked and told my accountant it was an accident?

Ah, yes, fraud alert girl.

Yes, fraud alert girl, exactly. Uh, well, when we started working on this podcast, I got on OnlyFans, I registered for an account, uh, and I subscribed to like a bunch of people just to see how it worked, right? And Willow was one of them because, I don't know, I knew she had one, and I guess I wanted to, like, return to the scene of the crime and see what was there.

God, I love seeing you explain this. So, did you finally get to see Willow naked for journalistic reasons? Of course.

No.

For science. Yeah.

No, not even for journalistic reasons. As far as I can tell, she only posts bikini photos, and that's about it. Mm, womp womp. But I did try to talk to her, and I did— tip her because I had to in order to get her to respond. So we only exchanged like, I don't know, 10 messages total. We barely got past her like asking me my name and where I was from. And then I was sort of reading over our chat log and I noticed all these like little grammar mistakes and strange usage. And again, in the name of journalism, I was like, and I'm reading now from my inbox, hey, I was looking at our conversation again and I noticed some unusual grammar mistakes that I wouldn't expect from a native US speaker. "Have I been speaking to the real Willow or a chatter?" Oh, so you just, like, came right out and said it.

Yeah? What did she say?

She said, "Leon, way to make me self-conscious about my spelling and my grammar." And then she told me it was inappropriate that I had asked and said that it made her sad.

No!

And she sent me a sad face emoji.

No, not the sad face emoji!

Yeah. And I gotta tell you, I felt horrible. I was like, "Oh my God, I made this woman sad." Sort of like vacillating between, you know, "Okay, this is still obviously just a chatter trying to reel me back in," you know? But the overwhelming feeling was that, like, this person's really hurt by what I said. And so I sent her another message and sent her, like, more money and was like, "I'm sorry." Oh my God!

So her ploy worked, and you were just probably chatting with a man in the Philippines the whole time.

Yeah.

It did.

It totally worked. It totally, totally worked. And I guess what I find interesting about the experience is that, like, if I were to step outside of myself for a second, it just seems so easy actually to conjure, you know, the suspension of disbelief that I would have thought I was immune to. Like, it really did not take much for her to sort of neutralize my suspicion by being like, you've said something, you know, hurtful. So, like, when Tyler accepted that Katie was telling him the truth when she said she didn't use Chatters, I can totally understand how he accepted it.

Yeah, it's like, "You believe what you want to believe." Right, as Amanda said.

And, you know, Rick, when he got caught up in this fantasy of running away with Jenna, he noticed all the same things I did, like the weird grammar and the fact that Jenna was online all the time and never not responding to messages. That's a dead giveaway. Yeah. And it made him question whether any of it was real. But ultimately, all the inertia is in the direction of believing it's really them.

I mean, Rick even told us that Jenna admitted to him she used an agency. So he assumed that at least some of the time he was talking to chatters. But even knowing that, he confessed it was still hard to stop talking to her. "Her" in quotes.

I don't even know what to say because I am still susceptible to the person, non-person that I, I fell for. Because I really did fall for this person, because our communications and our conversations were, were good. They were real. They were real life. They were, you know, family-type conversations. Except I still don't know her phone number. I still don't know her last name. I still don't know anything for sure about her family. I don't know where she was born, in Miami or not. I don't know if she lives in Miami. And so, you know, you start to lose your faith in humanity, you start to lose your faith in human interaction, and you withdraw more and more and more. And that's kind of where I am. I have withdrawn to the point that I don't interact with human beings unless I absolutely have to. And you can tell I'm a very verbal person. Yeah, I tell people all the time I can talk the horns off of a billy goat and make them like it. And it's partly because I'm so lonely. I'm a very lonely man. My daughter and her husband came for my surgery in July, and that's the last I have seen of my family.

That's the last visitor that I have received into my home. That is the last person I've encountered on more than a shopping trip or something like that in over a year. I'm extremely lonely and would love to have a friend, but I don't have any. I'm still lonely, and I still wish, you know, that the situation with Jenna were real. Hey, I'm intelligent. I have an IQ of 176, extremely high, but that doesn't make me wise. It doesn't make me grounded, and it doesn't make me able to, to always say, oh, this is hogwash, and walk away. Because I'm also human and emotional and desire to hear things that they're very, you know, willing to say and not mean. So I was taken advantage of. And do I feel like an idiot?

Yes.

Do I realize that I played the fool? Absolutely. Would I do it again? I don't know, because I did it once. I might be subject to do it again if somebody was good enough. I don't know. And I hate to even think that about myself, but she was so convincing in the beginning and throughout the beginning of our, our supposed relationship that by the time it got to the 'we're an item' phase, I was in. I believed her. And then when I found out that she wasn't, I was crushed. Destroyed. And suddenly you begin to see yourself as a dollar bill, and outside of that, you're nothing.

What makes a good chatter? Like, when you're training them, like, what are you teaching them how to do? And like, what are the natural talents that you look for when you're hiring for those jobs?

The number one skill that you're looking for is obviously a person who understands sales, but understands sales in a deeper psychological sense.

Michael Eiseman, the COO of Echelon Agency, whom you met earlier in the series, talked to us about the chatters his company employs. I asked Michael how he felt about the ethics of using traditional sales tactics on subscribers who think they're paying a woman they have a crush on to talk to them.

I've struggled with this quite a bit over the years because I think of myself as a pretty principled and ethical person. And so there's obviously a serious concern that you're misleading people. Here's what I'll say on that. One, we never deny. So the general rule would be like, if somebody gets on and says, hey, is this actually the Sarah that I'm talking to, or is this some chatter? We would not say, "No, this is definitely Sarah." We would say, "Baby, we've been talking for months. We've shared intimate details about ourselves with each other. Why would you ask me a question like that? That's so insulting." And I struggle with it. I struggle with it because I'm right there with you. I definitely— there's, like, a questionable ethical issue here. However, my response to that is, This person is paying to have what they believe is a true intimate relationship with Sarah with people who maybe they're not actually Sarah on the other side, but they're expressing genuine care. They're genuinely interested and concerned about their lives. They have genuine non-sexual conversations with them. And for me, I think when we're in a situation right now as a society where people are becoming more and more isolated because of their phones, because of work from home, because of a collapse of many in-person social structures, when we're at a point in society where genuine human interaction is diminished so dramatically, I think so long as you're doing so in a way that does not take advantage of the person in the sense of scamming them out of large sums of money, I personally, I can sleep well at night knowing that they're looking for companionship, they're getting companionship, and they're not paying a fortune to get

it.

Tyler spent almost $60,000 over the 4 years he was talking to Katie on OnlyFans. As you heard from Rick, he says he spent around $12,000 on Jenna. We talked to another man who told us he spent almost $200,000 in just a few months. At the time, he was married and going through a manic episode.

We do want to be careful here to say that Michael does not represent either of the creators that Tyler and Rick talked to us about. He told us that he drew a line at the type of behavior that Rick experienced with Jenna. "Telling a subscriber that you want to get married or asking for thousands of dollars for plane tickets," Michael said, "was completely unethical." But what about Katie, the creator that Tyler felt betrayed by? As it happened, Michael actually used to work for the agency that represented her, Unruly.

So here's the thing about the folks who feel betrayed. My heart does actually go out to those folks. I get it. That's got to be horrific. You know, I, I can understand that could be, uh, emotionally damaging for some folks. I would also, I guess, and I, I hate whenever other people make this argument that this is really be the honest truth of the matter. Those folks are gonna go looking for those kinds of relationships no matter what. And there are significantly worse bad actors out there than, than what the small fraction of agencies that are doing this ethically are gonna do. You could end up chatting with a creator who employs an agency like the one I work with where, you know, we keep detailed notes about everyone. We follow up with them. We wish them happy birthday on their birthdays. Like, We really do a painstaking amount of effort to keep detailed dossiers on all of the fans, and that's a level of care that you weren't receiving otherwise. We had a girl who worked for me at a, at an agency a while back who we were going to transfer her to a new team, to a different team, which means she would have been working on different clients, and she refused.

She was like, there's 3 clients on this account. They mean so much to me. I love talking to them. I feel like a deep personal connection to them. I don't want to stop chatting with them. Wow. And so I would argue again, if you, what you were in search of was companionship for somebody to actually care about you and you already understood that you were paying for it because that, that's the other aspect of this. It's not like the people who feel like they got betrayed got on there and spent $0. Right. The people who feel like they got betrayed is because they were spending, you know, anywhere between $20 and a few hundred dollars a month on this companionship. I think it's really a difficult ethical fine line to walk, but I, I like to think that the way that we walk it is probably the most ethical way you could walk it.

There have been at least two class action lawsuits filed in the U.S. court system alleging that OnlyFans, along with a number of major management companies, defrauded subscribers by not telling them they were communicating with Chatters. These lawsuits allege that OnlyFans is essentially facilitating a massive romance scam. I should add, we were connected to both Rick and Tyler by a paralegal working on one of these cases, though neither of them was a plaintiff in either lawsuit.

It was seeing press about one of the lawsuits that raised alarm bells a second time for Tyler. This was 2 years after the first article he'd read about Chatters. This time, he noticed that one of the agencies listed in the lawsuit was an agency he knew Katie worked with. Katie's name, in fact, appears in one of the complaints.

He also noticed that shortly after the lawsuit was announced, Katie's OnlyFans profile had added a little disclaimer that said in legalese something about how people from her team might be chatting on her behalf. On top of that, Tyler found Reddit posts where other subscribers were complaining that they were pretty sure Katie was using Chatters.

Once again, Tyler confronted Katie. This time she admitted she did have a, quote, team of people that helped her when she needed it. However, she held firm that Tyler had been talking to the real her. But by this point, Tyler could no longer convince himself that Katie wasn't lying.

And then in February, Tyler saw another post on Reddit from someone claiming to have evidence that Katie was posting photos that had been stolen from other models and cropping them so you couldn't tell it was someone else.

That was very upsetting. And especially since I spent a few, few thousand on pictures that wasn't even hers. And not only was I not talking to her, I was getting content that wasn't even her either.

How did that feel, Tyler, in that moment? Like, I know it's probably— this is probably a hard one to try to put yourself back into, but if you, to whatever extent you can, like, just describe the feeling of kind of having this suspicion come true?

Um, I was definitely very hurt. I was probably at my lowest point. Like, I was depressed. I was barely able to get out of bed. Like, um, I tried getting my mind off, off of it by, uh, going on a snowboarding trip by myself, and I ended up just staying in the hotel the whole time. I didn't even go out. I was— I hate to say it. I was a little bit suicidal as well because I wasted— I felt like I wasted 3.5 years for something that wasn't real. And I thought it was. And I just didn't understand, like, why they would do this. Like, what? Like, why they would do this to me? Like, I try to be as, like, respectful and open and honest in the messages. Like, I just— I was extremely hurt.

Is there something that still feels real to you about it? Like, real comfort? Or is it all kind of just like doesn't mean anything anymore?

It kind of just doesn't mean anything, I guess, because it didn't come from a place of like something that was genuine. They wanted to make me feel like this so I could continue to still tip. And so I guess I just— it makes me more upset than helps now.

Do you think having her there for those 2, 3 years, do you think it ended up kind of discouraging you from going out and looking for real connections in your real life?

Yeah, that's one thing that I was upset because I, I thought I was kind of, I guess, kind of helping myself by messaging her. But even when I was out with friends, I was still thinking, like, I would still find time to send a quick message or whatever. I was still, I wasn't all the way with my friends and family gatherings. I was always kind of somewhere else when I was messaging with her, if that makes sense.

What's your attitude towards like meeting someone right now or like dating, whether it's in real life or starting on an app or something? Like, do you feel like you're ready?

I would like to. I don't think I'm ready right now. I think, like, it's hard to trust people right now. I guess before I started on OnlyFans, I was naive and I trusted everybody. I thought, like, I just had to be nice to somebody and they would be nice back to me. And now I'm even more guarded and I'm— I know I'm not ready, but I hope one day that I am and that when I find the right person, and then I can just laugh about this situation. But it's just really hard right now. And so I want to work on myself right now. And then once I— once I'm ready, I know— I know I'll know it.

Sorry, I'm getting emotional. When Tyler said, "I just didn't understand why they would do this," I felt like I was watching hope die in real time. I wanted to say anything that would bring him some comfort. Whether it was true or not. I wondered if things would have been different if he'd fallen for another girl on another page, a real one, one who actually cared, even if it was just a little bit.

Yeah, I want a romantic comedy where a chatter falls in love with a subscriber.

And I mean, listen, there were a couple of them that almost got me, girl, and I had to remember that I wasn't the girl.

Been there.

I had to remember that, like, if this person saw me on the street, they would literally not know me. They would keep walking. And if I tried to talk to them, maybe they would literally try and beat me up.

The reason Amanda says this is that she's trans. She was born male, identified as gay for much of her life, married and divorced a man. She was a chatterer during the period following her divorce. And at the time, she identified as non-binary.

Like, some of the guys who were, like, actually cute or attractive or hot in any way, like, when I would be, like, sexting them, I would be like, "Oh, I'm into this." Like, I— and, like, you know, I— my— my heart would flutter a little bit, like, when they told me what a beautiful girl I was. And I was like, "Oh, I really am." I was like, "You don't know that." I— but I also—

but I—

well, yes, I am. Amanda performed in drag as a woman, and while that was certainly part of her gender journey, she told us that being on OnlyFans impersonating female creators was a crucial piece of it too.

I really do, in retrospect, kind of feel like spending all of this time pretending to be these beautiful girls, like, and talking to these horny men and, like, receiving that kind of attention from them as a woman, like, character-wise, I guess. Was like one of the things that kind of pushed me toward like exploring those things about myself. And like, hey, wait a second, maybe I do like this. And like, I like being flirted with when the per— when that person sees me as a woman more than I do when that person sees me as a man. Like, in the trans community, they call it like the egg. Like, when you haven't realized that you're trans and you haven't like fully gotten there, like, they call you an egg. And so it's like they'll talk about, like, the things that, like, cracked the egg or put cracks into the egg.

And I was talking to weird guys online.

Honey! Because what girl doesn't need a phase of talking to weird guys online? I know! I feel like it's a rite of passage.

Especially some of the compliments are—

Okay!

Great.

I was like, "Yes, my titties are big!

Thank you!" You're like, "And this feels right." Right! I was like, "No, maybe they should be." Amanda came out as trans after her turn on RuPaul's Drag Race. When we met up with her last summer, she'd actually just had facial feminization surgery, and she was preparing to launch a nationwide face reveal tour.

Would you ever get an OnlyFans?

Oh my God, I'm literally like talking to my friends about how to make that happen.

Let's consult.

Yes, well, especially like because what, I, I just got surgery on my face. I I've been on hormones for like a year and a half and some change. Like, I'm starting to feel comfortable in my body in a way that I never was before. Um, and like thinking about being a creator in 2025 and like having 100,000 followers on Instagram and like I'm still doing a day job and like worrying about rent I'm like, hmm, I don't know if I'm utilizing all my resources like the way I could be, you know what I mean? Like, I take videos of my titties bouncing, like, just to show my boyfriend and like my, my close friends. Like, so if somebody was like paying me to see that, oh honey, come here, come subscribe, come subscribe, come again. Exactly, honey, a cum fest.

Would you hire a chatter?

I'm not at liberty to discuss.

Perfect. There's that training coming in. There's the training coming in.

Damn. I would, I would, um.

In the wake of his experience with Katie, Tyler told us he was looking into his legal options, though both class action lawsuits against OnlyFans have been dismissed. For now, Tyler has taken his case where many disgruntled men go. To Reddit, where Tyler actively posts warnings to other men about Katie. In one post, he wondered if Katie had gotten a jaw implant and said that if she did, she should be on the reality TV show Botched because the doctor messed that chin up so bad. He's also posted that Katie definitely only goes to the Super Bowl in the hopes of finding a dumb professional athlete who will date her. At least to me, it seems like some of the loneliness and lack connection that Tyler was looking to fill on OnlyFans has now found a different outlet.

And to me, it seems like Tyler's experience on OnlyFans has left him more broken and resentful than when he found it. Like the platform has created one more hopeless, lonely, angry man.

Take these OnlyFans girls' brains, put it in a male body, these bitches would be in poverty, bro. Because they don't have any real tangible skill sets. They're not entertaining, they're not funny, they're not cool. They don't teach their audience anything. Those are just watching because they're simps.

If our question is whether OnlyFans acts as training wheels or a crutch, the answer clearly can be both. But if it's not handled well, it can be something else— a time bomb.

It's very funny that you get in your moral high ground about this, saying that we're the scum of the earth and that we appeal to incel fans. At least we're actually trying to bring them faith, trying to give them value, trying to give them real content.

I'm trying to save them from you taking their money. Before they kill themselves.

We give them a real message.

You jiggle your tits and pretend you don't expire in 2 years.

Oh my God, that's next on Only Fantasy.

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