Bella Thorne had two choices: stay home and collect royalties from her Disney Channel days, or actively fuck with working-class sex workers. Unfortunately, she chose the latter.
In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me try to briefly recap this mess. Bella Thorne—a 22-year-old actress who got big co-starring with Zendaya on Disney Channel’s Shake It Up about 10 years ago and has since tried very hard to rebrand as a kooky, edgy bad girl about town—joined OnlyFans, the content subscription service that many sex workers use to sell adult content. Within a day of making an account, she claimed she’d made $1 million, and then said she’d doubled that by week’s end.
Wait, but why was she on OnlyFans at all? Isn’t she a rich celebrity who has no material incentive to spend her quarantine slumming it in a labor community she has no legible ties to beyond just, like, trying to gain clout in a really gross way? Yes. But according to Bella, she was doing some research for an as yet untitled feature film about OnlyFans and sex work that she said she was working on with Tangerine and The Florida Project director Sean Baker.
OK, so now that we’re all caught up, here’s where Thorne’s moves over the past week crossed the line from annoying clout-grab to producing actual, material harm. The actress made so much money so quickly in part by charging $200 for pay-per-view messages that would purportedly feature nude images. The images that Thorne actually sent fans were totally not-nude lingerie pics—or as the French say, le SCAM—and so a bunch of those people who purchased them understandably asked for a refund.
That many refunds at once caused OnlyFans to lose a bunch of money, as it had to cover all the processing costs, so the platform has now imposed a number of limits on what OnlyFans creators can charge for their content, Insider reports. Creators can now only charge $50 for exclusive content, whereas previously there had been no max amount, and tips are now capped at $100. The platform has also changed its payment policy so that creators get paid 30 days after transactions, rather than weekly as they have been up until now.
“Imagine suddenly going from a weekly paycheck to a monthly paycheck,” tweeted actress, musician, and OnlyFans creator Erika Heidewald on Friday. “People have bills to pay. Kids to feed. Many people, including content creators and sex workers, live paycheck to paycheck. How are they going to pay their bills this month? How are they going to feed themselves and their families? This is real harm.”
Tipping this story into Twilight Zone territory, Sean Baker, the director Thorne said she was doing research with, has since come forward to clarify that he is not working on a movie with her, as the actress claimed.
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