Wild, Weird and Controversial Moments in OnlyFans History

OnlyFans launched in 2016 but, similar to TikTok and other sites that facilitate virtual interaction, usership really picked up during the pandemic.

Count Bella Thorne among the curious. But after the Shake It Up alum said she made $2 million after only a week on the platform in 2020, charging subscribers $20 a month for access, she was slammed by adult content makers who accused her of taking money out of their pockets with her already-famous presence.

Thorne was also accused of scamming users by teasing that she'd be nude on the site, but she said at the time that any image circulating online in which she seemed to be promising that kind of access was fake. 

Moreover, critics blamed her when OnlyFans subsequently announced that creators couldn't charge more than $50 for pay-per-view content and capped user tips at $100, but the site said in response to the backlash that "any changes to transaction limits are not based on any one user."

Thorne said she joined to do research for a movie, telling the Los Angeles Times, "What are the ins and outs? What does a platform like this do to its users? What’s the connective material between your life and your life inside the world of OnlyFans?"

But she also apologized, tweeting that she was trying to "help bring more faces to the site to create more revenue for content creators” and “remove the stigma behind sex, sex work and the negativity that surrounds the word sex itself by bringing a mainstream face to it."

Singaporean OnlyFans star Titus Low maintained that authorities were unfairly singling him out when he was charged with violating obscenity laws.

In addition to being bisexual in a country known for its conservative social mores (a colonial-era law banning sex between men was just repealed in August 2022), Low alleged that the government didn't like that he flaunted the wealth he'd accumulated from making sexually explicit material.

"Maybe if I had hurt someone, then I’d deserve to go to prison," he told the Los Angeles Times. “But this feels unjustified."

Initially police raided his home, confiscated his devices and warned him to stay off OnlyFans. But Low got the site to reset his password and he returned, after which he was arrested in December 2021, per the Times.

Facing 21 months in prison, Low pleaded guilty in October 2022 to transmitting obscene materials and breaching police orders. He was sentenced to three weeks in jail and fined $2,000.

"I’m glad this is finally over," he tweeted at the time. "Ready to start ... a new chapter in life. Mistakes were made. Part of life's learning process, I guess?"

OnlyFans announced in August 2021 that sexually explicit material would no longer be allowed on the site.

"In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform, and continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans," OnlyFans said in a statement, "we must evolve our content guidelines."

Founder Tim Stokely told the Financial Times that the site had been having issues with financial institutions rejecting transactions for the more graphic content.

"The change in policy, we had no choice," he said. "The short answer is banks."

Nude photos and videos featuring nudity would still be allowed, so long as they fell within certain guidelines, according to the announcement. But the purveyors of pornographic content were outraged, one of OnlyFans' selling points being that it provided them a safe, controlled environment to make money from sex work.

Less than a week later, however, OnlyFans reversed course on the plan to ban porn, tweeting that the site had "secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community and have suspended the planned October 1 policy change."

Still, alarm bells went off for adult entertainers on the site.

"I think everyone will keep earning on OnlyFans as long as we can," porn actor Scarlett Bloom told the LA Times, "but there's definitely a higher awareness that we need to be diversifying platforms." 

Stephen Bear, winner of the U.K.'s Celebrity Big Brother in 2016, was sentenced in March 2023 to 21 months in prison for posting alleged revenge porn on OnlyFans and making roughly $2,500 from it.

Bear was accused of posting security footage from his home garden of a 2020 sexual encounter between him and Love Island alum Georgia Harrison, his girlfriend at the time. Prosecutors said that Harrison consented to sex but didn't know she was being filmed and, when he showed her the video, she insisted he not send it to anyone.

Pleading not guilty, Bear maintained he didn't know they were being recorded and that he deleted the video right away. But in December 2022 he was convicted in Chelmsford Crown Court of voyeurism and two counts of disclosing private sexual photographs and films with intent to cause distress.

"I hope me taking a stand gives other men and women who have fallen victim to revenge porn the courage to seek justice and most importantly show them that they have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of," Harrison, who waived her right to anonymity, said after Bear was found guilty, per the Independent.

She later called his prison sentence "a vindication of what I’ve been put through."

Bear was released early in January 2024. "I went to prison and I was frozen in that mindset of my old life," he told the Daily Mirror after getting out. "You come out and you realize, 'Oh, I've lost everything', everything is gone."

Sophie Rain maintains that there is no discrepancy between her Christian values and her not-quite-R-rated modeling for OnlyFans, which helped her rack up $43 million in 2024—including the proceeds from one loyal follower who spent $4.7 million.

"The Lord's very forgiving, and he put me on here," she told People in December after her literal receipts went viral. "He put me on earth for a reason and I'm just living every day. If this wasn't meant for me, I wouldn't be here right now."

And as for "all the people online that hate me, and they post the mean comments and everything," Rain said, "that's what motivates me to just keep growing and to keep booming and keep doing my own thing. It just makes them mad for no reason. They don't know me."

After sharing that she had sex with 101 men in one day, X-rated OnlyFans entertainer Lily Phillips said she was actually "training to do 1,000 guys in a day."

Cue the mainstream attention once word got out.

But while she got emotional in a YouTube documentary detailing what went into reaching 101 and said she wasn't sure if she'd "recommend it" to anyone else, the British performer was in her element.

"I'm doing it for the love of the game. I just really enjoy it," Phillips told E! News in January 2025. "I'm very used to sleeping with a lot of guys. I did this as a hobby before I did it for work, so it's not that outrageous to me."

And, needless to say, OnlyFans has proved to be a lucrative venture. While she wasn't doing it for the money, she noted, "we're in the millions."

British OnlyFans star Bonnie Blue rang in 2025 by sharing that adult film actress Lisa Sparks' record of sex with 919 men in one day, set in 2004, was no more.

Blue shared Jan. 12 that she'd had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours. "So one person would watch whilst I was with somebody," she said in a video, explaining the logistics, "and then it would literally just be like a rotating circle like that."

Born Tia Billinger, she used to work a regular 9-to-5 job in an office but it wasn't for her, telling GB News in December, per The Sun, "I just wanted a better life."

Blue moved to Australia and "had a lot of fun" doing web cam work, she said. "Then it quickly escalated to OnlyFans, because in my eyes, if I was making content anyway to put on this website, I thought I might as well use a more established website like OnlyFans."

Asked about becoming notorious for sexual encounters with very young men, she noted that she wanted her content to be educational as well as entertaining.

“If I could go and sleep with as many people as I could, not only do I educate those I sleep with, but also I get a video that can educate the wider audience and obviously I can monetize that," Blue explained. "So when I sleep with students, or barely legal, it shows me discussing consent with him and it also gives them an opportunity to tell me what they like."