Empowered or degraded? The truth about Bonnie Blue – and what happens behind the scenes
After having sex with more than 1,000 men in a single day, Bonnie Blue’s notoriety was sealed. But while she tells Zoë Beaty her sex stunts bring her financial freedom and a way of fighting against male loneliness, a new documentary paints a more complex picture of how she feels about men and women
You may not know her by name, but chances are, you’ve heard of her. Bonnie Blue – real name Tia Billinger – is less a person now than a provocation, a social Rorschach test who incites fascination and fury – often both at once. In just a few years, the 26-year-old has gone from anonymity to infamy, propelled by controversial sex stunts and built on a mix of sexual provocation, circus, and a talent for turning the internet’s thirst for outrage into cash.
In a new Channel 4 documentary, she doesn’t just double down on the spectacle; she insists it’s a public service. But beneath the latex slogans and TikTok bravado lies something far more complex.
It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t have a strong opinion about Bonnie, though seldom does anyone agree. Depending on who you ask, she’s either a dangerous role model or a genius businesswoman; empowered or deeply traumatised and degraded. She’s frequently held up as the poster child of bad feminism, as someone who has confused objectification, over-sexualisation and regression of women with our hard-won rights. Her own self-proclamation is that she’s “basically a community worker”. Referring to her most infamous stunt – one that catapulted her notoriety into another league earlier this year, when she had sex with more than 1,000 men in a single day – Bonnie also compares herself to “athletes running marathons”.
She is at the apex of a very modern phenomenon – the world of sexfluencers who, in recent years, have become a mainstream presence on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The rise of subscription-based social media site OnlyFans – and TikTok’s QVC-for-Gen-Z culture, where everything is for sale – created a boom in women selling sex on their terms and, they argue, taking control of their online presence.
Born in May 1999 in Stapleford, which borders Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, Bonnie grew up in a middle-class family in the village of Draycott near Nottingham. After dropping out of her A-levels she began working in recruitment – but she found the humdrum life of a nine-to-five job suffocating, she says. After the pandemic, she and her long-term partner, Ollie, whom she met at 15, decided to change things – in 2022, they married and moved to Australia. It was then that, with encouragement from Ollie – from whom she’s now getting a divorce – Bonnie started selling sex online.
With the full backing of her mother and stepfather, Nicholas Elliott (she’s never known her biological father), she began working as a cam girl and, over the following years, built a business that she considers to be freedom. She has taken control over sexualising herself, she says, in a society that was going to do it anyway. Her subscriptions, beginning with OnlyFans, made her £8,000 in her first month. Together with the stunts, like her most recent, Bonnie can make her more than £2m a month.
It’s in the middle of her most recent and most divisive stunt that the Channel 4 documentary finds her. In January this year, at a venue in central London, Bonnie prepared to sleep with 1,000 men in one 24-hour period – or, more specifically, 1,057 as it turned out. She was frantically talked about online by both men and women; even those who expressed their disgust followed along with morbid fascination. Most had the same question: how?
It’s fair – logistically, this sort of extreme gang bang is all a bit grim. Footage shows painfully mediocre men queuing up in just their white ankle socks; each has precisely 41 seconds to penetrate Bonnie for the operation to be successfully completed. A clip shows Bonnie asking one of them outside the designated house, “What are you going to do to me in there, then?” in her broad Nottingham accent. He shuffles about, mumbling, “Err, everything.” There are no STI checks, but under OnlyFans rules – where Bonnie hopes to sell the footage – everyone must provide ID and wear a condom.
In preparation, one of Bonnie’s team tells her that they’ve ordered “20 tubes of KY Jelly, even got a numbing one, I think – there’s no way you’re going to be in pain,” he says.
The so-called challenge was a record – previously, porn star Lisa Sparks held it for having sex with 919 men in 2004. After all the “bonking” (a term used far, far too often in Bonnie’s world), the men begin to turn up on social media boasting about their part in it all by reciting their number in line (“I was number 641”, they say) like marathon runners or prisoners upon release. We, on the other hand, cut straight to Bonnie in Las Vegas a few days later, struck down by flu and doing a puzzle.
“She’s incredibly ordinary behind the scenes,” explains documentary director Victoria Silver. “She likes her table crafts and telly – funny documentaries, crime, watching Dexter.”
Her family remains fully supportive. On camera, her mum remarks how quickly anyone’s supposed morals would go out of the window for £2m per month. But, inevitably, there’s a lot of backlash that comes with it. Bonnie has been the subject of incredible levels of vitriol and hate for selling sex – not just from the public, but within the sex industry. OnlyFans’ top earner Sophie Rain publicly criticised her, saying Bonnie was singlehandedly destroying porn. “I hope one day she realises the trauma she’s causing herself and so many women,” 20-year-old Rain posted on X, telling TMZ that Bonnie’s stunts mean their work is “no longer about women’s empowerment”.
OnlyFans banned Bonnie after her mass gang bang, too. After facing an onslaught of abuse and death threats on social media every day, she doesn’t go out alone any more. Although the men who take part in her stunts are rarely held under any sort of similar level of scrutiny or threat.
Of course they’re not – and Bonnie is (jarringly) keen to defend her clients when we speak over Zoom. “I’ve never been bothered about myself personally, but I've always hated the backlash that the people who sleep with me get,” she says, “the people who spend time queuing for me.”
It’s one of the reasons she wanted to do this documentary in the first place. “I was like, I’d love to paint them in a different light. I wish I could show that they’re not disgusting, they’re not vile, they’re not weird, they’re normal, nice men.” She is helping the fight against male loneliness, she says.
Yet, when it comes to women – whom Bonnie says she receives the majority of hate from – it’s quite a different story. It takes less than a minute for Bonnie to bring up her fractious relationship with other women, whom she deems “poorly educated” people who “want to see her cry”.
Three times she repeats misogynistic tropes: “it’s not my fault” that “lazy wives”, who have “had children, or they’re busy … or they just want money” find their husbands cheat with her, she says. Women are offended, she says, and “take it personally” because she’s hitting a raw truth.
I’m increasingly convinced that I’ve met the final boss of rage bait. I hardly expected that our chat would see her confess, as many people aggressively project onto her public persona, that she really is harbouring “deep-seated trauma”, or “daddy issues”, or whatever other narrative might make her actions more palatable or understandable to some. I knew that she would tell me she likes doing what she does. I just wasn’t expecting to experience her fury factory so close up.
During what becomes a tensely defensive discussion at points, she also often slips into marketing mode: just as she appears to churn out go-to lines in the documentary – “I want to get my insides rearranged,” she says, flatly; “I just love to pleasure men” – her tone, especially when it comes to defending men, and especially when it comes to baiting women, feels like bland sales strategy, or the work of an AI girlfriend-bot. Some comments are quite simply very crass, like showing off about a time that she was “f***ing herself” on camera while her family waited in the next room. But when the talk turns to her fame and the responsibility that comes with that, things turn more alarming.
Much of the criticism of Bonnie centres around relatively clear issues: her recruitment of “barely legal” teenagers on university campuses and the insistence on seeking out virgins to sleep with, for one, which has been deemed exploitative. More recently, the (cancelled) “Bonnie Blue Petting Zoo”, wherein she would be positioned publicly in a glass box to engage with “potentially thousands of men”, was called out as “rape culture in a display case”. Her fellow sex worker Annie Knight deemed it morally unconscionable. The health implications – both psychological and physical – of extreme porn stunts like Bonnie’s have also been increasingly called into question, as has her normalisation of them.
Yet Bonnie says that she cannot be held solely responsible for the moral conscience of the porn and sex industry – and she’s right, though she has a role to play in it. It’s clear that everything she does is with full consent, which she is very vocal about and, as Silver says, she “never looks under any duress or zoned out or whatever”.
Still, her attitude to teens and rough sex is uncomfortable. “I love making content with people that are new to sex – virgins, 18-year-olds – because I’m allowing them to experience a woman’s body and try out things they’ve seen online,” she tells me. “Because it’s one thing watching porn online where someone’s been choked and slapped and then actually doing it in person and making sure you’re not hurting that girl, woman, whatever.”
It reflects a wider, increasingly violent culture of sex and porn. Sexism expert Laura Bates, earlier this year, warned that we’re in the middle of a “national emergency” in terms of sexual violence in schools, with around one rape per day in school terms being reported among young people.
The rise of AI deepfakes, increasingly legitimised and normalised misogyny, is strengthening the dangerous ideology of influencers like Andrew Tate, who are fuelling the burgeoning toxic masculinity crisis. Bonnie is a fan; he has called her “the perfect end result of feminism”.
Things get a little fraught when I bring Tate up. If Bonnie sounded a bit bot-like earlier, it’s here she sounds as if she is malfunctioning. When I question whether she is concerned about the wider effects of publicly supporting a self-proclaimed misogynist and accused rapist (he denies all charges), who boasts about beating up women, she says that women should “learn to stick up for themselves”, something she learned from her “brilliant upbringing”.
“I get that people get hurt, which is terrible, and they’ve not put themselves in that situation, not all the time. But I think women will happily sit there and blame everyone else, whereas a lot of the time, if they just looked in the mirror and realised they’re responsible for their sh*t lives.” The level of victim-blaming and phrasing (at one point she uses a tired analogy of women complaining about being robbed who had “a fancy watch on”) feels at odds with the vibrant twentysomething taking control of her sexuality as she claims to be.
Is it more bait from the Bonnie Blue marketing machine that I’m falling for? Potentially. Either way, it’s worrying, because the key thing is that this is all now very mainstream.
Like most sex workers now, Bonnie Blue isn’t just a presence on subscriber apps or dedicated porn sites but a prolific social media star, posting constantly on Instagram and several TikTok accounts (she has many “backups” as they get taken down so often). It’s bizarre to see relatively recent clips of Bonnie Blue appearing on ITV’s This Morning where a ribbon banner at the bottom of the screen asks if she is a “content creator or dangerous predator”, but what it means is that this world is very much a part of our lives – particularly young people’s lives – whether we like it or not.
The Channel 4 documentary doesn’t offer neat resolutions or moral clarity – because there is none. Instead, it presents the messy contradictions of a woman who has weaponised her sexuality for influence, profit and notoriety in a world that already commodifies women by default. Yet it’s poignant that this documentary comes out less than a week after national crime figures show violence against women and girls has increased across all categories. And while the government and policing leaders call for whole-system reforms involving health and education on VAWG, we’re left to scroll past the headlines and straight into the algorithm that made her infamy possible.
Is Bonnie in control, or merely playing the only game that guarantees attention?
Either way, the world is watching – and she’s charging for it.
Channel 4’s one-off documentary ‘1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story’ is scheduled to air on Tuesday, 29 July at 10 pm in the UK
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