A woman who wishes to remain anonymous sent this harrowing account of how she got involved in OnlyFans through our Share Your Story page. This provides a space for women (and men) to write about their experience of the sex industry in their own words.

My older, long-distance boyfriend was a man who hid his exploitative behaviors under the guise of being a seemingly fun-loving feminist who was “sex work positive”. We lived on opposite sides of the country from one another, and our romance from the beginning was like an intense dream. He constantly called me, texted me, sent dirty messages — for hours, he would text me fantasies and flirtations, and I liked feeling seen enough to be desired.

My boundaries with him were less eroded, more sawed off. Every day, he encouraged and flirted with me to send him nudes, which rapidly became requests for fully explicit videos of myself. Since we weren’t in the same city, his logic was that he wanted to feel connected to me despite the distance. For me, I never was fully comfortable on camera, but I wanted to feel appreciated— and as someone who sees the world rigidly through logic, I agreed his argument was sound. I wish I knew then that the price I paid to receive love should never need to be so steep.

Within a few months of daily explicit requests, he introduced me to drugs on one of our visits and encouraged me to try OnlyFans. In hindsight, the escalation was painfully obvious — if I was already willing to take explicit photos for him, I had already done half the work. In his eyes, I only had to “post it and reap the benefits”.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that he was kinky, and he introduced me to many “kinks” that were extremely unsafe and life-threatening. During visits, I was frequently heavily drugged and fed alcohol, and often beaten and strangled to unconsciousness. All of it was framed as normal, even kink-positive, though I always felt confused, abandoned, and earth-shatteringly alone after he’d leave. Whether I knew it or not, my brain was being conditioned to fear not the violence, but his absence.

With time in that arrangement, he eventually escalated again and began to encourage me to move across the country to live near him. It started as small hints bemoaning how far we were from each other or how much he missed me, but over time grew into actual plans. After several months I was ready to move 3,000 miles away to his coastline, and we planned to meet in a new city together.

When the time came, I moved.

He did not.

I unexpectedly lost my remote job during the move, so when I arrived in my new city I had no savings, no friends, no family, and no professional references — only him, suddenly much closer. He encouraged me to “stick with” OnlyFans, since my previous industry was not prominent in my new city, and for a year, I agreed. Terrified of being left on the streets, I didn’t know what else I could do— and by that point felt there was little else about me that I was “good” for.

OnlyFans was not the empowerment he had promised. I felt consumed, but if I showed any of my pain on camera, I wouldn’t make sales. I had to masquerade as every subscriber’s fantasy, or else I wouldn’t make sales. I had to pretend to like their attention, no matter how disgusting the language or degrading their requests— or else I wouldn’t make sales. I stopped sleeping regularly, and for over a year worked 12-14 hours each day, drugged and exhausted.

Things came to a head when I made plans to take my own life.

Deep down, I knew there was more to life than this hell I was living in. I had become addicted, an alcoholic, and even began to harm myself. The life I had walked into was dark and misogynistic, and I felt completely unloveable.

Eventually, I realized that enough was enough. Life was too short to be worth this level of constant suffering. In a mania sent from God, I deleted all my accounts online: every. Single. One.

He noticed, and within three days told me he was “finally ready” to move to my area, and expected me to give him a place to stay until he got on his feet. Still unemployed, he “needed” me to support him, now in his mid-thirties. Around that time, he also told me that he was thinking of evading his taxes, since his debts were several tens of thousands of dollars. That was the first time he ever disclosed his finances to me, and I realized then just how badly I had been screwed over, and how selectively he controlled the reality he built around me. I was utterly ashamed of how long it took me to wake the hell up, but understood that deep-frying my brain with drugs made it easy for my boundaries to be stomped on. I’ve been giving myself grace for that.

Reader, you’ll be pleased to hear that up against tremendous pressure, I found the strength and courage to tell him no. I told him I would never let him into my home again. He would never again control or correct my story for me.

After months of hard work and assistance from the state employment agency, I have a new job now. I love being myself again, and love exploring who I am outside of that narrow, dark person I became. Of course, I have daily severe anxiety that someone at work may dig up my past. Even though I know there are many real, legal criminal terms to describe his behavior, my lack of proof would not get far in a court of law– and there are no laws which protect ex-sex workers from workforce discrimination.

In 2026, the way partner abuse is changing to include increasingly digital mediums is leaving many young people vulnerable, since few have strong digital boundaries and the “signs to look out for” are no longer ubiquitous. Having a digital footprint is itself a form of bondage since its existence is often leveraged by pimps to justify a worker remaining in the industry (i.e. “no one will ever believe you”, or “no one will ever love you like I do”).

I want to call on anyone who consumes porn to hear my direct experience and consider that there is no such thing as “ethical porn consumption” under technocapitalism; although with entropy the commercial sex industry has evolved, so too have methods of abuse.

Share your story

If you’ve been in the sex industry, or have been affected by it in other less direct ways, and would like to share your story anonymously, please see our Share Your Story page.