Dark lonely life of Bonnie Blue from acid attack fears and seclusion to divorce
A new documentary delving into the real life of Bonnie Blue has exposed the sad reality of earning millions of pounds through extreme sex challenges, all while being one of the most hated figures on the internet.
Channel 4's new show, titled "1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story" follows the 26-year-old for six months, giving viewers a startling glimpse into how an OnlyFans empire is made - and the true toll that comes with such a controversial lifestyle. Before finding fame as one of the biggest adult stars in the world, Bonnie, real name Tia Billinger, worked a normal job as a NHS recruitment worker. The star, from Derbyshire, was married, had her own home and from the outside, lived the perfect life. But she says she was desperately unfulfilled.
"It was just the same day in day out, repetitive calls", she says of her old career. "I was like: Is this what I'm going to do for the rest of my life? People would look at me and oh wow she must be so happy in life, she's got a house, a fancy job. It's boring. Surely there's more to life than this."
She then began selling x-rated tapes online, but it's her troubling genre on the platform, and the way she promotes her content, that's sparked widespread fury and fear as many question the ethics and potential dangers of her work.
Indeed, Bonnie prides herself in specialising in sleeping with "barely legal" teenagers. Claiming in the new documentary that it "gives her purpose" - and even jokingly calling herself a "community worker" for sleeping with "normal people" - the star's most viral "challenge" came when she slept with 1,057 men in 12 hours.
Through harnessing the lucrative model of "rage-bait" - where social media users post contentious, outrageous clips, opinions or statements purely to spark anger online - Bonnie has made millions.
A year and a half into her work, she was making £500,000 a month. That soon skyrocketed to £2m a month, she claims.
"I was the most searched woman in the world this year. I've had headlines in just about every country. I get to travel to amazing places, I've got an amazing team behind me. My bank account has millions in," Bonnie brags.
"I think people think I'm going to regret this or she must be unhappy. No, I feel sorry for you, the ones who are sat there giving me hate, I'm sorry you're so basic."
But she admits that her fame has come at a dark cost. As the film's director Victoria Silve notes: "Bonnie's commitment to work that very few people seem to be able to handle has left her quite alone. She may have a full bank account, but life looks pretty isolating when the world hates you."
Indeed, away from the sex stunts, where hundreds of condoms litter the floor and men in balaclavas wait their turn to sleep with the notorious star, Bonnie's home life also seems far from normal.
Her home is vast but simplistic in its decor, with crushed velvet furniture, white walls and - like most 20-somethings - delivery boxes scattered everywhere. Pepsi max cans are left across the apartment, along with piles of clothes dotted across different rooms, designer handbags and a bathroom sink full to the brim with Velcro rollers.
At the screening that was attended by The Mirror, Bonnie insisted she was "very happy" with her life, and she is shown petting her fluffy white Pomeranian, completing puzzles or doing crafts. Yet a different story soon emerges as Bonnie's mask slips as Tia's real-life fears bubble to the surface.
As her career took off, Bonnie split from her husband and childhood sweetheart Oliver Davidson and her closest friends now seem to be Josh, her live-in videographer, and a stylist named Hermes. She says: "My sort of circles got smaller, but my team are also my best friends."
Admitting she never gets to go out alone - both in the UK and on the trips she takes abroad for work - she says: "The last time I went out by myself was probably about six months ago. Now it is not that safe. I get 100s of death threats a day, so it is not that safe when I walk around."
The star confesses that she's worried about being attacked with acid on the street. "I say, 'It is going to happen at some point, someone will come and give me stick' and fair play to her, at least they are getting up off their sofa. My worst one is acid, if someone did acid, and I could see some spiteful girl doing that," she tells the camera.
It was actually Oliver, or Ollie as he's known to Tia, who encouraged her to move into sex work. "I met Ollie when I was like 14, 15," she explains in the show. "We got married really young. Pretty, quite intimate wedding, nothing crazy, nothing over the top. Then we relocated to Australia shortly afterwards.
"Ollie was beyond supportive, he gave me the confidence to do OnlyFans. And it wasn't because he wanted to pimp me out, he just wanted me to be happy and have control of my life. And obviously the money was good as well."
Her now ex, who appears fleetingly in the film, explains why she's so successful and insists he's proud of her. "She really connects with the fans. Most people, if they do porn, they seem out of reach. You're never going to meet them. You're never going to be able to film with them.
"Whereas Bonnie puts a location online, and then obviously her fans can actually film with her. It's like a defining moment in porn, where she's completely changed the game."
Away from the vulnerable admission about her personal safety, Bonnie is quick to brush away any notion that her work has any impact on her physical or mental health.
After one of her gruelling sex stunts, where she sleeps with more than 1,000 men in one day, Bonnie reflects: "I'm just not emotional. I can very much control my emotions. If I don't want to be upset, I won't be upset.
"But no, I don't think I'm gonna need therapy, or I've got PTSD, or that there's any trauma. There's no hidden reason of why I do what I do." But some psychologists think otherwise. When her 1,057 man 'challenge' went viral, many critics questioned whether the stunt, which saw men wearing nothing but boxers and balaclavas lining up to take it in turns to sleep with the star, was even physically possible.
There are 720 minutes in 12 hours, which means each man would have had less than 60 seconds with Bonnie. And that's before factoring in breaks.
Bonnie insists in the show that she simply loves to have sex and that the extreme events don't phase her. But Natasha Silverman, a psychosexual therapist, told The Mirror it's "unusual" for women to "naturally remain in a state of pleasurable sexual arousal for a 12 hour period."
She explained: "Having sex when no longer 'turned on' can be psychologically and physically painful and distressing, and increase the chances of sexual interactions becoming traumatic."
The expert said that if Bonnie did sleep with 1,057 men in 12 hours, she may have used dissociation to cope. She explained that dissociation is a "coping mechanism" where the person may "disconnect" from their body or emotions as a way to protect themselves from discomfort, distress, anxiety, or emotional overload.
Natasha said when sex lasts for an extended period, or involves multiple partners, it can lead to feelings of being "out of control" or "detached" from the experience. And while some people might find out-of-body experiences "pleasurable" or even "transformative" others may find them "distressing".
It comes as other experts have warned that the current online landscape is encouraging sex workers to go to great lengths to succeed in reaching mass audiences, as it favours viral and shocking content.
Health psychologist Jo Rodriguez, from Straightforward Psychology, told The Mirror that younger "brains are not adaptive enough to recognise that actually that's not the real world".
She warned: "It's a version of reality that is given to you in the context of the situation. These young people, they see this, they expect this to be what relationships are like. How women are or what men are like, and then believe that they need to fit these roles. [...] It can create all sorts of problems for both men and women, because it is not an accurate reflection of reality.."
When asked how she feels about young teenagers coming across her content, Bonnie admits in the documentary that she "forgets" to think of it from that point of view.
She then says bluntly: "There's also a parent's responsibility to say, hey, there's people in the world that do mass murders. [It] doesn't mean you do that."
Despite widespread fears about her work, Bonnie's family seem supportive of her career, despite facing backlash of their own. One scene in the documentary shows Bonnie at home with mum Sarah, who speaks with pride about how her daughter was a great dancer as a child.
She says: "Would it be something that I chose for her to do, no. I was really, really shocked, but now would I want her to do anything else? No, not at all. It's her choice.
"People I know always liked us both, but think it's OK to make nasty comments. Most of the time I just laugh. I'm like, 'If you could earn a million pounds in a month, your morals would soon change, and you'd get your bits out'. I don't care what people say."
Sarah and other family members have given up their jobs to be on Bonnie's payroll. Bonnie adds: "My family started to put up with hate, I get that, but I also get the life I live and the money. So it's like I also want them to receive some of the rewards.'
The star admits she uses the widespread hate she gets as fuel for engagement, and often puts women down as part of her brand. At one stage, while answering questions at a Q&A after the screening, she even labels them "the fat women that stay at home and make TikToks."
She says in the show: "A lot of the times when I'll push into the hate, I know the more women that chat about me, the more husbands are going to search my name.
"The more they're talking to me in their household, the more their sons are going to go to their bedroom and search for me. So I'm happy to p*** off the women because they're not my target audience."
Channel 4 defended the multiple sex scenes in the documentary, telling the Mirror: "The explicit content is editorially justified and provides essential context.'
And at the screening, commissioning editor Tim Hancock said: "We are very proud to do films like this."
* 1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, Channel 4, Tuesday, 10pm.
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Daily Mirror
25 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
Kelsey Parker breaks silence on baby loss with heartbreaking admission
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Times
an hour ago
- Times
I swore at the Queen. She was very kind
An invitation to meet the monarch might make anyone anxious. There's the dress code and the correct royal address, plus the bowing or curtsying to think about. So when John Davidson was asked to meet Queen Elizabeth in 2019 he could be forgiven his nerves. 'It was already daunting,' Davidson says. 'But for people like me, pressure and stress make you do your absolute worst.'His troubles began as his car entered Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh and police inspected the vehicle's underside with little mirrors on stalks. Donaldson opened the car window and began shouting: 'A bomb! I've got a f***ing bomb!' By the time he was in front of Her Majesty, all royal protocol was out the window, the voice in his head too hard to control. 'F*** the Queen!' he shouted.'Her Majesty was very kind. She was as calm and assured as my granny. She was very good about it,' Davidson says. Welcome to the extraordinary world of Tourette syndrome. 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Bizarrely the moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse insisted the BBC show it after 11pm because it contained so much swearing. The corporation resisted and it attracted a huge audience at 9pm. One of the documentary's contributors was the acclaimed writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, who offered invaluable advice. 'Oliver Sacks told me, 'Accept the condition or it will dominate you,' and that has stayed with me,' Davidson says. 'It's there, I have to work with it.' That's harder than it sounds. Keeping his mind busy helps. Planning for stressful situations such as a visit to the cinema works too. But a new memoir about his life, I Swear, contains really heartbreaking stories, such as when Davidson is sent to stay with his strict God-fearing grandparents and asked to avoid the c-word. He calls his grandmother 'Granny c***'. We feel the visceral stress of him meeting Tommy Trotter, who gave him a job helping at a community centre. Trotter happens to have red hair, and Davidson's opening gambit is: 'F*** off, you fat ginger c***!' Incredibly they become lifelong friends. After the BBC documentary people became nicer to him, though a few oddballs came out of the woodwork. One day Davidson was home alone, caring for his pet rabbit Snowy, when there was a knock at the door. An exorcist who'd seen the programme had tracked him down. Standing on the front step in a hooded robe and holding a crucifix, he announced: 'You're possessed by demons and we need to dispel them!' Usually Davidson swears because he can't help it, but for once his response — 'Look, I need to deal with my rabbit so will you just f*** off?' — was just regular anger. Things really began to improve the day his school friend Murray invited him to play football and then to have tea at his house. Davidson initially declined because he'd heard that Murray's mother, Dottie, had liver cancer and only six months to live. Obviously horrible for Dottie, but a huge challenge for Davidson too. And yet he went, and despite his greeting ('Ha ha! You're gannae f***ing die!'), they became firm friends. In fact, Davidson moved in with Murray, Dottie and her husband, Chris. Equally extraordinarily, her liver cancer turned out to be a misdiagnosis (hemangioma, a benign liver tumour) and he now calls her his stepmother. 'That made my real mum feel guilty for a long time because she felt she had let me down,' Davidson says. 'But it's hard to explain just how hard it was for her dealing with me alone. Over the years I hope I've convinced her she did her best and she really needed a break.' Davidson's new family gave him a new lease of life. He got that job at a local community centre, became a youth worker and was eventually recognised as the leading national campaigner for awareness of Tourette syndrome. 'The MBE was the proudest moment of my life,' he says. 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Believe me, though, you do not want Tourette's. I've been attacked in the street for saying things I didn't even want to say.' Davidson may one day soon become an interesting medical footnote. Technology promises to make Tourette syndrome a thing of the past. The University of Nottingham has developed a wristband device called a Neupulse that acts on the median nerve at the wrist. Electrical pulses suppress the urge to tic, and trials show a 25 per cent reduction in symptoms. Davidson has tried it and the results were very encouraging. 'My tics were massively reduced,' he says, 'and my anxiety about ticcing was way down too.' However, when the device becomes commercially available Davidson says he will use it sparingly. 'As a kid I would have given literally anything to get rid of Tourette's. Now I just want to be me. Tourette's has given me massive insight into and empathy for humanity. I honestly think it's integral to who I am.' • Tourette's and the teenage girl — why are so many developing tics? One well-known figure with Tourette syndrome is the Brit award-winning Scottish singer Lewis Capaldi, who two years ago abandoned his world tour to deal with his symptoms. Davidson would like to meet him and offer some advice; he speculates that Capaldi might have tried the drug Haloperidol. 'I was on it for 30 years, and it basically makes you tired and hungry all the time. It doesn't cure Tourette's, it's just a way of doctors shutting you up, and to me that's not the right approach. We've come such a long way since the 1980s. I would like anyone reading the book or seeing the film to laugh with, not at. And everyone struggling with it to know there is hope.'I Swear by John Davidson (Transworld £18.99). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
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