The reckoning
In 2025, Elena Maraga, a 29-year-old kindergarten teacher from Northern Italy, was suspended and then fired from a Catholic school after a student’s father discovered her OnlyFans account, bought her content, and shared it in a local five-a-side football group chat. His wife found out and reported it to the school. The school called it a breach of trust.
Maraga has since sued the father and three social media users who attacked her online. “I never advertised that profile,” she told Corriere del Veneto. “It was that father who found me and spread my content without my consent.”
The mechanics of the case matter, and Maraga herself has commented on the double standard they exposed. In a video she posted online, Maraga asked who the ‘immoral’ actor in her story was: the people who judged and insulted her online while paying to watch her content? Or the content creator, who dared use her own body, as she chose, outside of working hours?
I reached out to four successful OnlyFans creators about sex work, women’s sexual agency and the ‘Maraga case:’ four women who built their companies from the ground up; who run teams and manage money. They’re no different from any other businesswoman I know.
Lily Phillips: the woman who won’t be anyone’s cautionary tale
She became the most talked-about OnlyFans model, after filming herself having sex with 100 men in 24 hours (see YouTuber Josh Pieters’ documentary.) Reactions to that video split cleanly down the middle: fascination on one side and, often from the very same people, concern for her well-being on the other.
“I kind of love ruffling feathers a little bit,” she says. Self-described as “English cunt, pornstar, escort,” Lily pushes back hard on people’s assumptions: “They think I’m like so sad and stuff like that, but that could not be further from the truth. I don’t think people realize how happy this makes me. I just think it’s so much fun, I can’t really put it into words.”
Lily recalls a conventional and comfortable upbringing, not the broken home or the financial distress people assume. “I think it’s a big misconception about me, or other women in the industry, that we don’t have morals,” she argues. “My parents have taught me right from wrong from the start.”
Lily Phillips • Photo: @sebby_raw
Lily is not naive about the many dangers in this line of work. But she has never been exploited by a manager, and she speaks with real enthusiasm about Germany’s association for sex workers as a model the UK ought to adopt. “Yes, I would love that,” she says. “I will always fight for more regulation.” She is just as direct about the fact that children are consuming pornography at increasingly young ages, and advocates for mandatory, age-appropriate education in schools.
She draws a hard line between work and her private life, “When I go to work, at the end of the day, we’re actors. It’s a performance,” she says, and describes carefully weighing every move. Privately, she is in a monogamous relationship with a partner outside the industry.
Isla is a 20-something Canadian creator who has an academic background in psychology and neuroscience. She graduated from an elite Canadian university with a 4.0 GPA, but, by her own account, she turned down a PhD program after earning $15,000 in two days. She reportedly earns more than $600,000 a month.
Walking away from research wasn’t purely a financial calculation, she explains. It had as much to do with temperament as with money. “I just, I can’t work for somebody else,” she muses. “I struggle so much with meeting deadlines that are set by somebody else.”
Her mother knows about OnlyFans and supports her. Isla’s university’s alumni network, however, did not and banned her, after learning about the videos. That stings, she says. Years of scientific work simply got erased. Her partner, who appears in some of her content alongside her, was not cut off from his own academic world.
Isla Moon • Photo courtesy Isla Moon.
Isla has built her brand, deliberately, around not looking like everyone else. She markets herself as a “natural” model: she is not conventionally thin —not by industry standards— and says she rejects cosmetic surgery. Female sensuality and desirability, she argues, are not tied to any single body type. A great deal of her content leans into the ordinary: fishing trips and afternoons by the lake, waders and fishing trousers rather than sexy lingerie. She also films gang bang videos, all very different from the outdoorsy persona her brand is built on. But this is no contradiction: “I just love doing content like that,” she maintains.
Isla is blunt, too, about a hierarchy she says exists within the industry itself, one that rarely makes it into outside coverage. “The girls who don’t do any porn kind of judge the girls who do, and they’re like, I didn’t need to do any of that to make money,” she observes. “I hate that so much. There is a stigma within the community.”
Not everyone behaves the same way, when recognizing her. At an amusement park, she got recognized by five different people. The ones who came up and said hello, she noticed, were women. Men, by contrast, filmed her secretly.
Amira Evans: she turned being different into a career
As a British creator based in Thailand, Amira stands six feet seven inches tall. She has built her work around her height, leaning into power dynamics and size contrast as her core content. What made her feel different as a teenager is now, quite literally, her brand.
She completed a degree in maritime law in Britain, and is now a full-time OnlyFans creator, with a supportive partner.
At the time of this interview, Amira was recovering from breast augmentation, a decision she made for herself and describes without hesitation. Whereas Isla has built her brand on “natural“ beauty, Amira has chosen to alter her body.
Amira Evans • Photo: @matsnapzofficial
Asked about the Maraga case, Amira argues that the judgment had landed on the wrong target entirely. It is the school that deserves scrutiny, she says, and a country that still has no statutory minimum wage. Women, she adds, are condemned for profiting from an industry that has sexualized and objectified them for decades. Yet the minute women set their own terms, they get condemned for it too.
Amira gets thousands of DMs, and every so often a fan asks to move things over to WhatsApp. “But it’s a fantasy, you know. This is my job. It is not a dating site,” she quips. “Yeah, that really pisses me off… these guys’ audacity.” Amira continues: “Say a guy goes into a strip club and asks the stripper for a two-hour VIP dance, but says, ‘actually, I want your time, but I’m not going to pay you.’” That, she says, is exactly the deal these men think they’re offering.
Rocket Reyna: engineer, poker player, creator
Reyna, based in Sydney, has a background in bioengineering. She planned to go into medicine, pivoted into software engineering (where she built apps for start-ups) and pursued a parallel career as a semi-professional poker player (she was once ranked among the top 30 women in the world.) “I wish there were more women playing,” Reyna says. She is used to being underestimated at the table, she adds, something she has learned to turn to her advantage.
“I am a larger Asian creator,” she says, describing what she brings to the industry, and part of the appeal for her is pushing back against a narrow idea of what Asian women are supposed to be. “I’m different because I break those stereotypes,” she says. Her content leans instead into presenting as physically dominant and unapologetic.
“My family actually has no idea. I think they might have an inkling, but I did not tell them, because they are rather traditionally Eastern.”
Rocket Reyna
Reyna once got recognized by a hotel employee who threatened to expose her unless she paid 5,000 Swiss francs. In the end, she didn’t report him to the police, out of concern for the man. “If he was doing all this for 5,000 Swiss francs, he probably didn’t have much more, and I didn’t want him to get fired,” she says. Another unwelcome encounter happened during a poker tournament: “Someone recognized me while I was playing poker, and they would DM me asking to hook up.” He asked repeatedly. She turned him down, just as often. She’s also been stalked on more than one occasion while in the US.
Reyna, like the other three women, doesn’t fit the stereotype (the prejudices) about sex work, OnlyFans and broken women. She’s an engineer, a competitive poker player, and her credentials far outweigh most of her haters.’
Where the money actually goes
All four creators say they work somewhere between 40 and 80 hours a week, including bookkeeping, marketing, and content planning. Lily says that roughly twenty people help run her company.
Family comes up again and again. All say that supporting their parents is part of what motivates them. None of them is interested in funding a lavish lifestyle. Reyna is the most open about this. “I try to be very smart with my money,” she says. She still drives a 2014 car.
The exception, not the rule
According to Fenix International, OnlyFans’ parent company, the platform has roughly 4.6 million active creators worldwide, the large majority of them women. Industry trackers analyzing the company’s 2024 filings put the median creator’s earnings at under $200 a month. True, 5,000 OnlyFans creators have earned over $1 million on the platform. But even the top 1 percent bring in about $49,000 a year, according to ofstats.net. For most of the millions of women running these accounts, this means considerably less money, in exchange for a great deal more personal exposure.
And yet it is creators like the four women we profiled who get stigmatized the most. A woman making an informed decision about her own body faces far more social and professional consequences than the vastly larger population of men financing the industry from the other side of the screen. “It makes no sense,” Michelle Tea writes in Free Love. “They come to you —me— dollars in hand to purchase access to my body and a bit of my precious time. But I’m the creep!”
