If you’ve never heard of Bonnie Blue, ask your teenage kids, the guys down the pub, your female colleagues. In fact, anyone with a social media account. They may respond with disgust or lurid fascination, but I guarantee they’ll have an opinion on this outwardly ordinary 26-year-old from Derbyshire, who claims that on January 11, within a 12-hour period, she had sex with 1,057 men.
This purported world record — one that goes undocumented by Guinness — begs many questions. How did she do it, given that’s 41 seconds per man not including changeovers? What was the physical toll? What childhood trauma led her to relish such gross public degradation?
Because let’s be clear, what Bonnie Blue does is by most standards extreme: in videos her small, slight, naked body is passed like a toy between multiple men who take turns penetrating her mouth and vagina, often at the same time. She kneels attending to a whole circle of penises, working manically in rotation like a music hall plate-spinner. Occasionally the men slap or choke or urinate on her: sometimes she gags and retches or looks overwhelmed by this sexual feeding frenzy. Unlike most porn stars, she doesn’t bother to fake orgasms: she is there not to receive but to provide pleasure for men who conclude by ejaculating on her face.
And yet Bonnie Blue — now the subject of a Channel 4 documentary — is mainstream. You don’t need Pornhub to watch her: you can scroll unexpurgated clips of her “events” on X. Meanwhile, on Instagram and
TikTok she posts nonstop wholesome scenes from her life: Bonnie with her fluffy dog; on a beach in a bikini; hungover eating lunch. The notion is she’s a normal girl who simply loves doing porn, and not just with other professionals. If you are a man, any man, “barely legal or barely breathing”, just turn up, join a queue and she’ll do you, although her preference is for 18-year-old virgins recruited at college freshers events. (A clip of one mother turning up to drag her son home went viral: “Where’s your coat?” she demands furiously. But it’s too late; he’s already had his go.)
Bonnie is where the influencer economy meets the porn industry: horny teen boys get free sex with a famous girl in exchange for filming content that she monetises to earn millions. Her queue of men has been compared to strangers recruited online to rape a drugged
Gisèle Pelicot, but I’m reminded too of lines you see outside any Instagram-famous shop or café: screwing Bonnie is about sex, but also participating in a craze.
Is Bonnie, as she insists, an “empowered” woman, the ultimate expression of female bodily autonomy?
Andrew Tate has described her as “the perfect end result of feminism”, and certainly “sex-positive” feminism has long valorised sex work, which must make Bonnie, coolly getting rich on gangbangs, a modern Emmeline Pankhurst or Germaine Greer. In any case, the results of our global experiment in exposing children to pornography before their first kiss is now here in human form.
From Tia to Bonnie
Her real name is Tia Billinger and we speak at the Times offices, where someone has booked us a glass-fronted room in the newsroom, meaning a constant stream of curious journalists flows by. She wears a pink Balmain minidress chosen by her Italian stylist, Ermes, but otherwise she looks like any nice, well-groomed twentysomething: luxuriant hair, shaped brows, natural make-up and nails, an athletic 5ft 3in figure, no boob job or tattoos or piercings, sweet face, veneered smile, grey-blue eyes with a fiercely direct gaze, which her right-hand man and videographer, Josh, calls her “death stare”.
I felt I was interviewing two people. Tia, the bright, funny, polite northern girl who loves her family, crafting, pets and Netflix, is occasionally possessed by lewd, crude Bonnie. Beyond our room is a Sunday Times leaving do. “Does he want a farewell blow job?” she asks. Er, I think it’s a woman.
She grew up in Draycott, a village between Derby and Nottingham, the sort of place, she says, “where your parents are neighbours with people they went to school with, and they live two minutes down the road from their parents. Which is nice, but it’s as if you can’t leave.” Her father was a welder who repaired railway tracks, working long hours often away from home. Her mother stayed home looking after Tia and her sister, then worked as a childminder, shop assistant and nursing home carer.
It was a warm, close, loving childhood. Tia and her sister were crazy about dancing, taking nine classes a week of tap, ballet and freestyle, and in 2015 they took part in the British street dance championships. School bored her, but she thought about becoming a midwife until she saw that after four years’ training she’d be on £21,000. She was already earning that aged 16 by teaching dance and working in Poundstretcher. So she dropped out of A-levels, “not because I didn’t have a good work ethic. Quite the opposite; I wanted to work. I was hungry. I wanted to earn money. University would only have slowed my life down.”
So she worked in recruitment, “a glamorised call-centre sales job” placing finance assistants and accountants mainly within the NHS. She did that from 7.30am to 6pm for five years. “I felt like my life got so serious so quickly. My friends were still talking about missing homework while I was thinking, ‘I need to find a finance director for Derby Hospital.’ ”
Articulate and engaging, she was good at her job and it brought material success: by 19 she drove a Mercedes C-class. She’d met her boyfriend, Ollie, a private-school boy, at a New Year’s Eve party when she was 15. They bought a house and were saving for a lavish wedding. Yet Tia was still deeply dissatisfied. “I kept thinking, ‘Is that all there is?’ The desire to leave your home town is quite strong, isn’t it?” In older friends she saw her life mapped out: a kitchen extension, one nice holiday a year, 20 days’ leave, yearning for Fridays to come around. She wondered if a baby would help, but she wasn’t pregnant after 18 months of trying and tests revealed it would be hard for her to conceive.
So once lockdown ended, she and Ollie, an estate agent, sold their house and cars, had a register office wedding in February 2022 and moved to Australia’s Gold Coast. Here material things mattered less, “because when you open your back doors, you’ve got the most beautiful beach and you get a cheap lilo from the corner shop”. A planned gap year turned into two. Then family and friends told her it was time to find a job. “They said, ‘You’ve had the best two years of your life.’ And that sentence was the biggest wake-up call, because I thought, yes, they were good years, but surely can’t be the best of my whole life.”
‘My first time as a cam girl, I was so nervous’
Resuming the nine-to-five filled her with dread and she’d noticed on TikTok “women, all different shapes and sizes and backgrounds, were getting extra money doing camming online”. Cam girls talk with and perform for men online. The first five minutes are free, and the trick is to lure a man into a virtual private room where he will pay per minute to watch you strip or perform sexual acts.
“The first call, I was so nervous,” she says. “But I thought, worst case, I’ll slam the laptop shut and never mention it again. But instantly I enjoyed it, and I was good at it. It’s just sales, really.” Her alter ego, “Bonnie Blue”, was born, and Tia used skills acquired in recruitment to stand out from thousands of other cam girls. She knew how to work out exactly what a man wanted: “You ask them very open questions, so they fill in the gaps for you.”
She kept a second laptop off-camera where she could google unfamiliar sexual practices. “One guy asked for SPH. I had to look it up. It’s small penis humiliation. Then I went, ‘Oh, your penis is so small. It’s pathetic. It looks like an AA battery.’ Some men love that, but I’d no idea.”
Soon she was camming for hours, pulling in good money. I ask how Ollie felt and she says he encouraged her, “though he didn’t pimp me out”. In Australia she’d put on weight, lost her dancer’s body, felt self-conscious, especially as the Gold Coast was a hive of glamorous influencers. “I became really insecure. I’d cover up my body, cancel trips.” Having hundreds of strangers telling her she was beautiful raised her self-confidence. She insists her work wasn’t why Ollie returned to England and they are now divorcing. “We just grew apart.”
After he left, Tia/Bonnie became a “full-service” escort. She recalls the first time she had sex for money. “I was nervous. I thought he might ask for a refund. It was a guy in his thirties with two kids and a missus. He booked a hotel. I remember saying to him, ‘OK, tell me what you like, what you enjoy.’ And he’s like, ‘Look, I just want sex. I’ve got to go in 20 minutes.’ It lasted about five or six. He hopped in the shower and left. I had the biggest smile on my face and £500.”
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Porn, consent and body positivity: How to talk to your teens about sex
She also joined OnlyFans, the British-owned subscription platform that, although it hosts content providers from chefs to celebrities, is chiefly known for porn. Then she applied her sales brain to climbing its rankings. She’d heard about Schoolies, a celebration at the end of Australian high-school exams, and went there to distribute business cards with a QR code to her OnlyFans page. She claims she was only musing whether to sleep with the boys when the Daily Mail ran a story calling her a sexual predator. So she leant into the publicity and offered herself free to 18-year-olds who would consent to be filmed, and then posted their brief encounters online. Her subscriber base soared. She had, it seems, invented a revolutionary category of sex work: the porn star who breaks through a laptop screen into a teenage boy’s life.
Holding a sign saying “Bonk me and let me film it” (made by her mother), she slept with 150 18-year-olds at Nottingham University freshers week and 122 during US spring break in Mexico. The resulting outcry about her seducing and deflowering “barely legal” boys led to her being banned from Airbnb, Tinder, Hinge, Australia (for visa breaches), Fiji and Nottingham Forest’s City Ground stadium, where she’d advertised her location to fans. “But men,” she points out, “have made porn content with schoolgirls since day one. Sexy schoolgirls pretending they don’t want it, then two minutes later they’re bent over the desk. No one has ever caused an uproar about that. So why can’t I do a schoolboy?”
She has a point. “Teen” is porn’s most searched online category and even before the internet, Hustler magazine’s most popular offshoot was Barely Legal: magazines and movies featuring girls of 18 who looked far younger and were frequently shot in student dorms being “sexually initiated” by older men.
Porn as sex education
Porn directors preyed on damaged girls from troubled homes, many of whom were abused as children: they had conveniently lower sexual boundaries and no one to protect them. Today such girls are still likely to end up in prostitution or grim Pornhub clips. But Tia/Bonnie is adamant she has no tragic backstory, no abuse, no “daddy issues”. As does
Lily Phillips, another OnlyFans girl from Derbyshire, the subject of a YouTube film about having sex with 100 men. (Tia, who worked with her, claims Lily copied her world record idea.)
Tia tells me she lost her virginity at 13, to a boy of 14, and first started watching porn at 12. Lily was only 11. For their generation, born in the late Nineties, entering adolescence when smartphones first became widely available, this was unexceptional. In fact, Tia sees porn as vital sex education: “It’s probably best sometimes they watch some to see how it’s done.”
Porn is first consumed now on average at 13, although 15 per cent are just 10. The fallout from this is just filtering through: in 2022, figures showed that the majority of sexual crimes against minors — including rape, assault, indecent exposure and voyeurism — were committed by other children.
Tia and Lily didn’t think anything abnormal happened to them because porn’s narrative that a girl’s role is to serve male needs is now utterly normal. In her videos, Bonnie tells men she wants to be their “slut”, their “cum rag”. The disgustingness is not an unfortunate consequence but part of the point: she displays with relish her eyes almost blinded by semen, the bedroom floor littered with hundreds of discarded condoms. She claims gangbangs are her sexual kink. “I tell men, ‘Throw me around, destroy me, spit on me, slap me … I want you to make a mess of me.’ ”
I say such porn has made men think that choking women during sex — a sometimes lethal act — is normal. “If I went on a first date, I’d want him to choke me,” she says. “I just think when rougher sex is posted, whether that’s on Pornhub or OnlyFans, it should have a warning. Like when you watch Britain’s Got Talent and it says, ‘Don’t try this at home.’ ”
Yet she rarely orgasms in her films “because I need to concentrate, and there’s too much going on. Making sure my hands are both moving, my mouth is busy, the next guy is coming in …” So your porn has nothing to do with female pleasure? “I get a lot of pleasure from men’s pleasure,” she says, “knowing it’s turning them on.”
‘If you could earn £1 million a month, you’d get your bits out’
By January, Bonnie claimed to have 800,000 OnlyFans subscribers — a mixture of free and paid accounts — making her its top content creator and, since it takes 20 per cent of earnings, its biggest cash cow. In the Channel 4 documentary, her mother remarks that although shocked initially by her daughter’s career, “If you could earn £1 million a month, you’d change your morals and get your bits out.”
Tia/Bonnie turned the outrage about her having sex with young fans into online rocket fuel. She baited the (mainly) women who denounced her, saying they were too lazy to have sex with their husbands. To critics who said she was putting feminism back 100 years, she replied it was stay-at-home mums, not a financially independent woman like her, who were socially regressive. Soon everyone was talking and tiktoking about her and she felt her profile was high enough for her biggest event to date: sleeping with 1,000 men.
The insatiable woman is a mythic figure, a source of horror and disgust from Messalina, wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, who was said to slip out of her palace to bed dozens of men in brothels, to the Singaporean porn actress Annabel Chong, who in 1995 replicated Messalina’s feat. Hired by the porn director John T Bone, Chong staged what was dubbed “the world’s biggest gangbang” on a set made to look like a Roman orgy. Chong, who was only 22 and had been brutally gang-raped as a student in England, claimed to be challenging gender roles when, over the course of 10 hours, she had sex with 70 men a total of 251 times.
This record was broken by various porn stars and had been held since 2004 by Lisa Sparks, who at the third annual world gangbang championship in Warsaw reportedly had sex with 919 men.
Tia/Bonnie organised her attempt on the record like a military operation, hiring a house in Marylebone and 16 staff to process the queue. Advertising her location on Telegram and X, she told men “to bring your friends, your family and your neighbours”. Hundreds showed up to have their ID verified and to wait in a corridor for hours. Condoms were provided and blue balaclavas for those who wanted to hide their faces on film. A “fluffer” was employed to get them excited. Some men had a few minutes alone but most took part in vast group sessions. To count towards her tally, each man needed to penetrate her vagina at least momentarily.
Why do men like gangbangs? “Some find it fun,” she says. “I’ve had groups of friends just having a laugh, high-fiving each other. I feel more confident that if one of those guys felt depressed, he could reach out to one of his friends because they’ve got an open relationship, a connection.” (I wonder why they can’t, maybe, go paintballing.) She has security because, “I get scared that if a guy comes on another guy by mistake, they’d be like, ‘Oh, you’re gay. Why have you done that?’ ”
When Bonnie appeared with him on the
Disruptors podcast, Andrew Tate said men who enjoy gangbangs are gay. “He thinks everything’s gay.”
Speaking of the physical toll of her world record, Tia/Bonnie sounds like a marathon runner pushing her body to the max. She talks of staying hydrated and keeping up her blood sugar halfway through with a doughnut. “Eight hours in,” she says, “I started to sting, so I thought I’m going to use some lube, but that stung more.” Her jaw seized up, but she was more concerned with her sexual reputation than the pain.
I ask if she’s ever turned down a man and she cites one with a fake ID and another who shamed other men for their small penises. “I told him instantly to get out.” But aren’t some men disgusting or smelly? She says she tastes more Lynx aftershave than unclean penis. Then she tells me something so disgusting I gag — that she was once expected to lick the anus of a porn star with huge piles. Oh Tia, I say, and she says brightly she’d do it for anyone. “Mostly they’re quite clean.”
What about loving sex? “I’m taking a break,” she says. “Me and my ex were together for a very long time and I’m fine not being in a relationship. It’s going to be difficult when I’m ready to date, because of what I do.” But, she adds, “Some of the sex I have with people is loving, but it’s not boyfriend and girlfriend loving.”
Too extreme for OnlyFans
After she’d completed the 1,000-man gangbang and Josh was editing it to be sold to subscribers for an estimated £300,000, OnlyFans suddenly announced it would not host porn made with amateurs. Visa, which runs its online payment scheme, thought her material too extreme. Analysts have also noted that OnlyFans is preparing for an $8 billion (£6 billion) sale and didn’t wish to scare off buyers.
So Bonnie hired 100 professional porn actors for another challenge. I sense she found this painful and unpleasant: the men were exceptionally well endowed and pounded her aggressively. But she needed new content to maintain her ranking.
But then Bonnie announced another event: a human “petting zoo”. She would be tied up helplessly in a glass box, and people could do anything they liked to her while others watched. Some compared it to Marina Abramovic’s 1974 performance
Rhythm 0, where the Serbian artist sat still before a table of 72 objects, including feathers, honey, a scalpel and a gun, which her audience could use on her. But Bonnie says she’d never heard of this, “and she gave them all these horrible sharp things — I was just going to have dildos and lube”.
For OnlyFans the petting zoo was the limit: Bonnie was kicked off the site, cutting her income instantly from £1.5 million a month to zero. She quickly joined another platform, Fansly, where she has built up 30,000 subscribers. But she says OnlyFans then told her she could not upload her 1,000-men event, which she claims cost £100,000 to host, because the men’s consent forms don’t grant permission to other sites. So all her hard work is still in the can.
The Andrew Tate podcast helped raise her profile, but also aligned her with a loathed misogynist who faces rape and human-trafficking charges, though he has denied acting unlawfully. So to keep relevant, to maintain her income, she is forced to create ever more extreme content. One option is to release a tape of her having anal sex, which, unusually for a porn star, she has never done. “That would probably get me £1 million.” (Lily Phillips is releasing hers too.)
To feed online rage, she has just filmed a “sex education” lesson in a classroom with very young-looking OnlyFans creators dressed in school uniforms. All look nervous; none has ever had sex in public. The boys are flushed from taking Viagra. Bonnie talks on camera of these girls needing to be “stretched out” by men. She is adamant they’re all over 18 and are never forced to do anything that makes them uncomfortable. Nonetheless, I say, it feels like a shift from selling her own body to pimping out young people, who may not be as secure and mentally strong. I get the death stare. “I’m not their mum. I’m not there to guide them. I’m here to say, ‘Hey, this is a business opportunity.’ ”
The youngsters are not paid but hope creating content with Bonnie will raise their OnlyFans ranking. But what, you wonder, will be their futures, now this material is online for ever? And what of hundreds of other girls — and boys — who will follow them into this rapacious industry? Or the millions who will view what Bonnie does as a template for their own sex lives?
Posing for her Instagram feed
A few days later when I ring Tia/Bonnie, she’s on a lilo in the south of France, planning her next move. She is far from Draycott and her parents’ relentless, decent toil. “Each day I wake up so excited. I can’t believe this is my life.” Yet no one believes she’s really happy. “They say to me, ‘You’re a suicide waiting to happen,’ ” she explains. Unlike Lily Phillips, who broke down after her 100-men gangbang, Bonnie insists you’ll never see her cry.
But it feels like she’s painted herself into a corner: what will she have to endure to top her already extreme challenges? She’s stopped going out much, because she’s scared the barrage of online hate may manifest as real violence. With her toughness, drive, looks and engaging personality, Tia reminds me of the flinty young women who win
The Apprentice. Given the right breaks she could have made it in business, say, or TV. Instead, she will always be Bonnie Blue, the Stakhanovite sex worker, the Ayn Rand of porn.
1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story is on Channel 4 on July 29
