I have written about OnlyFans before:
The War in Ukraine, OnlyFans, and Scammers
People who read that blog entry I made several months ago may assume that ALL members of OnlyFans are scammers. But even I did not think that; I was warning about ONE member of that site who shamelessly scammed me. Others I have encountered over the past year were a lot more loving and honest with me.
Here are two different articles about OnlyFans that tell completely opposite stories, and both were published by USA Today, one of the most popular news sources.
She made $14M on OnlyFans. Now, she’s an outspoken anti-porn advocate.
Charles TrepanyUSA TODAYUpdated Dec. 4, 2025, 2:20 p.m. ETIn her early 20s, Nala Ray had it all. Or so she thought.
She lived in a $4.3 million home in California. She frequently drove luxury cars, including Ferraris, Bentleys and Lamborghinis. Her closet dripped with designer labels − Givenchy, Dior, Prada. Her favorite? A lamb-skin Chanel bag − red, with gold chains. Even her dogs, she says, sported Louis Vuitton collars.
All the luxury, however, came at a cost, she says. Ray made her fortune posting explicit content of herself on OnlyFans. In fact, she says she was one of the first to ever do so. In the early years of the website, when she made her account, no one quite knew what the fledgling, subscription-based platform would become. Maybe it’d be full of cooking classes. Or fitness tutorials. But, Ray says, because of early adopters like her, it became a de facto porn site, where anyone can upload content of themselves in exchange for cash from paying subscribers. Though not everyone on OnlyFans makes porn, the site has become known for it.
Most OnlyFans creators make next to nothing. A lucky few make millions. Ray was one of them. Over the course of her five years on the site, she estimates she made $14 million total, averaging $300,000 a month.
But after what she describes as a spiritual awakening, Ray left OnlyFans and has since become an outspoken critic of the platform. Now, she says, she wants to see OnlyFans − the very website she helped turn into a porn empire − destroyed.
Her plan? By shedding light on what she describes as the hidden cost of pornography, she hopes to change the hearts and minds of those still on OnlyFans, one person at a time. She wants to see a day when no one frequents the platform anymore.
“I was so deep in the industry,” Ray says. “I was bold enough to take so many crazy, radical steps into it. And now, I’m just on the opposite spectrum. It’s crazy. That shows God’s glory.”
How Nala Ray found OnlyFans
Ray’s upbringing was tumultuous.
When she was 8, a tornado wiped out her family’s home in small-town Missouri. Her dad had an affair, leading to her parents’ divorce, but they remarried each other two years later. After that, Ray says, her dad took on a newfound religious intensity, becoming a minister. Frequent in-fighting in her Baptist community led her family to hop from church to church. She never felt like she had a spiritual home.
“You get to see a dark side of religion,” Ray says. “People will kick you out of their church, and that’s so hard to see from people that you kind of fell in love with. So it was kind of major divorces, over and over and over again.”
Things worsened when her dad took pity on a wayward 16-year-old boy, letting him live in their home. The boy molested Ray when she was 13, she says, and the abuse continued for months until he ran away one night. Ray says neither she nor her family have heard from him since.
After that, Ray began acting out. She’d sneak out of the house at 2 a.m. to meet boys. She longed for the day she could finally move out and become independent. At around age 20, she found herself in Florida, working for an orthopedics company. She wasn’t sure where to go next.
Then, she got the Instagram DM.
“A random guy on Instagram − he was verified − he reached out,” she says. “And he was like, ‘Hey, you’d be so good at OnlyFans.'”
‘I couldn’t feel much at all’
OnlyFans skyrocketed in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ray caught the wave at the perfect time, she says, joining the site in February of 2020. Her first month, she made $87,000.
It became her new full-time job − and she took it seriously.
Ray acquired a manager. She read books on men’s psychology, so she could learn how best to appeal to their fantasies. She studied popular porn trends − and adjusted her content accordingly. She went on podcasts and made outrageous statements about sex that would go viral − whatever it took to drive more people to her page. At her peak on the site, she had 270,000 subscribers.
As the earnings ramped up, so did the pressure to make more gratuitous content, she says. She relied on marijuana and alcohol to get through particularly tough filming days. Anything, she says, to numb herself.
“Honestly, I couldn’t feel much at all. I could feel angry, but I didn’t cry for years. It felt like I didn’t feel sorry for anybody,” she says. “Anytime I would have to do major scenes, I’d have to drink myself into oblivion to just do it.”
Then, Ray met Jordan Giordano, a Christian influencer, on TikTok in 2023. He didn’t know who she was. They started talking.
Giordano treated her as a person, not as as sex object. It was his compassion and gentle nudging, she says, that ultimately got her to see the life she was living differently.
In January 2024, Ray quit OnlyFans. She and Giordano wed that March.
“There was this tear inside of me. I had built this whole life. I was so independent. I didn’t need a man. I made my bag. I could have anything I wanted. I could go anywhere I wanted, even though I didn’t have a lot of friends or anything. I felt so unique, and OnlyFans had given me that kind of freedom,” Ray says. “To cross over into this very unknown world was terrifying to me. I thought so many times, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t do this. It’s too scary for me. I don’t know if I’m courageous enough to cross this line.’ And so what happened was, I continued to just talk to Jordan. I continued reading my Bible. I continued to pray. And then Jordan’s mom was actually the one that really helped me make the decision. She was like, ‘You’re on the right path, but you still have this door of darkness open, which is OnlyFans. You cannot have both.'”
Reading that story, it would be understandable if you end up hating OnlyFans, especially if you are also Christian like her. That would be a case of confirmation bias.
And here is the other story.
Her dream of becoming a trad wife fell apart. Now, she’s an OnlyFans millionaire.
Charles TrepanyUSA TODAYUpdated Oct. 16, 2025, 3:39 p.m. ETAt 36, Elaina St. James says, she thought all her dreams were about to come true.
The husband, the children, the white picket fence she’d longed for since childhood − they were within reach. Or so she thought. After four years, she says, the man she once considered her happily ever after dumped her via email − and her views changed drastically.
Now, St. James lives a life far from what she dreamed about. At 58, she’s an adult content creator on OnlyFans, a subscription-based website where she says she’s made over $1.5 million since joining in April 2021.
Before then, St. James says, she’d aspired for the lifestyle touted by today’s self-proclaimed “trad wives” (short for “traditional wife”). She pictured herself as a homemaker, subservient to her husband. If the trend had been around back then, she thinks perhaps she would have even been a trad wife influencer.
St. James knows her journey − from a “trad wife in training,” as she calls it, to OnlyFans model − is an unusual one. After all, most women neither identify as trad wives nor work in adult content − two camps that seem to be at odds when it comes to how women should express sexuality and seek fulfillment.
Still, St. James believes people can learn from her story. The way she sees it, her life offers both a warning to those who think they have it all figured out and hope to those who think it’s too late to make a change. It also highlights the pressures women face amid a surge of conflicting labels and world views.
“Women need to understand that nothing is permanent, and that’s good and bad,” she says. “As long as you are alive, you can reinvent. And that’s to men, too. … You can, at some point, decide that your happiness is more important than somebody else’s − especially if that somebody else doesn’t treat you with love and respect.”
‘This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole entire life’
Growing up, St. James says she first dreamed of becoming an actress or singer, like her childhood heroes Cher, Dolly Parton or Carol Burnett.
But the conservative culture around her influenced her views, she says. So instead, she set her sights on marriage and family, pushing any career aspirations to the wayside.
“I was always told early on… that a woman has a shelf life as far as being attractive, and that was around 40. And then, you become invisible,” St. James says. “You have one value, and it’s your looks.”
St. James worked various jobs while waiting patiently for Prince Charming. Eventually, she says he arrived, via Match.com.
The man, a handsome lawyer, she says, wanted a wife − check. He also wanted kids − check. In short, he was everything St. James thought she wanted.
“It was like, ‘This is the lottery. I’ve won the lottery,’ ” St. James says. “This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole entire life. This is worth the wait. This is the person.’ “
“I was living with him. I was taking care of everything − everything a traditional wife would take care of,” she says. “I was building a home for us and for our future children.”
Eventually, St. James says, his controlling nature started to surface. He didn’t want her talking to their neighbors, for instance. She felt cracks form in their relationship. At one point, she recalls, they decided to live separately for a month. Not long after, she says, she got an email from him ending the relationship.
“I’ve never spoken to him since,” St. James says. “What do you do when you get an email like that? … I was just absolutely floored.”
St. James’ worst fear had come true: She was unmarried and childless at 40. Her lifelong dream crushed, what was she to do now?
Trad wives, OnlyFans and the pressures women face
The years that followed, she says, were brutal.
St. James struggled financially working various jobs. At one point, she says, she was making about $30,000 a year, with no benefits. On top of it, she says, she also had to provide for her son, whom she conceived through sperm donation.
In 2021, St. James came across a People magazine article about a woman who made $100,000 a month on a website called OnlyFans. She thought it sounded like a scam.
But her curiosity was piqued. She began researching.
“I was almost propping my eyelids open at night. I was obsessed with finding out what this OnlyFans was,” she says. ” ‘People really do this? People pay for this? What is this? This is crazy.’ “
A few months later, she decided to take the plunge and join the website. Leaning into her age, she says, helped her find a niche − and she’s since exploded in popularity.
St. James says joining OnlyFans does come with sacrifices. She lives with deep concerns about her privacy and safety. She receives violent threats regularly. So do her family members. People in her life have also started treating her differently, including her son’s teachers.
Still, she says she wouldn’t trade her life for the subservient housewife role she once wanted.
“I went through the withdrawal when you’re in that position and then you’re tossed aside,” St. James says. “Your whole existence was about pleasing somebody else, and then that person rejects you, and you’re like, ‘Well, now what?'”
To St. James, the emergence of trad wives and OnlyFans models speaks to the financial hardships women face. Trad wives cope with this by seeking to marry men who will provide for them. Similarly, many women turn to OnlyFans because they see it as a path to financial stability. St. James, after all, was one of them.
“People are scared right now. It’s harder to live as a single woman,” she says. “There is a point in a woman’s life, in most women’s lives, where the thought of being a mom and that being a central role to you is very, very appealing.”
And though various and competing labels for women are popular right now, it’s important to keep in mind there are many different ways to live a happy life.
“I lived it,” St. James says of the traditional role she dreamed of. “And, when it went away … I was devastated.”
It would be interesting to see what would happen if Nala Ray and Elaina St. James made contact and had a discussion about their lives, past and present. And did you notice that not only were both articles published by USA Today, they were both written by the SAME REPORTER?! Talk about cognitive dissonance!
Both those women are beautiful, both as members of OnlyFans and apart from it. In both cases, their inherit worth and dignity should have been respected, always, by EVERYONE. Ray probably got sick of sexist men picking on her as an OnlyFans model and now thinks the solution is to eliminate OnlyFans, not challenging the sexism of those who harassed her (a website is only as harmful as those who use it). Likewise, it’s a safe bet that if St. James’ husband had not been such an asshole to her, she might never have gone to OnlyFans (so that was his fault, obviously). In both cases, their lives became better. And that’s the only thing that matters, period.
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