As the sun sets on a booze-filled day during the first weekend of Schoolies celebrations in Surfers Paradise – on Queensland’s sunny Gold Coast – British OnlyFans ‘content creator’ Bonnie Blue has just wrapped filming a marathon sex session with 32 school leavers.

For four debauched hours, young men aged 18 and 19 queued up outside Bonnie’s hotel room waiting their turn to have sex with her while cameras rolled nearby. The sex, brief and awkward as it was, didn’t cost the boys a cent – but Bonnie gets to upload it online and reap the profits from her 180,000 subscribers.

By the end of the ‘shoot’, after Boy No. 32 has cleaned up and shuffled off, she is feeling sore and tired. ‘I have fluid coming out of my ears,’ she says.

That was a year ago. Bonnie had planned to be back on the Gold Coast for round two in a few days’ time, promising the sequel would be even more outrageous. But in a shock eleventh-hour decision, her visa was cancelled on Friday.

The meteoric rise of Bonnie Blue (a pseudonym – she’s cagey about her real name) has dominated headlines in Britain and Australia for weeks. Her 2023 Schoolies stunt has helped make her one of the top earners on OnlyFans, where she claims to make up to $300,000 a month selling her X-rated content.

Since its inception, OnlyFans has amassed four million creator accounts and 305 million fan accounts, a spokesperson for the company confirms. Most of the ‘creators’ earn less than the average wage due to their small followings; it takes notoriety to break through and amass the fortune Bonnie has.

She tells me the secret to her success is being ‘relatable’. Her videos allow the viewer to ‘imagine themselves in those situations with me’.

See all these men? This could be you. 

The 25-year-old’s life took a dramatic turn in 2020 when she decided to become a webcam performer to supplement her income from her full-time job in recruitment.

‘I got to a point in my life realising I would be doing this job up until I retire unless I make a drastic change,’ she explains.

‘I wasn’t inspired and I didn’t want to keep going to the office and working for someone else, getting told I would only have 22 days annual leave a year and be stuck on a restricted pay.’

Her marriage ended the following year – she doesn’t talk much about her ex-husband – and, in 2022, she moved from webcams to the dominant adult creator platform, OnlyFans.

That decision was a turning point in her life.

In my years as a journalist, I’ve encountered my fair share of OnlyFans creators. One thing they always tell me is that it’s a slippery slope from the ‘implied nude’ selfies they upload to begin with towards the more extreme content that is required to keep subscribers paying. The customer may be satisfied by ‘softcore’ content at the start, but their interest soon wanes unless you keep pushing the envelope.

‘Before I started OnlyFans I’d only slept with five people, now I’d guess it’s somewhere between 500 and 700 men,’ Bonnie says, although she admits that’s a ballpark figure and she couldn’t really say for sure.

‘If I was to fall pregnant, I’d never know who the father was. I wouldn’t even recognise them if they walked past me in the street,’ she laughs.

Bonnie’s breezy attitude to having sex on camera with hundreds of men is confronting at first. But she’s also friendly and disarmingly polite. Chatting over the phone and exchanging WhatsApp voice notes, it’s hard not to like her.

I learn she hails from a quiet village near Derby, a city in England near Nottingham – the university town where she would achieve notoriety for one of her sex marathons with teenage boys during Freshers’ Week.

To my surprise, she’s extremely close to her family. She was initially reluctant to tell them about her adult career but by all accounts they have been supportive, even though they would have preferred her to take a different path.

‘My childhood was very normal, there wasn’t any trauma or “daddy issues” which everyone online assumes,’ she tells me of her upbringing.

‘I grew up working class: nobody in my family attended university, dad worked multiple labouring jobs day and night to support our family, which I’ll always be so grateful for,’ she adds.

Bonnie says her parents learned about her job after they were anonymously sent a clip of one of her videos on social media.

‘I didn’t take their call for two weeks. I was scared of their reaction,’ she recalls.

‘But they’ve totally come around and truly support me. They wouldn’t have chosen this career for me but, like most parents, as long as I’m happy, they’re happy.’

Bonnie’s mum Sarah is particularly proud of her daughter now she can see just how lucrative OnlyFans has been. She admitted on a podcast recently that she was ‘gutted’ at first but is now so supportive she helps promote Bonnie’s orgies.

During Bonnie’s sex tour of Nottingham Trent University in September, the mother-of-two made a sign that read ‘Uni students – bonk me and let me film it’ and handed out flyers and condoms.

Bonnie’s life today couldn’t be more different to her humble upbringing. She says OnlyFans has given her financial freedom and eight investment properties – but insists her tight friendship circle has always remained the same.

‘I’ve only ever had a small group of friends and we’ve remained close. They love what I do; I have even employed some of them,’ she says.

‘I only have what I have because I am a sex worker but I am so proud of being a sex worker that I will never see the comment as an insult.’

While her parents support her, Bonnie faced a firestorm of criticism ahead of her planned Schoolies orgy, originally slated for the Meriton apartments on the Gold Coast. She was accused of ‘predatory behaviour’ by parents and survivors of sexual abuse, such as the activist Harrison James. A day before a decision was made on her visa, Daily Mail Australia’s political editor Peter van Onselen, had lambasted immigration minister Tony Burke for dodging the issue, effectively forcing his hand.

Bonnie didn’t seem to care. In fact, she told me the parents of the ‘barely legal 18-year-olds’ she has sex with should be ‘thanking’ her for ‘educating’ their sons in the bedroom.

‘I love teaching them how to please a woman and I always send them off with condoms.

‘They’re in safer environment with me than they would be if they were having unprotected, casual sex with a girl they’d just met that.’

Bonnie stresses that all her encounters are consensual and the men above the legal age. They must also sign a consent form and have two forms of IDs that are photographed alongside their face. Police-grade breathalysers are used to ensure the boys aren’t intoxicated.

Before her Australian visa was torn up, Bonnie was determined to make her latest Gold Coast trip her most lucrative yet. She had even joined forces with fellow content creator Annie Knight – dubbed ‘Australia’s most sexually active woman’ – and together they hope to have sex with hundreds of boys.

With Queensland off the agenda for now, Bonnie has set her sights on breaking the world record for sleeping with the most number of men in a 24-hour period. The current record is 919. She hopes to smash that next year.

‘I’m aiming for over 1000. It’s a lot to mentally and physically prepare for but I think I can do it,’ she says optimistically.

As for the future of her adult career, Bonnie says she’s committed to OnlyFans and there is no cut-off date.

‘At the moment, I can’t see anything wrong with it,’ she tells me.

‘Before [OnlyFans] my life was so planned out, which didn’t make me happy. Now I don’t have a plan whatsoever; it’s purely focused on whether I am happy today.

‘Like, do I want to go and sleep with a group of 18-year-olds? If yes, I’ll go and do it. If I want to chill that day with my family, I’ll go and do that. So I take things day by day.’

Bonnie is a smart girl from a good family. She has no apparent trauma and was raised by two loving parents. She was once married to a man who, I assume, adored her.

And yet here she is – preparing to attempt a world sex record that could push her to her physical limits.

I could ask Bonnie the question – ‘why?’ – a million times. I feel there is no answer that would satisfy her critics.

For many following her story, there simply must be a reason, deep down, why a respectable young woman would go down this sordid path. But Bonnie isn’t telling.

Perhaps there is no reason – besides the obvious, money. Or maybe there is, but that secret is the one thing in her life Bonnie wishes to keep sacred.