I joined OnlyFans at 19 but then I realised the shocking truth

The girl in the pictures is stunning: blonde hair cascading over her shoulders; tanned skin stretching across a toned stomach; rosebud lips pursed in a perfect pout.

But it is her eyes that strike you. For beneath the fluttering jet-black lashes, the girl’s eyes look empty, two deep blue pools staring blankly into space. This is – or rather, was, until just three months ago – Rose Jones.

At 24, Rose was one of the top British earners on the adult subscription site OnlyFans, flaunting her naked body for strangers online in return for money.

While what she shared on her public social media pages might have seemed risqué, it was nothing compared to the explicit images, videos and private sex tapes (costing between £15 and £50, and lasting up to 50 minutes) she made for her hundreds of subscribers.

Full-frontal nudity; sex scenes with men, women or sometimes both; custom sexual acts requested by her fans… there was little she wouldn’t do to boost her profile – and her earnings.

Much like fellow OnlyFans star Bonnie Blue, 25, whose sordid act of bedding 1,057 men in 12 hours caused outrage last month, Rose couldn’t see beyond the perks of the site.

Having joined the platform aged 19, at her peak she was making up to £9,000 a month, enough to fund a glittering lifestyle of designer clothes, luxury holidays and an expensive London flat.

Independently wealthy, self-employed and enviably confident in her own skin – much of it on display for strangers to lust over – Rose seemed to have it all.

‘The world was my oyster. Because of OnlyFans, I was this pretty girl with loads of money to spend on whatever I wanted,’ she says.

‘If anyone judged what I was doing, I’d tell them to mind their own business – I was happy, empowered and enjoying every minute.’

Except that it was all a lie. Far from having the time of her life, Rose was, she now admits, deeply unhappy during most of the four years she spent as an OnlyFans star.

The experience left her battling crippling body-image issues, sent her mental health into an all-time low and exposed her to intense pressure to perform sexual acts with which she was increasingly uncomfortable.

Her story is essential reading for any young person who has been lured into believing OnlyFans is a fast route to riches, fame and contentment by the likes of Bonnie Blue and her competitor Lily Phillips, who claimed she would soon film content even more shocking than Blue’s ‘1,000-men’ stunt.

Because the facade that Rose Jones presented to the world was just that – behind which a vulnerable young woman was hiding.

For a start, her name isn’t Rose; offline, she is Eve, a former art student who lives in Hampshire with her father and their two dogs.

Having quit the site for good last November, hers is now a cautionary tale – revealing the full, unvarnished truth about OnlyFans.

‘My OnlyFans profile, Rose Jones, was like a mask I wore,’ Eve admits now. ‘It was a slippery slope; I started doing things I swore I’d never do when I started on the site.

‘Very quickly, I went from bikini shots and topless pictures to full nudes. Then it was intimate scenes on my own, then intimate things with other people.

‘I kept telling myself that I could do better, that I could earn more.

‘But I lost myself in the process of trying to become an OnlyFans success story.’

The daughter of a builder and an artist, Eve never had aspirations to take her clothes off for a living.

She dreamed of being creative like her artist mother and, from a young age, she remembers them sloshing paints around in her studio together.

But Eve’s mother fell ill when she was just five. ‘Mum almost died of breast cancer then, but she went into remission for ten or so years,’ she says.

‘Then, in 2017, she got re-diagnosed. They realised the cancer had spread to her bones.

‘Chemo wasn’t working, so they found a hormone pill that seemed to stop the tumours from growing any bigger. But the doctors warned us that, at some point, this would stop working.’

Tragically, that day came in 2020. Having moved home from Oxford Brookes University, where she was in her first year of a degree in fine art, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Eve spent four precious months with her mum before she passed away that July.

She had, in fact, started her OnlyFans profile already, having heard about the platform on a podcast and signed up – mostly out of curiosity – in April 2020.

‘As it was the pandemic, I couldn’t get a normal job,’ she says. ‘At the time, I was a very open person, comfortable with my sexuality.

‘As an art student, I was happy posing nude for others and drawing nudes of myself, so it felt like a natural progression. I didn’t mind my body being on show. I remember telling Mum about this site, which people seemed to be making money from and asking what she thought about me trying my luck.

‘She said, “Go for it. If you think it’s a good idea, why not?”’

Eve admits now that her mum, though supportive at the time, ‘probably wouldn’t have approved of how far I went with OnlyFans’.

‘It’s weighed on my mind for the past four years,’ she says.

‘She wasn’t around to see what it turned into, and I don’t think she would have liked it – or who I became – at all.’

Racked with grief and trying to numb the pain, in late 2020 Eve decided to give up her art degree –which reminded her so much of her artist mother – to concentrate on OnlyFans.

‘I couldn’t go back to studying art after Mum died,’ she says. ‘That was a really hard decision; it was such a huge part of my life.’

Eve focused on growing her fanbase, posting raunchy videos on TikTok and Instagram – where she has more than 50,000 followers – to hook people in, before directing them to her OnlyFans account to subscribe.

She charged £14.99 a month, for which subscribers – all complete strangers – could see all her explicit content. But fans could also request personal pictures, phone calls and one-on-one videos. ‘I made £8,000 in my first three months,’ she says.

The requests ranged from sexual to plain peculiar. One client asked her to melt an ice cube on her belly button; another asked her to tip buckets of slime over her naked body. High on success and hungry for more, she was happy to do anything they asked.

‘The money started pouring in and, at first, it was fun and exciting,’ Eve says. ‘I felt good. Strangers were complimenting my body and telling me how great I was. It was a way for me to avoid my grief, to escape and become somebody else.’

Offline, her day-to-day life began to change to reflect her online persona. Though her images – posing in lacy lingerie, bikinis and figure-hugging leather – looked effortlessly thrown together, it was hard work behind the scenes.

‘Some days I was working up to 16 hours, from 9am to 1am, planning content, getting ready, filming, editing and then messaging fans,’ she says.

‘I never took days off – if you do that, your popularity plummets – so it was a 24/7 job.’

She was, she admits, ‘addicted’ to OnlyFans, especially the money she made from posting photographs and sexual videos of herself in compromising positions – almost 2,500 in total.

As the money rolled in, nights in at home turned into glitzy holidays to Mykonos and Ibiza and a penchant for Prada and Louis Vuitton handbags. But it all came at a cost. As evidenced by Bonnie Blue, who is just one year older than her, Eve says that as more and more creators flock to OnlyFans, users feel the need to go to shocking and sometimes horrifying lengths to stand out.

While she had started out doing arty pictures and videos, her fans soon demanded more. By now making a living from OnlyFans, she was acutely aware her income depended on them – so when they asked her to start making sex tapes, she obliged.

At first, she admits, it felt like a daring act of rebellion that gave her a thrill. But one explicit video soon led to another, then another, and any ‘red lines’ Eve had initially laid down, denoting sexual acts she wouldn’t do, soon vanished – for the right price.

‘Pretty soon I stopped enjoying myself,’ she admits.

She acknowledges that her job essentially reduced her to being a sex object for faceless strangers on the internet – something she is less than proud of today.

And with increased visibility came the trolls, who picked apart her appearance – from her nose to her already tiny figure – until she felt she had no choice but to change it.

‘I spent every waking hour trying to improve the polished, perfect version of myself that people wanted to pay for,’ she says.

In 2022, she had laser eye surgery, followed by a nose job a year later. ‘I thought making my nose smaller would make me more successful. It was the same with dieting; I thought if I lost weight, people would like me more,’ she says. ‘It’s crazy how quickly I became so unlike myself. I started to feel numb.’

But it wasn’t just her appearance that was impacted. Reactions from those who knew the real her were understandably mixed.

Surprising though it may sound, Eve’s father supported her OnlyFans career – ‘He just wants me to be happy and healthy’ – but not all family members were so accepting.

Her grandmother called her a ‘porn star’ after finding out about her work. ‘It wasn’t nice,’ Eve admits now. And, while some friends stuck by her, others drifted away.

‘I lost some friendships because I became this person that wasn’t me any more,’ Eve says. ‘I was too obsessed with myself and my own career.’

Dating, too, was almost impossible. Potential partners were put off the moment she mentioned OnlyFans, or expected her to be someone she wasn’t.

Even now, Eve struggles to meet people because she is afraid of being judged on her past.

And as we know only too well in this digital age, once an image is shared online, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Despite stringent rules on OnlyFans telling subscribers not to save or share content, in reality this is impossible to enforce.

‘I’ve had several of my pictures and videos leaked over the years,’ says Eve.

‘Like most creators, I’ve had to use an external agency to get the leaked content taken down from porn sites – though I’ve had to accept that nothing can truly be deleted.’

Safety is also a concern, with some OnlyFans stars becoming the victims of stalking.

Eve recalls the measures she had to take when sharing content so that none of her fans could cross the digital divide.

‘I was very cautious about my safety,’ she says. ‘I didn’t share where I live, or take any videos around my house or where I was on holiday, because there are some strange people out there and I didn’t want to take the risk.’

By early 2023, the scales started to fall from her eyes.

‘This was the low point of my mental health,’ Eve, who was by then taking antidepressants, admits.

‘It got to a point where I didn’t recognise who I was any more. I was still making content, but it felt flat – I was going through the motions.

‘Offline, I was going on walks in the rain and sitting under a bridge, crying for hours. It was a really dark time.’

She left the swanky London flat she had bought with her OnlyFans earnings and moved home to be with her dad.

Grief, which she hadn’t fully processed after losing her mum, hit her ‘like a tidal wave’.

‘I lost all my energy. I couldn’t get out of bed,’ she says.

‘I remember sleeping on the sofa, not being able to walk up or down the stairs.’

She came off antidepressants, which she says made her feel ‘numb’, and started seeing a therapist.

Then, in November 2023, spurred on by the time and effort she had put into her OnlyFans profile in the past, she decided to give it one last go.

‘I knew it wasn’t the best thing for my mental health, but I wanted to try,’ she says.

‘Quite quickly, it became apparent that the money wasn’t like it was before.’

Indeed, findings published this week showed that the average creator made just £1,291 in 2023 – and that’s before OnlyFans, whose billionaire owner makes £1million a day from the site, takes its 20 per cent commission.

‘Other people on there were doing more and more extreme things to make money, and that wasn’t something I was prepared to do,’ she says.

‘I realised that, even if I made £50,000 the next month, I wouldn’t be happy. That’s when I knew it was time to stop.’

In November last year, Eve called her dad, sobbing, telling him her heart was no longer in it.

The next day, she uploaded a message for her subscribers – and quit OnlyFans for good.

Though she describes ‘a massive sense of relief’, she admits: ‘I clung to OnlyFans for so long because it was all I’ve known for the past four years. I do wish I’d stopped sooner.’

For now, her page remains active – ‘There were some people who had just spent money on it, and I felt guilty deleting it immediately’ – but she plans, in the next few months, to close it down.

Shocking as it may sound to readers, Eve isn’t concerned that images of her naked body, or indeed videos of her performing explicit acts, may remain on the internet for ever.

For her generation, sexting, sending nudes and laying out your life online are all part of growing up, she says – even if her version was more extreme than most.

Today, she still has good friends in the OnlyFans world.

‘I have a lot of respect for everyone in the industry,’ she says. ‘I know how difficult it can be and I admire all who are strong enough to deal with that – it just wasn’t for me.’

However, she now believes that age limits should be introduced to stop teenagers like her from joining OnlyFans before they can fully understand the implications.

‘I don’t think you should be allowed to participate in pornographic acts on OnlyFans until you’re 21.

‘I think 18 is too young to be making decisions like that.

‘When I started at 19, I thought I knew everything. I was so sure of myself, but now I realise I was still a child.’

Citing Bonnie Blue as an example, she adds: ‘This whole “barely legal” category of young men she targets is really problematic. Encouraging this sort of behaviour among younger adults is awful.’

To others considering a career like hers, she urges them to see the industry for what it really is.

‘Make sure you know what you’re getting into. You have to be strong and hard-skinned because it can wear you down.

‘OnlyFans isn’t a fun side hobby; to make any kind of money you have to go all in, and that takes a lot of time and dedication.

‘Even then, there’s no guarantee you’ll be successful. And it can affect your future life choices.’

Now, looking to the future, when she hopes one day to start her own business, she says: ‘With OnlyFans, I was trapped: every day was about making money, looking the part.

‘Finally, I can look forward to the rest of my life – not as Rose, but as Eve.’