OnlyFans gives women the chance to earn money by making porn. Sex traffickers also use the platform to abuse and exploit them, say police and prosecutors. The accused range from social media influencers to cash-hungry boyfriends. “I don’t think I’ll ever be fully healed,” said one victim.
By LINDA SO, ANDREW R.C. MARSHALL, LUIZA ILIE and JASON SZEP
This story contains offensive language and descriptions of sexual abuse.
On an August morning in 2022, a young woman slipped out of a house in suburban Wisconsin and dashed to a waiting police car.
Her hands shaking, she told officers it was the “most brave thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
For nearly two years, her boyfriend had held her captive, prosecutors say. She feared he’d kill her if she tried to leave. But just days earlier, after he’d poured hot grease down her back, she started plotting her escape, secretly messaging family and friends to alert police.
The young woman later explained her desperation to detectives: Almost every night, her boyfriend had forced her to record sex acts on camera to sell online. Among his chosen outlets was OnlyFans, the hugely successful website famous for porn.
OnlyFans says it empowers content creators, particularly women, to monetize sexually explicit images and videos in a safe online environment. But a Reuters investigation found women who said they had been deceived, drugged, terrorized and sexually enslaved to make money from the site. The findings are based on redacted U.S. police complaints and international court files, lawsuits and interviews with prosecutors, sex-trafficking investigators and women who say they’ve been trafficked.
In
one prominent case, influencer Andrew Tate, with millions of followers worldwide on social media, is accused of forcing women in Romania to produce porn for OnlyFans and pocketing the profits. He has denied the charges.
Generating less attention are cases Reuters identified in the U.S., where some women endured weeks or months of alleged sexual slavery in ordinary-looking homes in quiet communities. The victim sometimes was a fiance or girlfriend, abused to pad the household budget, fund a couple’s retirement or cover children’s expenses, according to accounts in police or court files. Reuters is withholding the names of women who say they have been trafficked.
The woman from Wisconsin, now 23, was abused by
Austin Koeckeritz, who described himself on a blog as
“a business owner, an artist, and a student of psychology.” He’s serving a 20-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to sex trafficking.
“The two years there felt like decades, and I was in pain and alone and ready to die,” the woman said in her first public comments about the case. “I don’t think I’ll ever be fully healed.”
At least two cases detailed in police files involve allegations of forced prostitution. A husband and wife ran a six-state trafficking and prostitution operation before their arrest in a tidy Ohio neighborhood where they were raising two children, prosecutors say. The husband allegedly used OnlyFans to arrange sexual encounters for multiple women and sell porn he ordered them to make. He awaits trial; his wife recently pleaded guilty to related charges.
These trafficking enterprises relied on intimidation, violence or false assurances of love to press women into porn and keep them producing, say victims and prosecutors. The alleged perpetrators were mostly men – some accused of beating and raping women, others of tattooing their names and faces on their victims. They filmed in private settings, sometimes holding victims captive for a year or more, the records and interviews show.
In a note she hid in the front yard for police the day before they rescued her, the Wisconsin woman said she “was basically imprisoned in this room to keep making money” for her abuser.
On OnlyFans, sex traffickers have a “unique niche” in which to privately conduct their business, said Catheline Torres with the U.S.-based National Human Trafficking Hotline, which helps survivors of trafficking and exploitation. Reuters identified 11 cases of women who told authorities or filed lawsuits saying they had been forced to perform sex acts on OnlyFans. But experts including Torres say the true prevalence of sex trafficking on the platform is nearly impossible for outsiders to assess. The accounts of most content creators are hidden behind a subscription-based paywall, “minimizing the likelihood that they are caught and prosecuted,” Torres said.
Prosecution can also be difficult because fearful or traumatized victims are reluctant to speak up or testify in court.
One woman told a detective her fiance had forced her over months to produce porn for OnlyFans in a suburban trailer park outside Orlando, Florida. She only escaped, she said, because police showed up to arrest the fiance on an unrelated warrant last year. He was charged with human trafficking in her case. But she recanted her allegations months later, and prosecutors dropped the charge.
She told Reuters that she feared the case might affect her custody of the couple’s young son and still felt “sick” just talking about what happened. “It brings back all the feelings, the emotions – every time,” she said. “The damage is forever.”
OnlyFans did not respond to requests for comment. The company is not charged in any of the cases described in this story.
On its website, OnlyFans says it prohibits prostitution and “modern slavery,” which includes human trafficking and forced labor. It says its moderators review all content on the site and are trained to identify and report suspected trafficking. OnlyFans has led “a focus on safety for people in the adult content space,” CEO Keily Blair said during a panel discussion in March.
Under company rules, creators must have written consent from everyone in their content. But until November 2022, they didn’t have to show that proof of consent to OnlyFans before the platform allowed their content to be posted, according to Blair’s recent statements to a UK parliamentary committee. The company now checks for proof of consent before allowing content to go live, she said.
