Mini Case study: Bella Thorne & Onlyfans

It seems like more and more often we’re seeing celebrities who are doing outlandish things and getting away with them. This leaves a lot of us to wonder, where is their publicist when they did this? As a publicist for a person, it’s obvious that you can’t control every word that comes out of someone’s mouth. Your hardest work lies in doing the damage control, your crisis management.

Crisis management can be messy. Let’s look at an example of poor crisis management in pop culture that recently happened. If you haven’t heard, Bella Thorne made headlines for making $1 million from her OnlyFans in only 24 hours. Fans were offered Bella’s $200 PPV content which was promised to be nude photographs. Once fans paid, they were disappointed to find that there were no nude photographs, just a headshot in which the girl in the picture was topless but her chest was covered.

Let me break down why this was a terrible PR move in my opinion.

1. You look like a liar. It makes you look very untrustworthy if you promise one thing and deliver something completely different. You wouldn’t want to work with me if I said I would create a press release and deliver it to you and ended up giving you one paragraph of words with no title, header, or any of the other important information that comes on a press release. So why would this situation be any different?

2. This really isn’t her bag or her lane. Sure there are people on OnlyFans who don’t use it for sex work, but it was popularized by sex workers. If you aren’t going to respect someone else for their hustle then don’t try to hop on the bandwagon. Bella and her sister have publicly talked down on sex workers and then try to take advantage of a platform made popular by those very people.

3. Her apology did not seem genuine at all. Of course, celebrities apologize all the time and go right back to whatever foolery they were doing before. Bella claims that she was trying to make the website more popular. This just seems blatantly untrue. If someone were on a mission to popularize a website that is typically stigmatized for being used by sex workers, then one might promote other people’s OnlyFans or actually give people what they paid money for. The issue isn’t that she didn’t take her clothes off, the issue is that by her lying to thousands, the people who actually make a living on this platform are suffering the consequences. There are now caps on PPV content, caps on tipping and a longer wait period for creators to get their money. The rumor is that so many people disputed the $200 that Bella charged for PPV that OnlyFans didn’t have the funds return all the money.

WAYS THIS COULD’VE BEEN HANDLED:

1. IF this was a publicity stunt, any person with morals would have told her not to charge an insane amount of money for something that she wasn’t going to deliver on.

2. In my mind, her creating an OnlyFans in the first place seems like enough of a publicity stunt, especially if her actual intent was to help destigmatize it. As previously stated, she could’ve just used her platform to spread awareness about other OnlyFans pages but instead, she used it for her own self-gain and ion like det.

3. If she TRULY meant her apology and didn’t mean to bring harm to the income of others, she could’ve given the money back or found some way to make it up to the people who she scammed.

Incidences like this happen in pop culture ALL the time. If you’re in need of a publicist or would like a strategy session to run your ideas by another party, feel free to fill out the contact form on my page.