‘My appeal is because…

Piper Rockelle was seven when she inherited her mother’s old iPhone and learned how to share pictures and videos from her everyday life with the wider world.

One, from 2016, when she would have been eight, shows her, a cute little girl in a pink vest-top, instructing other kids how to make play-slime (a big craze at the time) from glue and shaving foam.

The camera angle is a bit wonky, as is her ponytail, but that’s part of the charm.

‘Let’s get started,’ she tells her audience, with a wide and unaffected smile.

It’s where it’s all ended that is the concerning part.

Fast forward ten years, and Piper – who went on to become one of the biggest child influencers in the world – has now well and truly grown up.

She still loves a ponytail, and a cute vest top, but she’s no longer sharing fun challenges and pranks with millions of fans.

These days she dresses (and undresses) for a very specific audience on Instagram, on TikTok and, most recently, on OnlyFans.

Her content is offered with one aim – to get men to pay for it, and keep paying with the promise of more (or less, if we are talking clothes) to come.

As business models go, it’s a proven formula – and OnlyFans offers a lucrative platform.

But in what is surely a depressingly modern morality tale, Piper is a pioneer of a new and disturbing breed of content creator – that of the internet ‘kidfluencer’ who then pivots into adult content.

Particularly stomach-churning, in Piper’s case, is that she drove the career shift herself.

After her 18th birthday in August last year she told her millions of followers that she would be launching an OnlyFans page on Jan 1 and began an online countdown.

She has been posting content there ever since, claiming that in her first 24 hours on OnlyFans she earned £2.2million. Her team say she is on target to make around £30million this year.

Her appeal? As Piper herself says: ‘It’s because I look so young. I mean, I am really young. I’m literally like fresh turned 18… and people kind of like that, unfortunately.’

Sickeningly, there is a particular appetite, it seems, for sexualised content when it comes served up with teddy-bear or bunny-rabbit themed outfits, as Piper does.

A recent clip shows her sitting down with a superfan – a 58-year-old man who says he has been following her online for six years, since she was 12. In the past three months he claims to have spent £555,000 on her – mostly on paid content, but he has also gifted her a car. Why?

‘All I want to do is be your friend,’ he says, before pointing out that she is wearing socks, and doesn’t she realise that he has a thing about her feet? She duly takes off her socks.

There is no way of knowing if this man is real, or if the whole thing is a set-up – perfectly possible given the real-but-not-real world that Piper inhabits – but it’s a troubling reminder that men watch ‘innocent’ content for less than innocent reasons.

For Piper, it all began when her mother Tiffany Smith spotted the potential to make money from online videos.

A single mum from the time Piper was about three months old, when Piper was around three, they became involved in the child pageant world, travelling to various competitions. Piper was also home-schooled.

It was Smith who first started posting videos of Piper on channels like Musical.ly – a precursor to TikTok – but the little girl learned the technicalities herself. By the time she was nine she started attracting broader attention online.

But it was her YouTube channel, launched in 2016, that became the foundation of her fame, and led to a move from Atlanta to Los Angeles for the family, where a ‘squad’ of other children were recruited to join Piper on her YouTube channel. By now, Smith was her full-time manager.

Also involved in the family ‘business’ was Smith’s boyfriend Hunter Hill, introduced at the start as Piper’s brother, despite not being related to her.

But the very future of Piper’s brand was threatened in 2022 when Smith was the subject of a lawsuit.

Eleven of ‘Piper’s Squad’, the young content creators on her YouTube channel, sought compensation, claiming they had been bullied and exploited by Smith. Of particular concern were the claims that Smith not only acknowledged the fact that some fans were following her daughter for less-than-innocent reasons, but leaned into that interest.

One former member, Corinne, claimed that aged 12 or 13 she had gone to a post office with Smith, who was posting what appeared to be a package of Piper’s underwear. Questioned about it, Corinne says Smith declared: ‘Old men like to smell it.’

Smith and Hill denied all allegations and the lawsuit was settled in 2024 to the tune of $1.85million, without any admission of liability, but a subsequent Netflix documentary, Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing, opened the lid on a very murky world – one which occupies a no man’s land where normal child employment laws rarely apply.

This week, we spoke to some of those involved in that lawsuit, and no one expressed any surprise at the fact Piper is now a star on OnlyFans.

Where else would someone whose childhood played out the way hers did, end up, asked Florida-based lawyer Matthew Sarelson, who represented the young members of Piper’s Squad.

‘I predicted years ago that she would wind up on OnlyFans,’ Mr Sarelson told the Daily Mail. ‘What else is she going to do with her life? Is she going to go to college and have a normal life after what she went through? No.’

Lessons should be learned here, he says.

‘I think if you are a young person thinking about going on social media you should think long and hard about what you’re getting into.

‘I don’t tell people that it’s a hard “no”, but you need to go in with your eyes wide open. There’s an ugly side to putting your entire life on social media.’

Texas-based Angela Sharbino has three children, and her son Sawyer – who had been part of Piper’s Squad for around a year, when he was 14 – was involved in the lawsuit. She stressed that she doesn’t see Piper joining OnlyFans ‘through a lens of judgment’, rather she feels sorry for her.

‘I see a young woman who grew up under enormous pressure, and I sincerely wish her healing, protection, and happiness.

‘I think she deserves grace, love, and people around her who prioritise her wellbeing over online attention or profit.

‘I think a lot of young people online are shaped by pressures they’re too young to fully process at the time, and I have a great deal of compassion for Piper in that regard.’

She adds: ‘I don’t believe young creators should feel pressure to sexualise themselves in order to stay relevant online or make money.

‘There are so many successful careers that can be built through creativity, storytelling, humour, music, fashion, entrepreneurship, and talent without crossing those lines.’

She says her three children – Sawyer’s older sisters are actresses – have certainly learned lessons about the potency of social media.

‘Sawyer stepped away from social media for quite a while to focus on life and music and is only now beginning to re-engage on his own terms.

‘Social media… can create careers, creativity, connection, and opportunity. But I think young people especially need strong boundaries and a sense of self-worth that isn’t entirely tied to online validation.’

Yvonne Dougher’s teenage son Donald was also one of Piper’s Squad. His mother says her son fell out of love with social media – to the point of taking down his own YouTube channel after the settlement.

‘He said he wanted to get as far away as possible from social media, so he did two years at a Swiss boarding school and he thrived there,’ she says. Donald is now 19 and studying business at King’s College in London.

‘For a lot of kids, [social media is] their only avenue but nobody wants to watch you do pranks when you’re going into your 20s, so what’s the next step?’

Dougher was also not surprised to hear that Piper is a rising star on OnlyFans.

‘From her content, you could see that is where it was heading, and it’s always been money-motivated.

‘I wish Piper every success in her life and I just hope she finds the right path.’

Benjamin Nolot is the CEO of End Teen Porn, an American pressure group which wants to raise the age of entry into the porn industry from the age of 18 to 21.

‘It’s almost like a rite of passage in our culture where if you’ve gained some attention on social media as a child then the way to continue to cash in on that attention is to take off your clothes and pose on OnlyFans,’ he said.

‘It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the human body or human sexuality, it’s that there are risks involved with that level of exposure to the entire world that most people that age have not thought through.

‘I think a lot of the young women who have gained attention as influencers feel pressure to cash in on the currency of that fame to exploit their sexuality through OnlyFans.

‘It’s set up with a false premise that they’re going to be financially successful and what they end up with is images of their nude bodies out there for the public to consume without any ability to get those taken down, for ever.

‘That brings its own level of mental health challenges – a lot of regret and the potential to sabotage future relationships.’

Most concerningly is the fact that it’s aided and abetted (even if sometimes unwittingly) by parents.

Fortesa Latifi, a New York-based journalist, has previously interviewed Piper, and her new book Like, Follow, Subscribe makes for disturbing reading. Latifi spent months talking to both parents of kidfluencers, and the children themselves and documents the fine line between innocent content that makes everyone involved a few bucks, and a darker place.

One parent, for example, facilitated the monetisation of their daughter’s first period (a sanitary products company paid for this content).

Many parents were aware that potential predators were circling, or at least in their child’s orbit. Did they pull their children back? Not necessarily, because by then they were in too deep, in terms of financial commitment.

One of the saddest parts of Piper’s story, for example, is that she never knew her dad.

She’d only met him once, when she was too young to remember, yet as she progressed through her teenage years, she started to wonder about who he was. Perfectly normal, except in her case her videos asking the ‘what ifs’ were uploaded for the world to see.

When she was 13, she was filmed going to meet her dad. When he didn’t show up, her tears were broadcast. Several years later, she did meet him.

There was an awkward encounter, again captured on camera, where he insists on not being identified (he isn’t) and can’t wait to get away.

She asks outright if he ever loved her. He makes it clear he did not and afterwards she goes home and flings herself on her bed, weeping.

After this candid encounter, the ‘likes’ went through the roof. Bingo! But at what cost to Piper’s life and happiness?

Another tragic aspect of her story is that she seems perfectly aware that she is now living – and working – in a world where nothing is quite real.

‘I always think about my life as a show – you’ve got to keep it interesting,’ she explained in a recent newspaper interview.

‘It’s just ridiculous that I can have a lifestyle from doing what I’m doing and people want to watch me.’

In an interview for Teen Vogue earlier this year, she admitted that she simply doesn’t know how to exist without a camera in tow.

‘I’m so afraid of people in the real world,’ she said. ‘If I’m going to meet a person for the first time… I might have to act like I’m filming a vlog because I get so much more comfortable when there’s a camera on me. When a camera is on, I have worth.’

Meanwhile, there’s a chilling acceptance of the need to push for clicks and subscribers now.

As she says: ‘Nobody’s gonna want to see me when I’m f****** 40.’