The rise to fame of Bonnie Blue, who became Britain’s most notorious adult entertainer by claiming to have had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours, raises any number of questions. Not the least of these is: how do her friends and family put up with it?
After all, it is one thing when an individual decides to make her living by filming herself having sex with hundreds of strangers. What about when that woman is your daughter, sister or wife?
The depressing answer is that they all appear to be on the books. Earlier this year, viewers of a Channel 4 documentary, 1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, about Blue – real name Tia Billinger, 26 – were shocked to discover that not only was she married, but her husband, Oliver Davidson, 27, had encouraged her into the porn industry in the first place, and had a job helping to manage her.
Channel 4 released a documentary of the porn star this summer called, ‘1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story’ – Rob Parfitt/Channel 4
“We’re married so he’s going to get some of the money regardless,” Billinger said of Davidson in an interview last year. “He might as well work for it. This job benefits everyone in my family, including him.”
It is a family enterprise – her mother, grandmother and stepfather have all been enthusiastic supporters, too. “If you could earn £1m a month, you’d change your morals and get your bits out,” Billinger’s mother says in the film. After a screening earlier this year, The Telegraph critic, Anita Singh, noted the crowd was packed with Billinger’s close relatives.
“You might be thinking that Bonnie’s parents are horrified by her life choices,” she wrote. “Nope. They’re on the payroll. Also at the screening I attended were Bonnie’s mum, dad and granny.”
Source: The Reality Check Podcast on YouTube
‘Evil and controlling’
All the same, few were surprised when it was reported earlier this year that Billinger and Davidson, childhood sweethearts who married when Billinger was 22, were planning to divorce.
Billinger has insisted the separation was amicable and has “had nothing to do” with her work, of which Davidson, a rugby-loving, privately-educated estate agent, was said to be “very proud”.
There is mounting evidence, however, that the gargantuan fortune Billinger has amassed through her work, reported to be as much as £34m, is at the heart of an acrimonious split.
Childhood sweethearts, Billinger and Davidson, have broken up and are planning to divorce – @olliemdavidson/Instagram
On Saturday, Oliver’s mother, Gill Davidson, gave an interview in which she said Billinger and her “evil” team were working to prevent her son from profiting by the divorce.
“My son is no longer on the payroll,” Gill Davidson told the Daily Mail. “Tia and her team have cut him out, and it seems he is not entitled to a penny of her wealth.
“We’ll be glad to have got rid of her,” she added. “It’s all about her. She’s controlling and manipulative.”
The family circle
It is the latest twist in a saga that has revealed the mind-boggling and tawdry extremes of internet culture, as well as the vast sums of money involved. Billinger’s own earnings are thought to exceed £1.5m per month.
Born in 1999, Billinger grew up in Draycott, Derbyshire, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, she has said, and where it’s “nice, but it’s as if you can’t leave”. Her mother, Sarah, is a care worker. She never knew her biological father, but saw her stepfather, Nicholas Elliot, a welder, as her “real father”. Both have been supportive of her career choices.
“Obviously he doesn’t sit watching the videos, but all my social media, my TikToks, he’ll have a look at,” Billinger said earlier this year of her stepfather. “And he’s just proud seeing how happy I am, how much I’ve been able to support the family – it’s really changed my life and my family’s life.”
Sarah, for her part, told the Channel 4 documentary: “Was it something I’d have chosen for her to do? No. I was really shocked. Would I want her to do anything else? No. All you want is for your kids to be happy, and she is happy. She’s got no daddy issues, she’s not been abused – all these things people insist that must have happened to her. It’s her choice.”
Sarah has even reportedly helped produce props for her daughter’s stunts, including a sign saying, “Bonk me for free, let me film it”, which was used by Billinger last year when she slept with 150 students during Nottingham University’s freshers week.
Billinger has been banned from two countries for her extreme behaviour and sex stunts – @bonnieblue/Instagram
Billinger met Davidson, the son of a successful local businessman, at a New Year’s Eve party in 2013. After she left school during sixth form, it was his parents who helped the couple put together a deposit to buy their own home outside Nottingham. By 19, she was working in recruitment for the NHS, but wondering if there was more to life.
“I kept thinking, ‘Is that all there is?’,” she told The Times earlier this year. For 18 months, they tried and failed to have a baby, before alighting on another solution to late-adolescent ennui: heading Down Under. After lockdown, she and Davidson sold up and moved to Australia, where she first started working as a “cam girl”, performing sex acts online for paying customers. Davidson, she told a podcast earlier this year, was one of her biggest early supporters.
“I said I could never do that,” Billinger told the Holly Randall Unfiltered podcast. “I’d never have the confidence. People wouldn’t want to watch me, I’m not pretty enough. He was like, ‘No, you’re beautiful. Do it’, and I guess, gave me the confidence.”
‘It’s just sales’
The skills she had picked up in her office job proved transferable. “Instantly I enjoyed it, and I was good at it,” she told The Times. “It’s just sales, really.” Before long, she was making thousands per month. She and Davidson, who was schooled at Trent College in Long Eaton, split up when he moved back to the UK, having reportedly tired of the endless beach days and boat trips.
“I was living in Australia. He’d moved back to the UK,” Billinger explained at the time. “And we’d been together from the age of 14, so we just grew apart… I changed a lot. He changed a lot. We weren’t the most compatible towards the end. Like, we both wanted different things from partners.”
She subsequently became a real-life escort, and launched a profile on OnlyFans, a subscriber-based platform popular with sex workers. Billinger soon discovered a knack for publicity-generating scandal. She advertised herself as free to school leavers and students who would agree to being filmed while they had sex with her (they could maintain anonymity with balaclavas or masks).
She was banned from AirBnB, Australia and Fiji for her stunts. When criticised for her extreme behaviour, she replied even more provocatively, claiming she was only doing things that ought to have been the duty of wives and girlfriends.
The adult entertainer claims to have had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours – Instagram/@bonnieblue
The combination of PR nous and a willingness to put herself through extreme physical stunts meant her earnings skyrocketed – and she quickly became OnlyFans’ bestselling performer. But the platform finally banned her earlier this year, not after the 1000-man stunt in January, but following another proposal in which she would become a human “petting zoo”, where she would be tied up in a glass box so that anyone who wanted to could come and have sex with her, in full view of onlookers.
Although she has yet to hit the same revenue on her new hosting site, Fansly, Billinger has already amassed a fortune. As long as she maintains her instinct for the internet economy, where the spoils often seem to go to those who are most extreme, she is unlikely to starve. Nor are the friends, family members and other close accomplices who have become dependent on her.
Billinger is the most famous face of a booming industry. OnlyFans generated more than £4.1bn in revenue last year, and Pornhub reported 115 million visitors per day. Even within the growing field, her numbers are impressive – she has amassed more than 600,000 followers across different accounts and millions of views on TikTok.
No sign of emotion
Other performers have done shocking stunts. Lily Phillips, another OnlyFans star, made headlines when she slept with 100 men in a day. In the documentary about that event, Phillips breaks down afterwards. In an interview in August, her father, Lindsay, said he would sell the family home if it would help his daughter change career.
“If there’s anything we could do to change her profession, we’d do it overnight,” he said in an episode of Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over. “It’s the ‘degradingness’ of it and making sure that she’s safe,” Lindsay explained. “Sometimes we think, ‘Have we done anything wrong with her upbringing?’. Well, as far as I’m concerned, we’ve had nothing but nice times and lov… Is it money? Because if it was money, we’d sell our house. You could have everything you want, Lily, if you gave it all up now.”
Billinger has yet to display any such vulnerability, despite constantly being told she must have trauma, or some other mental health issue. Instead, she gives the impression she thinks of the most intimate human activities as no different from shaking hands, and is pleasantly surprised to find she has made generational wealth from doing so.
Those around her, apart from her mother-in-law, appear to remain loyal. As with successful musicians, actors or sportspeople, such sums of money at such a young age have a warping effect. As Billinger herself has bluntly put it, “My mum said to me as a kid, ‘Don’t be a town bike’, but now me being a bike has paid for our bills.”
The Blue empire, a multi-million pound family porn business, is not going anywhere. But whether Davidson will receive any of the proceeds of her work remains to be seen.
Billinger has been approached for comment.