Just who is Lil Tay? That was my first question on Sunday when I saw social media reports that the ‘influencer’ had launched an account on adult content site OnlyFans just one minute after allegedly turning 18 – and made more than $1million in just three hours.
Even for Lil Tay’s ‘fans’ – who have followed the US-Canadian rapper and self-styled ‘influencer’ since she posted her first YouTube video in 2018 – surely it was enough to make anyone sit up in astonishment.
As one shocked fan wrote after her announcement: ‘That’s sad as hell. She just turned 18.’ Another pointed out: ‘We saw this girl grow up, what the hell is wrong with people?’
How is she so famous she can reportedly make millions after one social media post announcing she was revealing all on OnlyFans – the sleazy site made famous by ‘porn content creator’ Bonnie Blue, who had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours?
Who is sick enough to be waiting for this content which – while all supposedly taken and posted when Lil Tay was 18 – is mathematically murky given the past discrepancies over her age.
But the real million-dollar question: How did a once innocent child end up quite literally selling her soul and body to the devil that is social media?
For those like me who had never even heard of Lil Tay before Sunday, the answer is as messy and make-believe as much of her background.
Lil Tay – whose real name is either Tay Tian or Claire Hope depending on who you believe – launched her own YouTube channel in 2018.
Lil Tay launched her own YouTube channel in 2018 and bragged that she was the ‘youngest “flexer” of the century’ in her videos – a term that refers to boasting about possessions
How did a once innocent child end up quite literally selling her soul and body to the devil that is social media? Amanda Platell asks
Aged just nine (as she claimed) or ten (as her Wikipedia page claims), she marketed herself as a wealthy, privileged social media star.
In videos to her 600,000 YouTube subscribers and 5.8million Instagram followers, she posed seductively in luxury cars (which she was too young to drive) and lavish homes. She brandished expensive jewellery, covered herself in wads of money, sucked her thumb suggestively, and wore provocatively tight tops emblazoned in silver sequins with the words ‘Pornstar’ or ‘Juicy’.
She bragged that she was the ‘youngest “flexer” of the century’ – a term that refers to the act of boasting about possessions, achievements or experiences to impress followers.
Such social media bragging has worked for the Kardashian family, Gwyneth Paltrow and even the Duchess of Sussex who’ve made squillions. But, in Lil Tay’s case, it was all false.
Her mother Angela Tian was sacked from her real-estate job in 2018 for allowing her daughter to use her flashy show homes to make these fatuous posts. These were further facilitated by her brother Jason Tian, who was formerly her manager.
How degrading does that get – a brother and mother both apparently in cahoots to make their precocious child into a social media millionaire? One can only but wonder what their cut is from her rumoured OnlyFans fortune.
As for her father Christopher J Hope, they are apparently estranged after she accused him of abuse – claims which he has categorically denied.
And that’s not the only deeply worrying story Lil Tay has apparently fabricated on social media to maintain her ‘flexer’ persona.
In no particular order, there was her early claim she was ‘partially black’ despite her father being a white Canadian and her mother of Chinese ethnicity.
Last September, Lil Tay posted pictures saying she was having ‘major open-heart surgery’ after being diagnosed with a tumour. There has been no further mention of her miraculous recovery
There was her mysterious five-year ‘disappearance’ from social media – before a post on her Instagram account claimed that she and her brother had died. The pair were, in fact, alive and well, and 14-year-old Tay claimed the announcement had come from a hacker.
Or her allegedly being diagnosed with a heart tumour last September, when she posted pictures claiming she was having ‘major open-heart surgery’.
Needless to say, there has been no further mention of her miraculous recovery from her tumour, nor of her premature death, nor of her alleged sexual abuse as a child.
Instead, she has managed to turn her foul-mouthed obscenities, vulgar boasting about wealth she never had, and even her failed fledgling music career (her self-published single Growing Up garnered half a million ‘likes’ on YouTube last year but never made it to the charts) into a social media empire.
Now, with her new ‘adult’ career, the young ‘flexer’ will coin even more unimaginable millions.
How did it come to this? A vivacious nine or ten-year-old child let loose on social media – turning from a child Instagram ‘star’ into a teenager promising to reveal all on OnlyFans?
Astonishingly, US magazine Newsweek reported recently that 1.4million American women – 2 per cent of the population – aged 18 to 45 are now OnlyFans ‘creators’, inspired by Bonnie Blue to take off their clothes as a way of making extra cash.
These, at least, are adult women making their own choices – not potential girls like Lil Tay who may have been immature, easily controlled and manipulated. Who appear to have been groomed via social media since they were young, even arguably by their own families.
If nothing else, Lil Tay’s tale is an intriguing cautionary tale of the perilous seductiveness of the ‘influencer generation’. How it sucks girls in. How it tricks them. How it makes them believe that millions of anonymous ‘likes’ for their naked breasts is somehow life-enhancing.
The truth is that, by taking their clothes off and provocatively posing for pictures, they are providing soft porn for their ‘fans’. And, far from being new age feminists taking control of their bodies, they are victims of the centuries-old tawdry exploitation of women and girls.
A final word of warning to all the aspiring Lil Tays of this world: when she started her social media journey as a beautiful baby-faced child, she had the world at her feet. Now she’s on a virtual fast track to a quick buck – and potentially a lifetime of misery.
