In the column Straight Nonsense, columnist Moises Mendez II takes a queer eye to the insanity of straight culture.
Piper Rockelle is one of the most vulnerable social media stars right now, and she doesn't even realize she's in danger.
On Thursday, "IMPACT x Nightline" from ABC News premiered a new episode on Hulu, "Piper Rockelle: Barely Legal," which details her meteoric rise from a kid influencer on the internet in the early 2010s, with over 12 million YouTube subscribers, to an OnlyFans model on her 18th birthday. According to Rockelle, she made close to $3 million in just 24 hours after creating her account — but it's clear there's a seedy underbelly to her online presence that she either doesn't notice or refuses to acknowledge.
Rockelle was one of the most popular influencers when she started making videos at just 8 years old. When she was 10, her mother (who filmed and produced her daughter's videos) assembled a group of young kid influencers who became known as her "Squad." They made videos over the years that grew increasingly inappropriate. At first, the videos were typical kid content — making slime, playing pranks on one another, etc. But as they hit their early teens, they were instructed to make dating videos, and in some of them, the kids were featured kissing. According to the Los Angeles Times, Rockelle was making between $4.2 million and $7.5 million a year at this time.
In 2022, 11 members of the Squad and their guardians filed a lawsuit claiming that they were "emotionally, physically, and sometimes sexually” abused by Rockelle's mother, Tiffany Smith, who denied the allegations. The L.A. Times published its own investigation into the Squad and found that some children have said that Smith "offered to show an 11-year-old girl how to perform oral sex, mailed her daughter’s underwear to men, and touched some Squad members inappropriately — sometimes impersonating the voice of a dead cat while doing so." The teenage content creators who sued Smith settled for $1.85 million in 2024. The attorney who represented the Squad told the L.A. Times that the settlement helped them avoid a trial that would've taken months and "required the kids and their parents and their friends and their doctors to testify about things that the kids have put behind them.”
But this trauma is sticking with them, as evidenced by the 2025 Netflix documentary Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kid Influencing, which spoke with some of the kids involved in the Squad. It was clear that this experience had left irreparable damage on their psyches, but they also emphasized how terrible they felt for Rockelle, who doesn't seem to notice the harm being done to her and the exploitation of her image for money. It seems clear that once the adults in her life saw just how much money could be made off of her public persona (no matter the age), they rode the wave until they couldn't any longer.
After the lawsuit, Rockelle's YouTube account was demonetized, resulting in her losing an estimated $300,000 to $500,000 per month, the L.A. Times reported. This meant she could no longer make money from the videos she uploaded to YouTube, and on top of that, brands stopped reaching out to her to collaborate on sponsored posts. Rockelle never stopped posting on YouTube and maintained a presence on TikTok and Instagram, but she also started posting on BrandArmy, a subscriber-based platform similar to OnlyFans that doesn't allow nudity. However, this didn't stop the influencer from posting risqué photos of herself.
This all built up to her 18th birthday because, as she told Rolling Stone following the release of the Netflix docuseries, people would take her more seriously. "They won’t think that I’m just a puppet. And once I’m 18, people won’t go and hurt my mom necessarily," she told the publication. "If they want to sue me, they’ll sue me, not my company or whatever.” However, she followed in the footsteps of other influencers who became famous at a young age, like Bhad Bhabie (Danielle Bregoli) and LilTay, and joined OnlyFans. It was an unfortunately obvious progression for the trajectory of her career, not only because of the financial opportunity it was sure to provide (and inevitably did), but the writing was on the wall ever since she visited the BopHouse in Miami (a content creator house made up of well-known OnlyFans creators).
It's clear that Rockelle has a facade of control over her life. It's evident in the way that she excuses the inappropriate videos she made as a child, the outfits she was made to wear by her mother when she was a child, the situations her mother put her in, and how she brushes off any concern for herself and her well-being. Even in the new interview that premiered on Hulu, she's asked questions like, "Does it trouble you that a lot of your fans are older men?" To which she responded, "I don't think about it that much." When the host, Juju Chang, followed up and asks whether she feels her work is embarrassing, Rockelle says she doesn't tell people she's an OnlyFans model; she says she's "an entertainer" and does so with a bit of a smirk.
On the surface, Rockelle is an adult and can do what she chooses; it's her life to live, but it's hard to watch her grow up in the limelight for such a long time, and how much it alters a person's chemistry, so much so that their perception of reality is tainted. We've seen so many celebrities attempt to break out of the child star mold, and it's rare to see a well-adjusted adult come out of this machine that churns and burns children like slabs of meat in a factory.
Rockelle is one of the many young people in the child-influencing sphere, a deeply unregulated market where government officials are moving at a glacial pace to pass laws that protect these vulnerable content creators — many of whom didn't choose to be influencers from the get-go. We've seen the tiniest bit of progress toward protecting "kidfluencers," but there's still so much work to be done. Rockelle is an unfortunate example of how, even though she is now an adult with the opportunity to make her own decisions, she doesn't seem to have people in her life who don't profit from her wealth and genuinely care about her well-being.
Now the world has to watch a young woman figure out life with a false sense of control and navigate the morally murky waters of "barely legal" content creation on the world stage. Who knows where she takes it from here?
Moises Mendez II is a staff writer at Out magazine. Follow him on Instagram @moisesfenty.
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