Bonnie Blue and Britain’s ‘OnlyFans triangle’

The pensioners in the church hall have never heard of Bonnie Blue. One elderly man arches a brow. “Is she a racehorse?” I hesitate, unsure whether Draycott’s historical society should be spared the truth. Bonnie Blue – real name Tia Billinger – is a 27-year-old former recruitment agent who first drew national attention in 2024 after claiming to have slept with 158 “barely legal” university freshers in two weeks, uploading the encounters to her OnlyFans page. Last year, Channel 4 documented her attempt to have sex with 1,057 men in a single day. In February this year, she organised a “breeding mission” where she slept with 400 men in a bid to fall pregnant. She confirmed shortly after that she was indeed expecting a child. Bonnie Blue has been barred from Indonesia for 10 years after being deported from Bali (Photo: Getty) So no, Blue isn’t a racehorse. She is Britain’s most famous OnlyFans creator. She also grew up just down the road. Unknown to many of Draycott’s residents, Britain’s three most prominent OnlyFans stars all come from this sleepy corner of Derbyshire. Lily Phillips, who also made headlines after sleeping with 100 men in one day, grew up eight miles away. Rebecca Goodwin, who has claimed to earn £143,000 in a month, lives 15 miles further. Derbyshire, in other words, once the engine of the Industrial Revolution, has unexpectedly become the cradle of another kind of industry – one built not on coal and steel, but on online porn. Before Blue became news, the biggest scandal to hit Draycott was the opening of a fetish dungeon in 2017. On an industrial estate a 10-minute drive away, a doctor’s office, schoolroom and prison cell can be hired by the hour. One online reviewer assures prospective visitors that “goddess Vivienne L’Amour is an absolutely incredible dominatrix”. Despite the shock this caused, one local informs me that Blue’s behaviour “is on a whole other level.” I had arrived in Draycott on the morning of its annual Scarecrow Festival. Each year, locals and businesses construct effigies to raise money for the Village Fund, which pays for planters of pansies and peonies along the high street. In the church hall, the Draycott and Church Wilne History Group had set up a stall to catch the extra footfall. Young families queued for tea and cake. In one corner, a scarecrow built by the Women’s Institute performed CPR on another. “Draycott is mainly a dormitory village now,” says Clive Wilkinson, 78, the historical society’s chairman. As a young man in the Sixties, Wilkinson took holiday employment in the mill where his father worked. Around 400 men were employed in the cotton and lace industry then, but by the Seventies the jobs were nearly all gone. “All the old mills have been turned into houses and flats,” Wilkinson says. One has been repurposed into a popular gymnastics studio. Lesley, 75, sitting at the stall with Wilkinson, adds: “I think we’re very middle-class now.” Today, the independent coffee shop, barbershop and salon that constitute Market Street are the town’s main employers. Blue’s mother once worked as a hairdresser. But inside Bonnie’s Beauty Spot, a floral-clad salon, owner Caroline Stevenson stresses there is no connection. She is, however, friends with Blue’s cousin. What does she make of Blue’s exploits? Caroline grimaces. “It’s not what Draycott wants to be known for.” Later, Wilkinson – still mischievous behind his spectacles – wanders over to a young man eating cake. “Excuse me, do you know who Bonnie Blue is?” he asks. The man does. “I think she’s very attractive,” he replies. A scarecrow watches passers-by in Draycott, the village where Blue grew up (Photo: Dispatch) “I back up what Bonnie does. If she owns it, who gives a f**k?” Will Walters, 27, describes himself, like Blue, as “money-motivated”. He opened his own barbershop, Will’s, on Draycott’s Market Street at the age of 19. Blue, he says, is a frequent topic of conversation in the shop. Though he never attended Friesland School with her – in nearby Sandiacre – many of his friends and customers did. They recall her as “quite quiet”. He now cuts the hair of the best man at her wedding. Blue married her high-school sweetheart, Ollie Davidson, at 20. They are currently getting divorced. Walters’ girlfriend is also on OnlyFans, having traded messages with Blue online. She began her own page as a way of monetising her growing Instagram following, he explains. She has since signed with a management agency and, thanks to the new money coming in, has quit her job in an Audi call centre. “She didn’t really like it,” Walters explains. “Now her day consists of waking up, taking a couple of pictures, and going for coffee.” Later, I search for Walters’ girlfriend on Instagram. Blonde, voluptuous, she looks like she could be on Love Island. I follow the link to her OnlyFans. Her most recent post promises footage of her performing oral sex on a man. Walters plays down her work. “There’s not too much of her out there… she only does topless.” Lily Phillips sparked outrage after claiming to have slept with 100 men in a single day (Photo: Getty) A 25-minute drive north of Draycott, the John Flamsteed Community School sits at the end of a country lane. It winds past horses and goats, linking the village of Denby to the neighbouring hamlet of Smithy Houses and the Denby Pottery. The original Victorian schoolhouse remains, alongside a Seventies extension. The school is named after the Astronomer Royal who first identified Uranus. Today, its most famous graduate is Lily Phillips, the OnlyFans star who has offered subscribers the chance to “go in [her] back door”. “Renowned for raising whores,” says one of Phillips’ classmates, when I ask him to describe the school. He points out that another girl in the year above also became an OnlyFans creator. Even so, the school is now one of the most oversubscribed in the county. Many of Phillips’ peers work in graduate professions – in law, tech or finance – in Derby, Sheffield and London. Her brother is employed at BAE Systems. Phillips herself studied nutrition at Sheffield University before turning to OnlyFans. One former pupil claims that classes at John Flamsteed dedicated to career advice were patchy: “Our two main teachers both retired at the same time, so we didn’t have a teacher for those lessons for a while.” The same, she adds, was true of sex education. Denby is a small but prosperous village. The tabloids have often stressed Phillips’s “wealthy childhood”. Her brother attended private school, while her father ran a property cleaning business. The village has a church, a primary school and a pub. There are large, detached houses with Land Rovers at one end, and pensioners’ cottages at the other. The issue currently gripping residents is a dispute over planning permission for a proposed solar farm. Window posters make allegiances clear. Phillips hails from Denby where she attended the local school as a teenager (Photo: Dispatch) Inside the mock-Tudor Denby Lodge, a handful of pensioners are eating early suppers while a toddler sits before a blaring iPad. GB News plays on the television, broadcasting a report about crime at Notting Hill Carnival. Sally Simpson, 64, whose husband is the licensee, tells me she and her family have run the pub for 16 years. “It’s usually busier,” she promises, noting that the place employs around 20 locals, following the closure of Denby’s only other pub. A man at the bar reminds me that there used to be a coal mine behind the pub – once the main employer of young men in Denby. It closed in 1968. And the women? The Denby Pottery company was founded more than two centuries ago and survived until entering administration earlier this year. Production ceased in June. Linda Salt spent 50 years at the pottery and served as its archivist. “Women have always played a large part at Denby,” she explains. She cites Sarah Elizabeth Bourne, who ran the firm for three decades after her husband’s death. “She was at the helm of the pottery in Victorian England until 1898,” she adds. Even in the Seventies, as men grappled with the job losses caused by the mine’s closure, more than 70 women were employed as decorators alone at Denby. When I visit, before the firm entered administration, the shop is adorned with bunting. Denby’s signature Imperial Blue tableware is on sale everywhere. A cafe serves afternoon tea. Grandparents stroll with grandchildren in the small garden. When I stop a young couple, carrying cardboard boxes of crockery back to their car, they tell me they have never heard of Denby’s most recent export, Phillips. They do, however, love its pottery. “There is not a finer county in England than Derbyshire,” Jane Austen wrote in Pride and Prejudice. In the north of the county, Chesterfield lies between Chatsworth House, often cited as the model for Mr Darcy’s estate, and the former site of Markham Colliery, once the largest in Derbyshire. It is also the hometown of Rebecca Goodwin, 31, arguably Britain’s third most recognisable OnlyFans star. A self-defined “council estate girl”, Goodwin’s path into the industry was unlike that of Blue and Phillips. The collapse of coal mining left deeper deprivation in the towns of north Derbyshire than in the villages further south, which, as 2024’s State of the Coalfields report noted, benefitted from “proximity to growth and jobs” in Nottingham and Derby. At 28, Goodwin was a single mother of two. She has spoken of how the cost of childcare made full-time work impossible, and how she struggled to heat her home and feed her children. Though she once dreamed of becoming a comedian, she has linked both her financial hardship and her “hypersexuality”, a result of childhood sexual abuse, to her decision to join OnlyFans. Since starting in 2019, she has reportedly made more than £4m. Her career, however, has been marked by a far harsher reality than the glamour projected by Blue and Phillips. Last year, Goodwin alleged that she had been raped and that Derbyshire Police had failed to act swiftly, despite her submission of a seven-minute video recording of the incident. In a statement, Derbyshire Police claimed that they were initially unable to locate the man, but he was later arrested, has appeared in court, “and the matter has been adjourned to a future date”. Research shows that working-class women on low incomes are disproportionately represented as sexual violence survivors and, as the grooming gangs scandal demonstrated, often less likely to be taken seriously as victims when reporting assaults. Last year, Labour MP Joani Reid drew attention to the differing experiences OnlyFans creators can face due to their class background. “[By prioritising] a tiny minority of privileged individuals,” she said, “people like Bonnie Blue, who pursue this work out of commercial choice rather than desperation, we ignore, and in fact further marginalise… exploited and vulnerable women trapped in cycles of abuse, violence and poverty.” The average creator, she claims, makes just £4 a month. “It is a lottery where a handful at the top get rich, while millions of others are driven to push their boundaries further and further to survive.” At the time, there weren’t really any other sources of income… That pressure is something that Alexia Grace, 28, another OnlyFans creator from north Derbyshire, has also noticed. Grace turned to the platform during lockdown, when she was furloughed from her job as a flight attendant. “At the time, there weren’t really any other sources of income… I never expected to do it for so long.” Today, she earns six figures a year, with 10,000 OnlyFans subscribers and half a million Instagram followers, though she insists she produces only “normal content”. She made headlines in 2024 for selling jars of her sweat. The expectations, Grace explains, have shifted in recent years. “I get so many people who subscribe and then ask me to meet them. They try to pressure me into it. That’s a new thing. They’ve seen Bonnie and Lily do it, so they expect everyone to do it.” Read more Bonnie Blue’s new stunt is her worst yet – so why is no one talking about it? I found out my ex lived a double life – the pain of humiliation was extraordinary Grace describes being followed in public, and fans turning up outside her house. She has filed police reports and even sold her car when it became too recognisable. When I ask why Derbyshire seems to have produced so many of Britain’s most prominent OnlyFans creators, Grace shrugs. “I just think it’s a weird coincidence.” Nonetheless, she adds: “Bonnie and Lily have changed the game.” A version of this article appeared in Dispatch