In her early 20s, Nala Ray had it all. Or so she thought.
She lived in a $4.3 million home in California. She frequently drove luxury cars such as Ferrari, Bentley, and Lamborghini. Her closet was filled with designer brands like Givenchy, Dior, and Prada. Her favorite? Lambskin Chanel bag – red with gold chain. She said her dog also wore a Louis Vuitton collar.
But all luxury comes at a price, she says. Ray made his fortune by posting explicit content of himself on OnlyFans. In fact, she says she was one of the first to do so. In the website’s early stages, when she created her account, no one had any idea what the fledgling subscription-based platform would look like. Maybe it will be filled with cooking classes. Or fitness tutorials. But thanks to early adopters like her, Ray says it has become the de facto porn site where anyone can upload their own content in exchange for cash from paying subscribers. Although not everyone on OnlyFans creates porn, the site has become known for it.
Most of the creators on OnlyFans don’t create much at all. A lucky few make millions. Ray was one of them. In her five years on the site, she estimates she made a total of $14 million, or an average of $300,000 a month.
However, after what she described as a spiritual awakening, Rae left OnlyFans and has since become an outspoken critic of the platform. Now, she says, she wants to see OnlyFans, the very website she helped turn into a porn empire, destroyed.
What’s her plan? By shining a light on what she describes as the hidden costs of pornography, she hopes to change the hearts of those still on OnlyFans, one person at a time. She hopes to see a day when no one uses the platform too often.
“I was very involved in the industry,” Ray says. “I was bold enough to take so many crazy, radical steps, and now I’m just on the opposite spectrum. It’s crazy. It shows the glory of God.”
How Nala Ray discovered OnlyFans
Ray’s upbringing was turbulent.
When she was 8 years old, a tornado wiped out her family’s home in a small Missouri town. Her parents divorced because of her father’s affair, but they remarried two years later. After that, Ray said, her father took on a new religious zeal and became a pastor. Frequent infighting in her Baptist community caused her family to bounce from church to church. She never felt like she had a spiritual home.
“You get to see the dark side of religion,” Ray says. “People will kick you out of the church. And it’s very hard to see that from the people you’ve grown to like. So it was like a big divorce, over and over again.”
Things got even worse when her father took pity on the wayward 16-year-old boy and let him live in his house. She said the boy sexually abused Ray when he was 13 years old, and the abuse continued for several months before he ran away one night. Ray says neither she nor her family has heard from him since.
After that, Ray started acting. She snuck out of the house at 2am to meet the boys. She looked forward to the day when she could finally leave home and become independent. Around the age of 20, she came to Florida and worked for an orthopedic company. She didn’t know where to go next.
Then I received an Instagram DM from her.
“A random guy on Instagram was verified and reached out to me,” she says. “Then he said, ‘Hey, you’re really good at OnlyFans.’
“I could barely feel anything.”
OnlyFans has skyrocketed in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic. Ray hit the wave at the perfect time, she says, joining the site in February 2020. In the first month, she earned $87,000.
It became her new full-time job, and she took it seriously.
Ray got a manager. She read books on male psychology to learn how best to appeal to men’s fantasies. She studied popular porn trends and tailored her content accordingly. She appeared on a podcast and made some outrageous statements about sex that went viral online. She did whatever it took to drive more people to her page. At its peak, the site had 270,000 subscribers.
As revenue increased, so did the pressure to create more free content, she said. She turned to marijuana and alcohol to get through particularly grueling filming days. She says she’ll do anything to numb herself.
“To be honest, I didn’t feel much. I felt angry, but I hadn’t cried in years. I felt like I couldn’t empathize with anyone,” she says. “Every time I had to play a major scene, I had to swallow myself into oblivion to get it done.”
Ray then met Christian influencer Jordan Giordano on TikTok in 2023. he didn’t know who she was. they started talking.
Giordano treated her not as a sex object, but as a human being. She says it was his compassion and gentle nudging that ultimately helped her realize that her life was different.
In January 2024, Ray quit OnlyFans. She and Giordano married that March.
“There were tears in my heart. I had built the life I had. I was so independent. I didn’t need a man. I made my own bags. I could have anything I wanted. Even though I had no friends or anything, I could go anywhere I wanted. I felt so unique, and OnlyFans gave me such freedom,” Ray says. “It was scary for me to jump into this completely unknown world. I kept thinking, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it, it’s too scary for me. I don’t know if I have the courage to cross this line.'” So what happened was, I just kept talking to Jordan. I continued reading the Bible. I continued to pray. And it was Jordan’s mother who actually helped me make the decision. She said, “You’re on the right path, but there’s still this dark door open, and that’s OnlyFans.” You can’t have both. ”
“Some people just want someone to listen to their story.”
Since leaving OnlyFans, Reyes has received a ton of backlash online. Many of them weren’t from models on OnlyFans, but from fellow Christians.
They call her a fraud. They call her faith false. They said she would be back on OnlyFans now.
The noise was bothering her. Now, she says, she’s better able to tune it out.
“The hatred definitely got to me,” she says. “It got to my husband, too. One day I felt completely alone and thought, ‘Wow, the whole world hates me.'” Honestly, that’s a tough pill to swallow. ”
Ray still has empathy for women who do OnlyFans. Although she doesn’t agree with their actions, she knows that many people have conflicts they will never understand.
“My heart goes out to the girls on OnlyFans, not just because I was that girl, but because I saw it,” she says. “So many girls thought, ‘Oh, my dad abused me.’ ‘My stepfather tried to do something to me.’ ‘I don’t have a dad.’ ‘My dad ran away.’ ‘My mom hates me.’ I heard it all… Behavior is a sign of what’s really going on underneath, right? Hurt takes a toll on you, and shame can lead you to things you never thought you would do. ”
At the user’s request, Ray will guide them through the process of quitting OnlyFans. She recalled one model who deleted her account after flying to Tennessee to have a face-to-face conversation with Ray.
When such people contact her, Ray says she listens to them without judgment. That’s what her husband did for her, and she believes it will make a real difference.
“The biggest thing I’ve realized is that people just want someone to listen to them,” Ray says. “She just wanted to talk and I let her do it. And she told me everything about her relationship with her family in her life and how she felt about OnlyFans. And I didn’t judge a single word. That’s it. We can’t judge others because we don’t know what it’s like to spend a day in their shoes.”
Ray’s life seems much different than it was a year ago. Her financial situation also seems different. The money on OnlyFans quickly disappeared, she says. Websites accounted for 20% of that. Her manager, 45%. Not to mention the high California taxes she had to pay.
Although life hasn’t gotten easier, she says she doesn’t regret her decision. Being honest about her current life is also important to her as she embarks on a new path. She plans to start a podcast to continue sharing her story.
“The type of Christian I want to portray is the type of person who says, oh, life sucks,” Ray says. “I’m a mess. I’m not always humble. I still swear sometimes. Yes, I want a joint sometimes. That’s the Christian walk. I hate it when I see Christians online who just look perfect and still don’t understand the reality that life is so hard sometimes.”
