Former Boston ICU nurse Allie Rae made international news in August last year after she was fired for running an extremely naughty Only Fans account o
Former Boston ICU nurse Allie Rae made international news in August last year after she was fired for running an extremely naughty Only Fans account on the side. The story appeared everywhere from the NY Post, to CNN, The Daily Beast — and she even made an appearance on Dr Phil.
The resulting publicity saw fans subscribing in droves and the 37-year old mother of three now makes more than $200,000 a month.
But the same sort of moralizing and censorship that ended her nursing career also threatens her newfound wealth from Only Fans. Just six days after her story was made public, Only Fans announced it would ban “sexually explicit” content, under pressure from its banking partners.
“When the news broke about the payment processing and OnlyFans I began looking at other platforms to switch to, and quickly realized they too could fall into the same trap down the road,” Rae says on the line from her new home in crypto friendly Florida.
“It was at that time that I figured out crypto was the answer.”
She’s assembled a team of 20 developers and is putting the finishing touches on a new Only Fans meets Instagram style crypto-powered social platform called WetSpace. It’s due to launch in beta in February, accepting payments in a range of stablecoins across different chains to mitigate issues with gas fees. NFT support will come in the project’s second stage mid-year.
Porn has long been seen as one of the best chances crypto has for adoption: Users can remain anonymous and performers don’t have to deal with payment processors charging them high fees or unilaterally cutting off services under opaque morality clauses.
Despite this, as Magazine discovered in the past, crypto payments have failed to take off. Pornhub tried and failed with Verge, then moved to using Pumapay’s service, which was crippled by high gas fees on Ethereum and is in the process of relaunching on Binance Smart Chain. Spankchain attempted a more modest platform targeting crypto users but has had limited success so far, though it’s still in the game and is developing ‘SpankPay V2’ based on user feedback. Cumrocket is developing an NFT marketplace but reports limited availability of its CUMMIES tokens on exchanges.
Rae believes a major problem is trying to launch projects with related adult tokens. “I had been watching the fall of other ‘adult shit coins’ and how their model was destined to fail serving two masters — creators and holders. That is when WetSpace came about.”
Rae points out that adult coins add an extra step to the process and most are very volatile which isn’t attractive to users or models.
“So I thought,’ Well we don’t need a coin, like, why go through all the drama of this coin? Of course, you’d get a lot of money up front, and it would definitely help fund your project. But luckily, I didn’t need to be concerned about the financial side of it, because I had the money to put into it.”
How she got here
The mother of three teenage sons, Rae is an unlikely porn star turned crypto entrepreneur. She joined the Navy at 17 and married husband Steven the following year (he sometimes stars in her videos). She then worked for five years in marketing, management and real estate, before getting her dream job in nursing. “I was obsessed,” she says. “I was a straight A nursing student, it was truly my passion and still is, it really is.”
Rae received a Masters in Nursing Education and specialized in Neonatal Intensive Care, nursing sick babies back to health. “Even though it was such a tragic time for so many families there were also so many great moments,” she says. “I was a wonderful NICU nurse very, very good at my job.”
But bored at home during the pandemic, she started up an Instagram account posting about hockey and craft beer. This attracted a devoted male following, some of whom suggested she start an Only Fans. When she read news reports that the actress Bella Thorne had made $1M on the platform in a single day, she decided to take their advice.
“I posted a few pictures and I really actually had kind of fun with it. It was quite liberating, you know, at my age and before you knew it, I had so many subscribers and we were actually making good money on there.”
By the end of her first month she’d made $6,900 — more than the $6,500 she was paid as a nurse.
Unfortunately for Rae not everyone is a fan of Only Fans and a group of six of what she calls her “mean girl” colleagues, led by a Pastor’s wife, stumbled across her Instagram and then screenshotted her Only Fans content for management.
News spread like wildfire through the hospital and that was “ultimately what I think drove management to have to act.”
“Their overall consensus was that it was now such a distraction on the unit, with everybody knowing, that if I was going to continue to do that, I couldn’t work there,” she adds.
“I wasn’t mentally ready to leave, I’ll tell you it was very…
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