One job paid about $140 a day. The other often pays that much in an hour. Both were important for different reasons.
Sheena Sittner, 42, had worked with kids for decades and found a home in the Parkway School District in suburban St. Louis, where she’s been for more than two years.
“I love those kids,” she said of the elementary school students, whom she said would often greet her with a hug. One of them is her son, who’s 9.
While her teaching job filled her heart, her other job, as a performer on the adult-content site OnlyFans, fills a financial need.
But in September, Sittner’s separate worlds collided. The contractor who employed her as a teacher, Kelly Education, removed her from assignments, with a manager citing reports of her OnlyFans activity — Sittner said the manager listed her screen name — as the reason her employment account was suspended.
Much of her work on OnlyFans involves filming consensual sexual activities with her husband, though she sometimes teams up with others in erotic acts, as well. It largely depends on the requests from customers, who must show proof they’re age 18 and older, and pay a fee for content.
“It has changed us financially in significant positive ways,” she said of OnlyFans. Sittner has two older kids, ages 18 and 22, in college and is taking classes toward a degree in criminal justice.
Tuition, student loans and daily living expenses piled up, she said.
“People say, ‘Oh, you don’t teach for the pay,’” she said. “That’s true, but bills don’t stop coming just because you’re passionate about the job you have. Banks don’t care.”
Kelly Education issued a statement about the incident.
“The safety and well-being of the students we serve are our top priority,” the company said. “We take all concerns raised about our substitute educators seriously and work closely with our school district partners to respond swiftly and appropriately.”
The news of her firing brought her new business online, Sittner said.
Her husband, Tim, who runs a business, has scaled back his business activities to make time in the day to handle a surge of fans’ requests.
“I just thought, ‘We’re already [being intimate] all the time anyway. Why not just record it and see what happens,’” she said.
The financial boost comes with frustration over being removed from teaching assignments. Her firing took away a role model from students and violated her rights, she said.
“I truly believe in freedom of speech,” she said. “The backlash women receive for doing online content, it’s absolutely awful.”
Exploding market, with big risks
OnlyFans is the largest of a suite of relatively new web platforms featuring explicit adult content that almost anyone can post. The sites saw massive growth during the covid shutdowns.
About 5 million people have accounts set up to make and post adult content on OnlyFans, with about 437 million “fan” user accounts, according to publicly available figures from their parent company. That adds up to almost $8 billion in annual revenue, much of which flows to the content creators.
The platform was featured prominently on a television show, “Double Lives of Suburban Wives,” whose characters’ stories loosely resemble Sittner’s story. They’re in Missouri, and ends weren’t meeting financially so they took to the site and made a small fortune. Sittner and her husband have known the families in the show as friends for years, prior to it even airing. The Sittners were inspired by their story and have since made some videos with them, she said.
As more people venture into online content, employment cases like Sittner’s have grown, too, said Corey Silverstein, a First Amendment lawyer in the Detroit area. He’s seen a surge in people who lost jobs after their online activities were discovered, alongside a similar surge in employers looking for guidance on crafting employment contracts and guidelines to address the issue.
“If you have any of these [online] accounts, no matter how private you think they are, you’re going to be found out,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time.”
Silverstein said employers have turned to a growing industry of companies that use sophisticated third-party search software, powered by artificial intelligence, to check potential and current employees’ online presence.
Even though most content creators use online aliases on the sites, employers are increasingly able to identify them using visual detection software. A photo of someone’s face can lead to a match.
Once identified, employees often don’t have much of a First Amendment case to challenge their firing, Silverstein said. This is because employers, including third-party contractors who often partner with schools and health care facilities, have turned to more explicit language in contracts that bans activities that violate the legal standard of “moral turpitude.”
Anyone who works with minors has an especially difficult case to make, he said. He encouraged people interested in working in online entertainment to first check the contracts for their other jobs, and consult an employment lawyer.
“They should be talking to professionals to fully understand what their rights are and what could happen if they’re caught,” he said.
Sittner doesn’t know for sure how her employer learned of her online activities. And she doesn’t harbor ill will toward the person that reported her OnlyFans account.
“Whoever did it was probably hoping they would ruin my life,” she said. “In fact, they have helped it out so much that I don’t even care they ratted me out.”
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