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, including Ferraris, Bentleys and Lamborghinis. Her closet dripped with designer labels — Givenchy, Dior, Prada. Her favorite? A lamb-skin Chanel bag — red, with gold chains. Even her dogs, she says, sported Louis Vuitton collars.
All the luxury, however, came at a cost, she says. Ray made her fortune posting explicit content of herself on OnlyFans. In fact, she says she was one of the first to ever do so. In the early years of the website, when she made her account, no one quite knew what the fledgling, subscription-based platform would become. Maybe it’d be full of cooking classes. Or fitness tutorials. But, Ray says, because of early adopters like her, it became a de facto porn site, where anyone can upload content of themselves in exchange for cash from paying subscribers. Though not everyone on OnlyFans makes porn, the site has become known for it.
Most OnlyFans creators make next to nothing. A lucky few make millions. Ray was one of them. Over the course of her five years on the site, she estimates she made $14 million total, averaging $300,000 a month.
But after what she describes as a spiritual awakening, Ray 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.
Her plan? By shedding light on what she describes as the hidden cost of pornography, she hopes to change the hearts and minds of those still on OnlyFans, one person at a time. She wants to see a day when no one frequents the platform anymore.
“I was so deep in the industry,” Ray says. “I was bold enough to take so many crazy, radical steps into it. And now, I’m just on the opposite spectrum. It’s crazy. That shows God’s glory.”
How Nala Ray found OnlyFans
Ray’s upbringing was tumultuous.
When she was 8, a tornado wiped out her family’s home in small-town Missouri. Her dad had an affair, leading to her parents’ divorce, but they remarried each other two years later. After that, Ray says, her dad took on a newfound religious intensity, becoming a minister. Frequent in-fighting in her Baptist community led her family to hop from church to church. She never felt like she had a spiritual home.
“You get to see a dark side of religion,” Ray says. “People will kick you out of their church, and that’s so hard to see from people that you kind of fell in love with. So it was kind of major divorces, over and over and over again.”
Things worsened when her dad took pity on a wayward 16-year-old boy, letting him live in their home. The boy molested Ray when she was 13, she says, and the abuse continued for months until he ran away one night. Ray says neither she nor her family have heard from him since.
After that, Ray began acting out. She’d sneak out of the house at 2 a.m. to meet boys. She longed for the day she could finally move out and become independent. At around age 20, she found herself in Florida, working for an orthopedics company. She wasn’t sure where to go next.
Then, she got the Instagram DM.
“A random guy on Instagram − he was verified − he reached out,” she says. “And he was like, ‘Hey, you’d be so good at OnlyFans.’”
‘I couldn’t feel much at all’
OnlyFans skyrocketed in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ray caught the wave at the perfect time, she says, joining the site in February of 2020. Her first month, she made $87,000.
It became her new full-time job — and she took it seriously.
Ray acquired a manager. She read books on men’s psychology, so she could learn how best to appeal to their fantasies. She studied popular porn trends — and adjusted her content accordingly. She went on podcasts and made outrageous statements about sex that would go viral — whatever it took to drive more people to her page. At her peak on the site, she had 270,000 subscribers.
As the earnings ramped up, so did the pressure to make more gratuitous content, she says. She relied on marijuana and alcohol to get through particularly tough filming days. Anything, she says, to numb herself.
“Honestly, I couldn’t feel much at all. I could feel angry, but I didn’t cry for years. It felt like I didn’t feel sorry for anybody,” she says. “Anytime I would have to do major scenes, I’d have to drink myself into oblivion to just do it.”
Then, Ray met Jordan Giordano, a Christian influencer, on TikTok in 2023. He didn’t know who she was. They started talking.
Giordano treated her as a person, not as as sex object. It was his compassion and gentle nudging, she says, that ultimately got her to see the life she was living differently.
In January 2024, Ray quit OnlyFans. She and Giordano wed that March.
“There was this tear inside of me. I had built this whole life. I was so independent. I didn’t need a man. I made my bag. I could have anything I wanted. I could go anywhere I wanted, even though I didn’t have a lot of friends or anything. I felt so unique, and OnlyFans had given me that kind of freedom,” Ray says.
“To cross over into this very unknown world was terrifying to me. I thought so many times, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t do this. It’s too scary for me. I don’t know if I’m courageous enough to cross this line.’ And so what happened was, I continued to just talk to Jordan. I continued reading my Bible. I continued to pray. And then Jordan’s mom was actually the one that really helped me make the decision. She was like, ‘You’re on the right path, but you still have this door of darkness open, which is OnlyFans. You cannot have both.’”
‘Someone just wants someone else to listen to them’
Since leaving OnlyFans, Ray’s received tons of backlash online − much of it not from OnlyFans models, but from fellow Christians.
They call her a grifter. They call her faith a sham. They say she’ll be back on OnlyFans any day now.
The noise used to bother her. Now, she says, she’s better at tuning it out.
“The hate got to me for sure,” she says. “It got to my husband. I felt utterly alone some days, just being like, ‘Wow, the whole world hates me.’ And that’s a tough pill to swallow, honestly.”
Ray still has empathy for the women who do OnlyFans. Though she disagrees with their actions, she knows many have struggles few will ever understand.
“I have a heart for the OnlyFans girls, not only because I was one, but I saw it,” she says. “So many girls were like, ‘Oh, my dad abused me.’ ‘My stepdad tried to do things with me.’ ‘I don’t have a dad.’ ‘My dad ran away.’ ‘My mom hates me.’ I heard it all … Behavior is a symptom of what’s really going on underneath, right? Hurt damages people so bad, and shame will lead you into things that you never thought you would do.”
When they ask for it, Ray helps guide people through the process of quitting OnlyFans. She recalls one model who deleted her account after flying to Tennessee to have a heart-to-heart with Ray in person.
When someone like that contacts her, Ray says she listens to them, without judgment. It’s what her husband did for her − and it’s what she believes makes a real difference.
“The biggest thing I realized is someone just wants someone else to listen to them,” Ray says. “She just wanted to talk, and I let her. And she just told me everything that was going on in her life with her family and her relationship and how she felt about OnlyFans. And I didn’t pass one word of judgment. That’s it. We just can’t judge other people, because we have no idea what it’s like to walk a day in their shoes.”
Ray’s life looks quite different than it did a year ago. Her financial situation looks different, too. The OnlyFans money dried up fast, she says. The website took 20% of it. Her manager, 45%. Not to mention the hefty California taxes she owed.
Although her life hasn’t gotten easier, she says she doesn’t regret her decision. Being honest about her current life is also something that’s important to her, as she charts this new path. She plans on launching a podcast to continue sharing her story.
“The kind of Christian I want to portray is like, yeah, life freaking sucks,” Ray says. “I mess up. I’m not always modest. I still cuss sometimes. Yes, I want a joint sometimes. That is the Christian walk. I hate it when I see Christians online who just seem so perfect, but yet aren’t real with the fact that life is so hard sometimes.”
