Piper Rockelle is back in the headlines, and not for good reasons.
The 18-year-old creator, who launched an OnlyFans account on January 1, sat down with one of her top-spending fans, a 58-year-old man who casually revealed he's been following her for about six years. That puts him in her orbit when she was around 12 years old.
Video of the exchange spread quickly on X, and the internet did not take it well.
"This is not a fun podcast moment. This is a safeguarding failure that nobody in that room reacted to properly," one user wrote.
Rockelle didn't see it that way. She reposted the clip herself and defended the man outright.
"He is my number one supporter and I have so much love for him," she wrote.
The backlash is the latest in a string of controversies for Rockelle, who built her following as a child on YouTube through Dance Twins and Piper's Squad.
Her childhood in the influencer world became the subject of a Netflix documentary, Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing, which covered a lawsuit filed against her mother by former Squad members.
She joined Bop House, Sophie Rain's OnlyFans creator group, before going solo.
On her first day on the platform, she claimed to have made nearly $3 million, a figure she later deleted but has continued to stand behind despite widespread skepticism.
"This is clearly fake and advertising for her personal brand," one commenter wrote.
"There are entire discords where streamers and aspiring influencers pay in the thousands for their controversial clips to be put on X, they get paid per view. Disgusting that they would fake pedophilia for views."
Others were less analytical about it.
"She still looks like she's 12, creepy guys gonna creep," one person wrote.
Real or staged, the clip did exactly what Rockelle's content tends to do, get people talking.
