‘Escort influencers’ make sex work sound fun. I was on the game for years and it eats a part of your soul you’ll NEVER get back. One girl’s story still gives me nightmares years later: AMANDA GOFF

She reminds me of myself when I first stepped out into the world as Samantha X – only she’s younger, savvier and more business-minded. 

Her name is Kayla Jade, and with close to two million followers on TikTok – where she is known as blueyedkaylajade – she is Australia’s most recognisable OnlyFans star.

And escort.

Yes, unlike most of the OnlyFans girls who keep things strictly online, Kayla goes out for in-person sessions with paying clients. And she’s built a cult following online by sharing the sort of tawdry tales most sex workers only tell each other.

Recently, I was a guest on her podcast, Storytime with Kayla Jade, and we spoke about the world of ‘high-class’ – meaning expensive – escorting. It made me realise how much the industry has changed since my days as Samantha X.

And not in a good way.

When I started out more than a decade ago, having men pay for your time and company was deemed controversial – something to hide and be ashamed of.

Now, it seems everyone is bloody at it – and they’re not hiding.

There is a new class of ‘escort influencer’: they count their wads of cash on TikTok, flaunt their designer handbags, and brag about their famous clients – whose names they tease like it’s a ‘guess who, don’t sue’ gossip item.

Kayla Jade is part of this new generation: smart, strategic, successful and – somehow – sufficiently brand-safe for the companies clamouring to sign her up for #spon deals.

And like me, she doesn’t consider herself a victim. As we chatted, we both agreed – this job isn’t for the faint-hearted, but we chose it.

I’ve never wanted to say it’s all glamour – because it sure as hell isn’t. It can be dark, dangerous and deeply disempowering.

And while the pay can be obscene –  some girls now claim to charge more than $20k for a night (which I, admittedly, find hard to believe) – no one wants to talk about the potential consequences or the emotional and psychological fallout of this line of work.

Pretty Woman it ain’t.

I’m a strong-minded, confident woman. I was far from naïve when I entered the industry at almost 40, with plenty of life experience under my suspender belt.

And yet, I was sexually assaulted on the job. It had a profound impact on me and even now I am still trying to heal. 

While I firmly believe in a woman’s right to do whatever she pleases – and I know plenty of women who genuinely love this profession –  these young, impressionable women waltzing into ‘the game’ thinking it’s all glamour and heels must hear the truth.

First, there’s the emotional labour of the job.

Men want to f*** you – absolutely, that’s the whole point – but they will also treat you like a surrogate mother and unqualified therapist. No one told me about that.

I’ve listened to business types cry about being abused as children. Grown men break down as they reveal I’m the first woman they’ve been with since their wives left. Lonely, old men speak of the trauma they’ve held for a lifetime yet never told another living soul.

Then there’s the widowers – I won’t even go there. 

But once the tears have dried, guess what they all want? More sex. That’s the real reason they’ve booked you, after all. Make no mistake.

And while most of the sex is standard bedroom fare, there are requests that make you a little queasy – and others that simply make your stomach turn.

An escort friend of mine told me one client brought in photos of his pre-teen niece to stick on the wall while he was having sex with her. I’m not sure I’d have the constitution to count the dollar bills from that booking on TikTok afterwards. 

Others have had requests involving excrement. You’ve probably heard of Dubai’s vile ‘porta potty parties’, but you don’t need to go overseas to find men who want to perform degrading acts on women involving human waste.

How’s that designer handbag looking now?

I’ve had clients who scared me – one told me he’d killed someone before, like it was nothing. I feared I wouldn’t get out of that hotel room alive, but I went through with the booking anyway because that’s the job.

No matter what safety precautions you take, all it takes is one night with the wrong bloke and it could be all over for you.  

Another friend of mine told me about the client who wanted her to pretend to be unconscious while he stroked her hair and cried. Hardly Richard Gere and Julia Roberts is it? And yet some of these influencers would have you believe the average booking is a suave Mr Big who just flew in business class and wants some company.

Maybe you still think the money makes it all worth it. Well, here’s a stark fact: a lot of the ‘successful’ OnlyFans escorts you see flaunting their cash and bragging about their property portfolios are lying. (I don’t include Kayla Jade in that assessment, by the way – I found her to be charming and authentic.) 

Most women on OnlyFans actually earn less than the average wage. You’re better off getting a normal job and having a normal boyfriend.

And even if you do make the sort of life-changing money I did (I was once paid $20,000 to eat pizza and watch movies in a fancy hotel – admittedly an exception to the rule), escorting itself is expensive.

Hotels, sexy outfits, lingerie, hair, make-up, even surgery – none of this comes cheap. (Yes, if an escort works out of a hotel, she doesn’t turn a profit until she’s made enough to cover the cost of staying there a night.)

And no one talks about the emotional debt you pay. I find it hard to trust men now. I used to crave validation from men and my work gave me that. But now I’ve hung up my heels, I’m struggling to find my sense of self-worth.

Second, it’s very easy to dissociate – but so much harder to reconnect.

I used to say ‘showtime’ every time I painted on Samantha’s face. I learnt how to fake intimacy so well that eventually I forgot what the real thing felt like. I’m still not sure I know.

I set such firm boundaries in my work that I almost forgot what a ‘real’ man was like. I began to see dates as ‘working for free’. It made love and romance really, really hard.

Another thing: you will always be judged – even after you stop sex work.

It doesn’t matter how articulate and smart you are, or how much money you have in the bank, people will have strong opinions about what you used to do – and usually you can’t change their minds.

While society is more open-minded about sex work now than it was in the 2010s when I went public as Samantha, Australia remains a conservative country.

Once people know you have worked in the adult industry, it follows you around like a bad smell. You may not care now, but I promise you, in time you will.

I’ve been judged by strangers, by men I’ve dated, by other school mums. I’ve had prospective employers google me, then turn me down. At dinner parties, I’m seen either as a source of fascinating stories, or someone you’d rather not sit next to. 

That’s the reality and you need to know it. I’m lucky I had a career as a journalism to fall back on and wrote books. Make sure you have a back-up plan. 

You’re probably thinking you can do this job for a bit, make some decent coin, then get out of the game, right?

You’re half right. You can leave the job – but it doesn’t leave you.  

I once interviewed a former BDSM worker – now a Sunday school teacher – who told me that society wants us to leave the job, but when we do, we are still stigmatised.

It’s so true. 

Another escort told me it’s hard to accept ourselves when society tells us we are bad people. This job leaves its fingerprints – not just digital ones.

Even years after hanging up my Louboutins, the job is still with me. No matter how hard I try to go back to being Amanda, to some, I’ll always be Samantha.