“I founded a popular news channel run by strippers. The threat of censorship won’t stop us”

I grew up in Toronto and always had an interest in filmmaking and documentaries. When I was just shy of 18, I moved to Montreal to study communications at Concordia; I got involved in film there too and became a one-woman freelancing show, making music videos and documentary projects. There were lots of hurdles trying to break into the industry: I was often dismissed, and many people underestimated my technical abilities. I was also sexualized by certain people I worked with. It felt like, because I was a young woman, I wasn’t always being taken seriously. It was hard to find enough work to earn a living, so I needed another way.

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Around the same time, a friend told me that a man had come up to her on the street and offered to buy her panties for $500. She had said no, but I thought, Oh, I would have done it. Another friend told me that she thought I’d make a great cam girl. I’d been interest in sex work for a while, and I felt like I’d have a natural talent for it. I’d received a lot of unwanted attention from men over the years, whether from teachers or colleagues, and it often felt like a burden. So I liked the idea of using my body and my charm to monetize that attention. I know how to flirt, I’m a sensual and sexual person, and I’m very comfortable expressing that. I also really enjoy connecting with people.

After moving back to Toronto, I kept thinking about my friend’s pantie story, and I decided to try camming. I ended up thriving and made good money from people paying to watch my livestream. I even got nominated for Favourite Cam Girl at the adult film industry’s AVN Awards. Then, around three years ago, I began to miss in-person connections, like going on dates and talking to people, so I became a stripper and a sugar baby as well.

As a stripper in particular, you receive so much information—you’re sitting on so many laps, and you’re talking to so many people. You have to keep an open mind to absorb it all. At the same time I was working at a strip club, my Instagram feed was being flooded with man-on-the-street interviews. I started thinking about how the vulnerability of a journalist doing a streeter is similar to the vulnerability of a stripper approaching people and asking if they want a dance. The reels also got me thinking about Speakers Corner, that City TV show where people filmed rants and stories inside a video booth, which ran in the 1990s and 2000s. I was inspired by the style and playfulness of those interviews, that gritty off-the-cuff vibe.

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I also became interested in news dissemination: how we consume information on current events and how our access to it is filtered. There’s an inundation of news, true and false, on social media, and it’s often difficult to process. I started to think about ways to challenge how we receive and think about news. I also wanted to give a platform to all my amazing friends who are sex workers, to showcase how smart, cool, funny and interesting they are. At the club, we use our charm to disarm people. Sometimes it’s flirty and sometimes it’s sexual, but we also use other parts of our personalities, like our knowledge, our politics and our opinions.

Thinking about all of this gave me the idea for Stripper News: an online news program in which sex workers from Toronto and beyond would select and research the issues they care most about and then film episodes on them, complete with streeter-style interviews. In the fall of 2024, I met someone through my connections at the club who was excited about my idea for Stripper News and down to throw some money at it. We filmed a pilot that December—my friends and I were running around in our pleaser heels, fur jackets and stripper gear, interviewing pedestrians on King Street West. We asked Torontonians all kinds of questions, from light-hearted (What’s the next concert you’re going to?) to more serious (What are your thoughts on the US tariffs?)

I officially launched Stripper News at the end of February 2025. We had a mini launch party with a bunch of club regulars and a bunch of dancers, and I printed T-shirts that read, “I paid a stripper to tell me the news.” Our publishing cadence is very fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants—at first, I tried to produce at least three videos a week, but then I just started posting them whenever I could. Before New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was elected, we filmed a video at one of his rallies, and I didn’t sleep for two days just so I could get it edited and posted before voting day.

Stripper News is a collaboration: our stripper-reporters pitch stories, write their own scripts and do their own interviews, and they are paid to do so. Each episode stems from our personal interests. For example, Andrea Werhun focuses on Ontario politics; in one video—dressed in a baby-pink bucket hat and a matching bikini—she discusses the problems with the province’s Safer Municipalities Act, which gives law enforcement more power to evict unhoused people from encampments despite the serious lack of shelter space. Robin D. Banks has questioned the relationship between AI and animation, and she also did a video about the importance of queer-inclusive spaces in Toronto. I really wanted to do an episode on autism in the media because I felt like there was so much misinformation. We fact-check everything: we brought on two non-sex-worker colleagues to help with research.

I tell people joining Stripper News to be themselves—be whoever you want to be. There is definitely a strong desire to use elements of camp and humour in our delivery. That approach helps us hook viewers and keep them around while we dive into everything from climate policy to labour rights issues. I joke that it’s like we’re slipping vitamins into people’s ice cream. It’s very Trojan horse.

Last August, Stripper News was invited to Instagram’s New York office after I met someone at a party who worked there. When I was at the office, I was encouraged to post about Stripper News, and there was no indication that anything we were doing would be censored. But, after posting dozens of videos, amassing nearly 17,000 followers and getting 1.7 million profile views, our Instagram was taken down in October of 2025.

It started with our account getting banned twice in the span of 24 hours. Both times, I successfully appealed. The first time, Instagram said it was for content related to sex trafficking, which was obviously not true, and they immediately put the account back up. The second time, the only reason listed was “Misuse of Instagram,” but they still reactivated the account after I appealed. Then, not long afterward, our account was banned a third time—permanently. Months later, Instagram still hasn’t given me any explanation for its censorship of our content. Part of me wonders, Is it because we’re reading the news? Is it because we’re sex workers with opinions?

Internet censorship is a constant battle. Any sex worker who has done work online knows that you’re constantly pivoting from platform to platform, navigating inconsistent content moderation and creating new account after new account. Yet we live in a social media–based world. For online creators on platforms like OnlyFans, their entire livelihoods and careers depend on social media and getting people to follow them.

I like to think we’re at a time right now when people can finally be open about the fact that they’re a stripper or a porn actor and still get brand deals and have a successful social media presence. But some platforms seem to disagree. Taking visibility away from an online content creator cuts off their opportunity to make art, earn money and feed their families. When it comes to Stripper News, the frustrating thing is that we’re not even doing anything that platforms have traditionally censored, like posting nudes. I don’t think “stripper” should be a bad word. I don’t think we should have to hide the fact that, as adults, we’re sexual, sensual beings.

Especially with a company like Meta, there’s a lot of hypocrisy involved. Instagram allows content that’s far more overtly sexual than ours, whether it’s made by influencers or artists or celebrities. Lately, I’ve been getting ads on my personal feed for erotic novels, and they show an animated girl having sex. Why is this okay but we’re not allowed to report the news in our bikinis?

These days, the goal with Stripper News is to be available everywhere. We can’t depend on just a few platforms anymore; we need to expand across as many as possible. If we’re going to be constantly battling censorship—and if we don’t currently have a mainstream social media platform that can accommodate all the multitudes of sex work without villainizing it—then we have to become as omnipresent as possible. Because we deserve to be heard and listened to and laughed with. And I think people want to see us that way.

I used the Instagram ban as a chance to take some time and reevaluate. Now we’re filming season two. I’m building a studio in Toronto’s west end: a kind of Stripper News headquarters where the girls can film and do interviews. I haven’t been to the club in a while because I’ve been so busy with the show. I still have an OnlyFans account, and I have regular clients from the club. But my goal is to make Stripper News my full-time job.

Not everyone wants to be public about sex work, and I understand that. But I do think that, these days, many people want to be honest about their line of work. A lot of women are trying to break free from the stigma that’s been put on sex workers for so long. We’re getting better language to think and talk about sex workers, and there’s momentum for sex workers to be more accepted in society. And it’s all thanks to a long history of individual sex workers being brave, bold and relentless.

Stripper News is about destigmatizing sex work. I want to continue to propel sex workers into the mainstream in this really big way, where you’re going to have to embrace us as strippers—you’re going to have to say “Stripper News” with us. You’re going to have to see us in our outfits, and you’re going to have to listen to what we have to say.