‘I interviewed Bonnie Blue – what she was like off camera shocked me’

"They say we'll need STI tests just for being near her."

You already know who Bonnie Blue is. Your gran does too. She’s everywhere, from the This Morning sofa to Andrew Tate’s podcast, meaning that everyone has an opinion on this 26-year-old from Derbyshire. And promotion for a Channel 4 documentary focussing on her claim to have slept with 1057 men in one day, something that seems to push both time and human physiology to their limits, means that we, the presenters of the PoliticsJOE podcast have the opportunity to interview her. 

We live in an attention economy and Bonnie Blue is a master of commanding attention. Anything she does, from her claims to have slept with a father and son to suggesting that women are failing their husbands by not shagging them properly, elicits howling rage from just about everybody. All that does is benefit her. As long as you mention that she has an OnlyFans or a Fansly account, she couldn’t care less about what you say about her. 

With this in mind, we concocted a gameplan before the interview. Don’t rise to her attempts to shock us. Keep the conversation grounded in reality. Give her space and make her feel comfortable. That way, hopefully, we’ll meet the real Bonnie. 

She arrived at the studio with her manager, a man called Mike. It turns out that Mike claims to be the person to have launched the viral phenomenon of nonce hunting in the UK.  “Now I work with one,” he laughs, alluding to Bonnie’s stated preference for “barely legal" men. 

Bonnie coolly scrolls on her phone before we begin. My colleague Ava asks her what hairspray she uses. She says she doesn’t wear any. She’s wearing a matching Miu Miu outfit, complete with Miu Miu trainers. She is smaller than I expected. I had wondered if she would switch “on” to being in character when the cameras start to roll but she and Mike cracked crass jokes at her own expense throughout their conversations.  

The interview begins and we breeze through her early life, how she got into the industry, whether she considers herself a feminist. She engages with some questions but it seems that when she gets too close to being earnest she lurches back into crass jokes. The rapport cools slightly when we bring up her association with Tate. The conversation moves on and says she thinks sex workers who end up in unsafe situations are “stupid”, something that totally repels me. When we circle back to Tate the rapport totally frosts over, and it never comes back. We agreed after that from that point it seemed that there was an impasse, that she’d let her guard down slightly initially but she became unimpeachable from then on.

The interview ends about ten minutes later. She and Mike say we’ll need STI tests just for being near her then they leave.

There’s a concept in professional wrestling called kayfabe. It’s the concept that the act is never dropped. There is no wink, no acknowledgement that the Undertaker isn’t an undead zombie, that he’s actually a man in his 50s called Mark. And I suspect that’s what Bonnie is engaged in and that’s why I’m not convinced of her claims.

There’s a pattern. She says she’s done something shocking, offers little evidence, and then generates thousands of tweets and segments on morning telly. Ultimately, all she wants is for people to pay for her content. If you’re talking about her at all, she’s winning. There’s famously no such thing as bad publicity.  She’s built a character for herself straight from a writers’ room of the horniest teenage boys. She doesn’t need to actually sleep with a thousand men to become the most famous woman in the world. She just needs you to think she has.