Teachers’ OnlyFans side hustles lead to resignation, public battle

(ST LOUIS) — The $2 million Brianna Coppage says she made on OnlyFans in the last year proved a lot more lucrative than her day job as a high school teacher.

“You know what I need right now?” she says in an Instagram promo video. “Someone to take me to dinner, and then bring me home and have me for dessert.”

Before beginning to produce saucy videos in 2023, Coppage was a high school English teacher in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, and struggling to make ends meet after her husband was laid off.

“I made $42,000 per year,” she told Ashan Singh in an interview with “Nightline.” “Missouri is one of the lowest paying states in the country for teacher pay.”

She spotted a friend’s page on OnlyFans, the subscription-based video hosting service primarily associated with adult sexual content, and decided to give it a try.

“So at first, it was just like me and my husband. Just like boy-girl stuff, girl stuff, just me. But didn’t show my face at all,” she said of her early videos on the platform.

This added $5,000 a month to her income, she told “Nightline.” OnlyFans has more than 3 million creators, pulling in more than $1 billion a year, according to parent company Fenix International Limited’s 2022 earnings report

“We could pay our rent, but I also didn’t know how much of a risk there was going to be. So at the time it was me thinking, ‘Well, can they actually fire me for this?’ ”

Despite this concern, Coppage didn’t see her OnlyFans career as being at odds with her work as a teacher.

“I wasn’t doing anything illegal,” she said. “I’m there to teach reading and writing. Like I’m not there to instill their morals.”

She found out exactly what her employer thought after a school employee suspected that she was the woman hiding her face in one of her videos.

“And I was like, ‘I guess I need to tell the school,’ ” she said. “And then I just started, like, kind of panicking. And then someone called and reported it to the school.”

This resulted in Coppage going on leave from her teaching job, with global media picking up on the story.

“Seeing my name and my face in every news article around the world was like a huge shock to me,” she said of that moment.

Coppage quit shortly after her OnlyFans career became public knowledge. Despite this, she says she wouldn’t have a problem with someone teaching her children who had a similar side-hustle.

“​​As long as they were not, like, bringing it to school, talking to my kid about it,” she said.

Even though her career as a teacher was cut short, Coppage has embraced her life as an OnlyFans creator.

“I don’t have any regrets,” she said.

Coppage fits the traditional mold of an OnlyFans creator — young and female – but the site caters to a wide range of desires. Joe Gow is a 63-year-old whose porn work bumped up against his 16-year career as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

“We felt a little more liberated, if you will, and just thought ‘Let’s experiment and just see. Would anybody be interested in these videos?’ ” he told “Nightline.”

Gow has been making sexy videos with his wife Carmen Wilson for 10 years.

“So Joe was like, ‘Well, I don’t know how to ask you this, but how do you feel about porn?’ I’m like ‘Yeah, I’m OK with porn,’ ” Wilson said of the moment that kicked off this escapade.

They recorded about 20 videos over a decade, but didn’t make them public. That changed in late 2023, when they started uploading the videos to their “Sexy Happy Couple” OnlyFans account. When that failed to attract many subscribers, they tried using a free porn video hosting site.

“I didn’t expect it to get out in … kind of the explosive way that it did,” Wilson said. “And there are so many millions of videos to watch on the free sites, how would we even get noticed? Well we did, quickly.”

This prompted the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s legal team to send Gow an email asking about the video. He acknowledged that it was indeed he and Wilson, and he was terminated as chancellor.

“In recent days, we learned of specific conduct by Dr. Gow that has subjected the university to significant reputational harm. His actions were abhorrent,” it said in a statement at the time.

The incident was widely reported, with Gow telling outlets he believes he was punished for making porn videos with his wife.

“The media reaction was just stunning,” Gow said. “We’ve been in several British papers. We were in The Economic Times.”

Despite losing his job as chancellor, Gow believed his tenured teaching position in media studies would be safe.

“I wasn’t surprised when they said, ‘You can’t be chancellor,’ ” he said. “But ‘We’re going to go after you as a tenured faculty member.’ Wow. That’s new.”

At a hearing in June, Gow acknowledged making the videos.

“​​We did so on our own time, using our own money,” he said at the gathering.

Colleagues aired their beliefs that Gow had damaged the university’s reputation.

“We don’t want to be known as Porn U,” Interim Chancellor Betsy Morgan said at the hearing. “We want to be known for the quality of our academic programs.”

Ultimately, the university released a unanimous decision to dismiss him for unethical conduct.

Gow continues to fight, despite his health insurance benefit potentially hanging in the balance. He says if he walked away willingly he could keep the benefit — estimated to be worth $313,000. But by choosing to fight, he risks losing it.

His appeal could be heard sometime in August.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.