Kylie Leia Perez made more than $5.4 million on OnlyFans between 2019 and 2023, performing under the stage name Natalie Monroe. This week, a federal judge sentenced her to a year in prison for it. Well, not for the content itself. No, Perez is going to prison not for what she did, but what she didn’t do with the IRS.
Perez, 31, pleaded guilty in May to filing a false federal tax return for 2019 and failing to pay at least $1.5 million owed across the following four years. U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Barber handed down a year behind bars plus a year of supervised release, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida. The original indictment, filed in July 2025, laid out a year-by-year accounting of exactly how much slipped through: more than $1.6 million earned in 2020 alone, with nearly $499,000 in taxes on that income left unpaid, and taxable earnings ranging from roughly $603,000 to over $2.1 million annually between 2021 and 2023. She’d faced up to seven years if convicted on all five original counts; the plea deal narrowed that considerably, but a year in federal prison is still a year in federal prison.
Prosecutors were notably light on specifics about what Perez actually spent the money on, and the release doesn’t detail what content she posted. But it’s a stark reminder that OnlyFans, whatever its reputation, hosts musicians, fitness instructors, and all manner of creators alongside its adult content, and this case has nothing to do with the legality of what she made. It has everything to do with what she reported. “When someone chooses personal luxury over meeting their tax obligations, the consequences are inevitable,” said Ron Loecker, the IRS Criminal Investigation special agent who led the Florida field office’s work on the case. U.S. Attorney Gregory Kehoe’s statement was equally blunt: “Evading the payment of owed income tax is a violation of our federal tax laws. We will continue to prosecute those who purposely commit these crimes.”
But this isn’t just about OnlyFans. It’s a story about what happens when a new, fast-moving income stream outpaces the habits and infrastructure people build around more traditional employment. A creator going from $0 to seven figures in a matter of months doesn’t come with a payroll department automatically withholding taxes, an HR office issuing a W-2, or a CPA on retainer from day one. That gap between sudden, self-reported income and the systems that normally handle tax compliance automatically is exactly where cases like Perez’s happen. It’s not necessarily out of malice or intentional tax evasion, but rather a mismatch between how quickly the money arrived and how prepared anyone was to manage the obligations that came with it.
That gap doesn’t excuse what happened here. Perez pleaded guilty to filing a false return, which is a deliberate act, not an oversight. But it does explain why this keeps happening across the creator economy broadly, not just on OnlyFans specifically. Every platform that lets someone go from side hustle to six or seven figures overnight is subjecting everyone to the same tax exposure, and very few of those platforms include guidance on quarterly estimated payments, self-employment tax, or how 1099 income needs to be handled differently than a W-2 paycheck.
The practical takeaway for any creator reading this is simple: track every dollar of income as it comes in, set aside a solid percentage for taxes the moment it lands rather than after it’s spent, work with an accountant who understands self-employment and platform income specifically, and file quarterly estimated payments rather than waiting for one enormous reckoning every April. No, that isn’t glamorous advice, but it is the difference between building a legitimate business and ending up exactly where Perez did.