Yet again, a young woman is at risk of losing her job because of her spicy side hustle. Rookie NYPD officer Dannah Battino is getting dragged online and in office because gasp she had an OnlyFans! People who log into Pornhub no fewer than three times a week are clutching their pearls and calling for her removal from the force, calling it the scandal of the decade. For those of us who stay tuned into these matters, it’s just another episode of America being weirdly obsessed with controlling women’s bodies while pretending said control is all about professionalism.
This story has everything. A NYPD officer in probationary status, a now-removed OnlyFans account with explicit content, an Internal Affairs review, and possible violations of outside income disclosure and department conduct rules. Rules may have been broken, but no crimes were committed, nor was public safety at risk here in any form or fashion. This story kersploded on the internet because it hits three of our favorite scandal buttons all in one go: cops, sex work, and women. Those things basically made Dannah’s predicament catnip for outrage-culture junkies.
Before I dive into whether or not rules that Dannah agreed to were violated, let’s make one thing abundantly clear: the shock and horror at regular ol’ women making money on OnlyFans isn’t about safety or corruption, it’s about discomfort with women owning their sexuality and capitalizing on their own objectification. Discomfort with someone else’s private activities, in which everyone involved is an informed and fully consenting adult, shouldn’t be what makes public policy. OnlyFans is legal, the creators who generate income there pay taxes on that income, it’s paywalled to prevent casual scrollers from accidentally seeing something that they shouldn’t, and it is private. Someone selling adult content behind a login screen for a site that users have to opt in to in order to consume any of the consensually created content isn’t a scandal. It’s just e-commerce. If capitalism gets a pass for monetizing everything from clean air to multiple limited-edition albums that one has to go to several different corporate chain stores to collect, then I’m pretty sure we should be good with one cop selling feet pics in her pre-LEO life.
Even when you have a public-facing job, your private life should be your private life. What you do off-duty shouldn’t get to define your worth as a worker unless it directly affects your ability to do your job. Teachers, nurses, city clerks, firefighters, they all privately engage in the same vices and activities that we do. They date, they consume alcohol (sometimes while dating!), and they even have sex. Wild. We all do things in our personal lives that would get judged by people who come online specifically to pretend that the Puritans are still hip, but suddenly the appearance of a paywall makes it a crime?
This isn’t the first time an OnlyFans creator has had some turbulence when transitioning to a less spicy line of work. Most adult content creators don’t want to create adult content for the rest of their lives, so they eventually try to move into real estate, retail, wellness, tech, marketing, media, or any other industry that you can think of. However, the stigma is real, and it follows them. Would-be employers do a quick Google, find screenshots of leaked content that will never die, and then doors close in their faces. Punishing someone in 2026, the year of our lord and savior Dolly Parton, is only going to make the pipeline even more backed up with misogynistic guck than it already was. We keep saying that “sex work is work” until someone tries to transition to a different line of work, and then suddenly it’s like you’re reading The Scarlet Letter all over again.
In Dannah’s case, “back the blue” should mean backing privacy and due process rather than purity tests, but here we are. Cops shouldn’t have to live like Victorian nuns when they’re off-duty. If we’re really going to get snippy about a woman who is willing to put her life on the line on the force having earned money from selling access to her girl-on-girl content once upon a time, then maybe we should discuss the idea of cops being banned from strip clubs.
However, as things currently stand, the NYPD is an agency that comes with rules that have to be obeyed in order to remain on the force. Outside income disclosures must be transparent, codes of conduct must be followed, and public image clauses are a part of the job. If you sign the contract, you’re bound by those same rules. Boring? Yes. Real? Also yes. I fully believe that Dannah had the right to join the force after her tenure as an adult content creator, and that what was created on her private, paywall-protected OnlyFans account shouldn’t count against the public image clause that she agreed to, but I’m not on the NYPD HR team, so that’s not really my decision.
So, is it wrong for public-facing professionals to have or have had an OnlyFans? I don’t think so. Should these figures be shamed for the content they created while utilizing OnlyFans as a source of income? Again, I say nay. But if you’ve agreed to follow a set of rules while in that public-facing position, and your OnlyFans page violates those rules, then it’s kind of on you for not disclosing your page to the higher-ups prior to signing that dotted line. The real scandal here isn’t so much the paywall as it is the fact that grown adults are struggling this hard with nuance. In order to truly back the blue, we need to work on being able to back the creators on the blue website as well.
