Sophie Rain has a message for James Fishback, complete with receipts totaling $170,000 spent while clearing 520 Amazon carts from teachers in just 48 hours.
The 21-year-old OnlyFans star, who reportedly earns around $45 million a year on the platform, announced this week she’d start fulfilling teachers’ classroom wish lists directly. Things like pencils, books, learning materials, and all the ordinary, unglamorous stuff teachers routinely buy out of their own paychecks because school budgets don’t stretch far enough. She wasn’t prepared for the response. “We have spent around $170,000 and cleared 520 carts,” she announced. “It’s been way more than I expected… and more messages are still coming in.” The requests poured in from California, Texas, Canada, and the UK, reminding all of us that the underfunded-classroom problem isn’t confined to any one district or country.
What actually surprised Rain wasn’t the volume of requests. It was how basic they were. “What surprised me is how similar a lot of the requests are… books, learning materials and things teachers are apparently paying for themselves all the time,” she said. Her read on that is blunt and, frankly, hard to argue with: “When somebody is responsible for a classroom full of kids and still has to reach into their own paycheck to buy supplies for them, something is wrong with that system.” Rain, who grew up on food stamps in Miami, says the sympathy isn’t performative. It’s personal. “My family wasn’t wealthy, so I understand what it’s like when money matters and you can’t just buy whatever you want,” she said. “School supplies might seem like a small expense to some people, but when families and teachers are already stretching their budgets, those little costs add up really quickly.”
The timing was intentional, and not just because it’s back to school season. Rain launched the initiative as a direct, pointed response to James Fishback, the Florida gubernatorial candidate who ran on a proposed 50% “sin tax” targeting OnlyFans creators’ income, floated in part as a way to fund teacher pay raises. Fishback finished a distant third in last week’s Republican primary, and Rain hadn’t missed the opportunity to needle him about it days earlier. This teacher-supplies campaign reads as the follow-up punchline. “But we all really know where the money is going,” she told her nearly 9 million Instagram followers when she announced the initiative Thursday, a clear jab at the credibility of a tax pitch from a candidate who never actually got the power to implement it. Where Fishback proposed taking money from creators to theoretically help teachers, Rain simply cut out the middleman (and the legislative process and the campaign trail) and put real dollars into real classrooms within 48 hours.
She’s not treating it as a one-time PR moment, either. Rain says she’d like to visit some of the classrooms she’s funded, provided teachers and districts are comfortable with it. “I think it would be cool to actually meet the teachers and students who are benefiting from this instead of everything happening through a phone screen” But she made it clear she doesn’t want to turn it into a stunt: “I would never just show up somewhere or turn a classroom into a publicity stunt.” She’s also framed the gesture in personal terms, reflecting on her own uneven school experience and the teachers who stuck with her anyway. “I was definitely not the teacher’s-pet, straight-A student,” she said. “But I always remember the teachers who actually cared about me as a person. You don’t really appreciate how much teachers do until you get older.”
And Rain is definitely going out of her way to show her appreciation these days…which is more than you can say for most politicians.