Bella Thorne’s been making headlines quite a bit lately, thanks to joining Only Fans, making a boatload of money, and then causing controversy with her actions on the subscription platform. However, if you were to ask Bella Thorne herself, the impression that most people have of her is wrong. In a recent interview, Thorne spoke out about her public image and people often thinking she’s “bad news.”
To hear Bella Thorne tell it, perception is very different than her reality. She says she has an image of being a party girl or someone “bitchy” and that’s not really who she is as a person. As Bella Throne told The Independent:
People have this idea in their head that I’m this crazy bad party girl, or this bitchy, crazy druggie. I don’t get it, because I feel like I don’t actually put out, like... bad shit? Like, I’m honest. I’m really, really fucking honest, and that gets me in trouble sometimes, but at the same time…Most people who meet me will apologize. They’re like, ‘Yo, I’m sorry, I’ve read all these things and I just had a certain image in my head of who you are. And now that I meet you, I feel so bad because I realize that’s completely untrue and I should never read anything.’ The amount of fucking people that I’ve heard this shit from – directors, producers, studio heads. Even friends! I hear it all the time.
The Infamous actress touched elsewhere in the interview on how headlines and the general public often get her wrong, mentioning a time when she was dealing with acne and people took her challenges with her skin routine to indicate she was on drugs. She called that a “really hard one to get over mentally” when she was younger and it seems as if the rumor mill has persisted in the time since.
Yet, Bella Thorne is in equal parts often pushing out a “wild child” image of herself through various endeavors, including directing porn (though she'd say this was to promote sex positivity), wearing SEX necklaces on Instagram (again to promote sec positivity), and her recent Only Fans jaunt, which netted her $1 million in the first day. She also wrote a book and opened up about being molested as a young woman, thus further shedding her Shake it Up image and reforming her fanbase. She noted:
They used to be like, ‘Bella, I love you, oh my god – Shake It Up, Midnight Sun.’ But now it’s like, ‘Yo. Bella. I was raped too.’ And that is such a beautiful thing. People feel like, ‘Yeah, Bella’s a celebrity but she’s one that you can actually talk to about this shit. Because she understands and she’s not, like, a judgmental bitch.’
Most recently, Bella Thorne said she joined Only Fans hoping to make a movie with The Florida Project director, though the director, Sean Baker, later debunked that idea. She also apologized after leading people to believe if they paid $200 they would receive nudes of her rather than lingerie content, which led Only Fans to put caps on content for all Only Fans users and angered other workers on the platform who are transparent about the type of content they put onto the platform.
Her sister, Kaili Thorne, has also joined Only Fans, defending her controversial comments on sex work. Bella Thorne has still recently been teasing new content on the platform, including a new music video.
