“Nursing is always where I saw myself,” explains Allie Rae.
Getting there was the hard part. She signed up for the Navy at 17, serving as a yeoman who assisted the admirals and penned awards literature anytime someone received a medal. At 18, she married her husband, and they had two children right away. Rae—who is using her stage name—decided to leave the Navy in 2006, following Hurricane Katrina. She’d been stationed in New Orleans during the disaster, and witnessing the devastation and loss of life firsthand had taken its toll. Following a brief stint in marketing, she enrolled in nursing school, eventually landing in the labor and delivery unit of a top hospital in Massachusetts.
And she soon realized that she had a gift for helping people.
“I started off in labor and delivery, which is where I always wanted to be,” says Rae. “Then I started to realize that anytime something went wrong with a baby I was incredibly nervous, so I made myself shadow in the NICU [neonatal intensive care unit] in order to get past my fear and ended up falling in love with it. I can say with pure confidence that I was a fantastic NICU nurse.”
Rae worked 14-hour days in the neonatal intensive care unit, which she describes as “taxing on my body” and “emotionally draining.” But she loved her work. To blow off steam—and entertain herself—Rae began posting revealing shots of herself on Instagram and The Chive, under the alias “Allie Rae.”
In December 2020, after nearly nine years on the job, six nurses in her unit stumbled across some of her photos online and reported them to their boss.
“They informed my manager about that and I was called into the office about their social media policy,” shares Rae. “It got uncomfortable, where I felt people were concentrating more on my performance outside of the hospital versus my performance in the hospital.”
Given that she was using an alias, wasn’t identifying where she worked, and wasn’t posting anything too risqué, Rae was let off with a warning.
Three months later, in March 2021, the nosy nurses found Rae’s OnlyFans.
“They subscribed and paid to my OnlyFans account to screenshot it and bring it to my manager,” recalls Rae. “It was like Mean Girls for adults.”
“They got the director involved and it was, ‘You need to get rid of this account or we can’t have you working here.’ That really bothered me,” Rae admits.
So she quit.
“The stigma against people in the sex-work industry and OnlyFans ran a really good nurse out of the hospital,” says Rae. “I didn’t even need the money—I was making more money on OnlyFans than I was as a nurse and was only doing it because I loved it—but once I became ‘the girl who does OnlyFans,’ it tore me apart.”
“I Was Just Your Typical Girl…”
Thanks to her bikini-clad images on Instagram and The Chive, Rae had amassed a decent online following. In the early months of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of people across the world, OnlyFans exploded, as lonely, locked-down men (primarily) flocked to the adult subscription site to quench their sexual thirst. Rae began receiving DMs from her Instagram followers telling her to start an OnlyFans account, so she and her husband thought, let’s go see what this is all about. They set up her OnlyFans in September 2020 and the feedback was, well, extremely positive.
“I posted a couple of photos and by the end of the day, I had 20 subscribers,” she remembers. “So, I posted every day—or every other day—and by the end of our first month, we’d made $8,000, which surpassed my monthly nursing salary. And it was COVID, so it wasn’t the most pleasant time at work. To see that much money come in with such little effort…,” she mutters, trailing off.
“This was a completely new frontier. I was just your typical girl,” she adds. “As far as how it felt, my husband and I were married very young, so it was liberating.”
What started as a handful of nude photos has grown to include far racier images and pay-per-view videos—including Rae masturbating and performing sex acts with her husband. She calls her OnlyFans a “behind-the-scenes version of our life.”
“We’ve definitely expanded our horizons from the beginning,” she offers. “For instance, I never saw us selling videos of us having sex to strangers online, but now we do it. That came with many late-night conversations and talking things through together.”
Rae, 37, now pulls in an average of $65,000-75,000 a month from her OnlyFans through a combination of subscriptions, which run $12.99, and the pay-per-view sex clips that’ll run you between $7-30 apiece (The Daily Beast has viewed documentation confirming Rae’s OnlyFans income.)
“We try to provide a fly-on-the-wall experience, and I think that’s been a huge part of our success during the pandemic,” Rae explains. “It’s a full-time job for me now, but I never want it to feel like I’m ‘selling myself’ online. It’s just us having fun and enjoying ourselves.”
While Rae’s husband has always been intimately involved in her OnlyFans activities, their three children—ages 12, 17, and 18—had been largely kept in the dark. It was only recently that she and her hubby sorta broke the news to their two eldest kids.
“We took the two older kids out to dinner and I told them I was doing some influencer-type work, and they were like, ‘We got it. We’re good. We know,’” Rae remembers. “It was an unspoken thing where I’m sure they understand where we’re dabbling. They had a pretty open mind about it. And we’ve blocked them—and their friends—on all our platforms.”
Rae and her husband are currently living in Florida, where they moved after she left the hospital in March, only a few months shy of receiving her doctorate in nursing. They’re thinking of buying property down there with all the OnlyFans cash but are so flush with it that they’re “not sure where else to put the rest of it.”
Despite her riches, Rae misses nursing—and is still haunted by the way she was cruelly pushed out of the hospital.
“I didn’t like the way I was looked at and treated, and the way that I was labeled. Everything shifted,” she maintains. “But nursing takes a toll on you, and after I got past the fact of, ‘How could everyone be so mean?’ I realized that I could spend more time with my kids, make them breakfast every morning, and am there for dinner every night. These were things I could never do as a nurse working 14-hour days. So, there were a lot of positives that came out of it.”
“That being said, I do mourn it a bit,” she continues. “That will come back a lot, because I did have a passion for what I did—doing something meaningful. It’s the purpose that I’ll miss the most. I won’t say that what I do now is empty, because I do give a lot of advice to people struggling with their relationships… but I do miss nursing. The wound is still fresh.”
She also finds it strange just how much more she’s making on OnlyFans compared to her far busier nursing days.
“It’s very, very little money for saving a life every day—especially in the NICU,” she says, with a deep sigh. “That really opened my eyes. There’s definitely an underappreciation for nurses.”
