OnlyFans has killed the celebrity sex tape industry—and Kevin Blatt’s career.
The man who once hustled Paris Hilton’s sex tape is now sitting in front of a camera explaining that his old business model is dead. The celebrity sex tape broker, best known for pushing those grainy bedroom reels into the mainstream, insists the market that made him notorious doesn’t exist anymore.
“There just isn’t that potential to make any money, not the way that we used to,” he said in a recent interview. What used to be million-dollar leaks are now, at best, a fleeting headline for TMZ. The internet has moved on, and the stars are running their own shows.
Blatt says OnlyFans killed the bootleg industry. After all, why wait to be exposed when you can monetize your own intimacy and cut middlemen like him out of the equation entirely?
“With sites like OnlyFans, you could put up your own content,” he explained. “Now, you put out a sex tape just to become a blip on the radar.” In 2023 alone, creators on the platform earned $6.6 billion. That dwarfs anything the Hilton, Kardashian, or Anderson tapes could have dreamed of. Blatt himself now spends his time doing the opposite of his old gig—helping people bury what they don’t want online. He calls it a new epiphany.
The A&E docuseries Secrets of Celebrity Sex Tapes reopens the vault on all those grainy cultural detonations. From Pam and Tommy to the tape that put Kim Kardashian on the map, this docuseries shows how these tapes rewired ideas of fame. But it also highlights how the landscape has been swallowed by user-generated platforms. What once looked like scandal is now just a revenue stream. Blatt argues the public is savvy enough to know when a celebrity is in on the performance.
“A lot of these celebrities are promoting themselves,” he said.
That doesn’t mean the old wounds aren’t still raw. In her 2023 memoir, Hilton described the horror of being pressured into filming with Rick Salomon at 22, downing booze and Quaaludes to get through it. She remembered believing her life was finished when it leaked in 2003.
“The world thinks of me as a sex symbol,” she wrote, “but when people saw that sex tape, they didn’t say ‘icon,’ they said ‘slut.’” The tape may have juiced her notoriety, but the psychic damage outlived the clicks.
Blatt, for his part, denies he ruined anyone. He insists the tapes mostly helped, citing the careers boosted by scandal.
“I don’t believe that any of these sex tapes have really harmed anybody’s career,” he claimed. “They’ve only enhanced people’s careers and put them back in the zeitgeist.”
Some celebrities, he added, were willing participants in the marketing schemes that turned leaks into headlines. He resents the label of extortionist. He’d rather be remembered as “a nice Jewish boy from Cleveland.”
Now, with privacy laws tightening and stars selling their own bodies on their own terms, the sex tape broker has been demoted to relic. The economy of shame is out, the economy of self-exposure is in. Sex sells, but only if you’re the one cashing the check. Which is perhaps how it should have been all along.