I ditched my Mormon life — now I make £240,000 a month from ‘tasteful’ sex work

When Kit Barrus was just eight years old, she started sneaking books out of her local library, reading them cover to cover.

She wanted to keep them away from the prying eyes of her mum, who had a habit of taking a black marker, and redacting the pages.

‘It was like censoring a government document,’ Kit tells Metro.

Kit, now 27, had been born into a strict Mormon family in California. Their lineage could be traced back to Brigham Young, the second president of the LDS church who famously had 20 wives and fathered 47 children.

She attended church for about 20 hours a week — the equivalent of a part-time job — throughout her childhood, but even at her young age, she was questioning the religion and its values.

‘I had three hours of church every Sunday, as well as at 5am everyday before school, plus Young Women’s Nights every Wednesday, which were classes for teen girls where pastors instilled strict gender norms,’ she says.

But Kit’s life today is unrecognisable from her religious home she was brought up in. Now, she’s a sex worker, and one of OnlyFans’ top earners, making £244,164 ($335,000) each month filming tasteful partnered sex scenes with both men and women.

This line of work isn’t her first act of rebellion, though. Kit says her first ‘massive fight’ with her parents about her faith came when she refused to get baptised, again at eight years old.

‘It’s supposed to be a choice to get baptised,’ she explains. ‘I’d never met a kid who didn’t want to get baptised, because Mormons believe if you’re not baptised, you can’t get into heaven. But I didn’t want to do it.

‘My dad couldn’t handle it, saying it would bring massive shame to our family, so after months of pressuring I gave in.’

Kit says she attempted to reject this right of passage so young, because even then she didn’t like how women were treated in the LDS church. ‘I was really p**sed off over the idea that girls were nothing,’ she says.

‘I excelled in school with straight As, I knew I was smart, and I knew I wanted to have influence, but women can’t hold roles of leadership in the church. They can lead other women, but God forbid a woman leads a man.

‘If I was doomed to insignificance in this church, then it wasn’t for me.’

Her teen years were filled with more practices she didn’t care for, such as baptisms for the dead. At 12, Kit would go to Temple where she says she was made to be baptised in a deceased person’s stead.

‘If you die unbaptised you can have a surrogate do it for you on this plane,’ explains Kit. ‘So Mormons compile names of everyone in their family tree who’s died and make a bunch of teens get baptised for them,’ she says.

‘They put you in a white jumpsuit, then old men put their hands on your head and give you a blessing before dunking you 15 times while saying a prayer. I probably did 50 to 100 of these.’

At 15, like all Mormon girls, Kit went to Girls Camp for a week in the summer. She remembers singing a song called ‘I Love a Mormon Boy.’

‘There’s a chant at the end of that song that goes, “more men, more men, more men, sing it again,”‘ she laughs.

Kit also remembers her annual ‘birthday interview’ with a bishop, something every child does each year.

‘The head of your congregation pulls you into his office and asks you really uncomfortable questions’ she recalls. ‘You’re a little girl sitting there with a 60-year-old man in a closed room who is asking you if you masturbate. It’s horrible.’

It was around this time that her relationship with her parents worsened. She’d stumbled across porn on the internet at 14 and liked it, and lost her virginity to her Christian boyfriend at 15, and ‘just wanted to be a normal teenager’.

‘When my parents found out about this, everything blew up,’ she says. ‘They pulled me out of school and sent me to Idaho to live with my grandparents,after about six months of house arrest. I was miserable.’

Because she’d lost her virginity, violating the code of conduct, Kit was also banned from taking the sacrament — similar to Holy Communion, when members drink wine and eat bread to symbolise the body and blood of Jesus.  

‘These 14-year-old boys hand out the blessed bread row by row, and you have to say “I can’t have it”,’ she sighs. ‘Although I didn’t really care, I couldn’t be more of an outcast than I already was.’

Living with her grandparents until the age of 18 was easier, although she had to buy her own food and clothes, so she worked at Taco Bell for £5.28 an hour, to pay her way.

Her grandma did threaten to kick her out when she discovered Kit wasn’t paying tithing— a commandment which expects members to pay 10% of their earnings to the church.

Kit eventually moved backto California with her parents when she graduated, but it didn’t last long. At 19, her dad found a single edible and a vibrator in her bedside table. It sparked a huge row, and saw Kit leaving home at 1am, and never coming back.

A few weeks later after sofa surfing with friends, she found a room for rent and got a nine to five at a law firm, where she worked for the next five years. She saved up enough to enroll in college, also working as a PT to fund her dream of getting a PHD in mathematics.

‘I was trying to do it with minimal debt, so I’d wake up at 4am to train a bunch of people, then go to school, but I was still struggling to pay my bills,’ she says.

So, one of her friends suggested OnlyFans. She was hesitant at first, but at this point she was living out of her savings, so she thought she’d test the waters, opening up her account in 2022. After earning earning £7,350 in her first month, she was sold on it as a career and ‘doubled down’ on making OF videos.

It was this money that allowed her to fulfil her dream of getting her mathematics PHD, but Kit now does sex work full time.

She makes sexy but humorous role play content, like dressing as a dragon and having sex with a female knight. ‘It’s silly but fun,’ she smiles. ‘I don’t make any extreme content or engage in sex challenges, and I actually credit my Mormon upbringing for that.

‘This industry can really push your boundaries. A lot of people fall into the trap of doing more and more extreme things because it sells well, but growing up Mormon and having everybody tell me what my values should be, then inherently disagreeing with that, has made me very independent when examining what I want to do.’

She adds it can be difficult when thousands of men are asking for something sexual and are willing to pay for it, but that’s never going to sway her.

‘You’re like, “I could make £100,000 if I just do this one thing”, but that’s when you sell a part of yourself,’ Kit says. ‘I have strength in my convictions after my childhood, I’ve been inoculated.’

Of course, her parents have no idea she’s one of the most famous sex workers on the internet, in fact, they think she’s struggling for money working for her tax lady.

However, the family have worked hard over the years to rebuild their relationships, and while there have been periods of no contact, they’re currently in a good place.

‘My parents are on a totally different side of the internet,’ she explains. ‘They only have Mormon friends, and Mormons don’t engage with pornography.’

‘But my parents aren’t interested in not having their kids in their lives, that’s just not who they are.

‘We’ve been through a lot at this point, my parents have worked hard on themselves, so we’re quite close now,’ she says.

‘If they find out, I expect they’ll need some space and there will be some awkwardness, but ultimately it will be okay.’

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