Within 10 days, Elizabeth had made over a million dollars, an amount she’d previously expected could take a year. “I was blown away,” she told me in May. “My fans have really shown up for me, and they’ve supported me. And they’re still there supporting me, which I just never would have expected.”
She sees her presence on the site as an extension of her “American Pie” days, when she created a personal website to interact with fans, one of the first celebrities to do so. “The tech wasn’t ready for it yet,” she said. “We kept crashing the servers.”
So far, Elizabeth’s OnlyFans subscribers have seen peeks into her everyday life mixed with a bit of sexiness and glamour. “People have asked what my boundaries are, and I don’t even know my boundaries yet,” she said. “I’m just getting started on this.”
“This has kind of allowed me to find that side of myself again, especially being at an older age, you just kind of like assume, ‘Oh, well, that’s gone,’” said Elizabeth, who split from her husband Simon Borchert in September. (Her first husband, Joseph Reitman, is her friend and manager.)
“In the past, women at that age just weren’t seen,” she said. “Nobody considered what they wanted or how they felt. We’re hearing that more and more, with women in their 40s and 50s finding this whole new zest for life. And I’m quite excited.”
It’s safe to say Elizabeth has very different plans for her new revenue stream than the typical online influencer. Primarily, she hopes to bolster the Shannon Elizabeth Foundation, her charity that provides a 2,300-acre sanctuary of protected wilderness in South Africa, where she’s primarily lived since 2016.
