Australia is facing a devastating wildfire season. Since October, fires have destroyed more than 1,400 homes, killed at least 24 people and countless animals, and burned millions of acres of land.
Kaylen Ward, a nude model in Los Angeles, found herself particularly affected by this news. She lived in Redding, Calif., in 2018 and saw firsthand how the Carr and Camp fires wreaked havoc on her family, friends and neighbors. The scale of the Australian fires has dwarfed those blazes.
Ms. Ward wanted to help. On Jan. 3, she told her 30,000 Twitter followers that she would send a naked picture of herself to anyone who donated $10 to charities involved in relief efforts.
“It’s a really good incentive for people who wouldn’t donate, as bad as that sounds,” she said in an interview this week.
In order to receive a nude photo, each donor would need to send Ms. Ward a receipt as verification. The model said that by the end of the first day — once she had added up the totals from the receipts sent to her Instagram inbox — she had encouraged the donation of about $5,000 to charities focused on Australia’s fires. She now claims to have raised more than a million dollars, though she was candid about her inability to verify individual donations. She provided screenshots in which it appeared that she had received multiple submissions per minute.
“I was trying to proof them as best I could,” Ms. Ward said. “I do think it’s very possible that a lot of them aren’t real.”
Her example has inspired others. A 26-year-old Colorado woman who poses nude using the name Lana Evans said that her husband sent her Ms. Ward’s original tweet. She quickly posted something similar and said that she stopped counting donations when she had $2,000 in receipts. She said that she joined an impromptu group of more than 20 women doing the same thing.
“I think it’s just motivating normal guys to donate because it’s giving them an incentive, you know?” she said.
These efforts, though surely more risqué, do have precedents. Partially dressed firefighters are known to pose for fund-raising calendars, and pageants with swimsuit competitions are often held for charitable purposes. Charitable nudes are certainly a more immediate means of gathering donations, although it’s possible that only a fraction of those messaging Ms. Ward and others have actually donated.
Ms. Ward’s mission was tabloid catnip, covered in The Mirror, The New York Post, The Sun and The Daily Mail. The author of the Mirror story, Milo Boyd, said that he knew fairly quickly that it would be popular with the tabloid’s audience, as it offered “a new way to present a hard-to-read story.” (The hard-to-read part referred to the fires.)
“It’s a nice combination of someone beautiful doing something philanthropic and doing it in a quite humorous way,” he said. “Our readership I think is one with an appreciation of good looking people and also one with an appreciation for an ethically-centered story.”
Before she announced her nudes for charity campaign, Ms. Ward, who makes money through the pornographic subscription service OnlyFans as well as more traditional modeling jobs, had about 30,000 followers. Within days, she had more than 220,000 followers and Instagram had banned her account. Instagram said in a statement that it did not allow its users to offer nude images.
Charitable donations raised through nude pictures are not always smiled upon by the charities themselves. David Marshall, a personal trainer in Australia who posts nude pictures and videos on OnlyFans, said that in 2018, when he tried to donate $5,000 to a charity supporting mental health, he was turned away. He was told that, while he could keep donating, the charity did not want him to mention its name on social media. He chose to donate the money to another organization.
Mr. Marshall said in an interview that he appreciated Ms. Ward’s efforts, and that he personally has donated $3,500 from his OnlyFans income toward similar wildfire relief efforts.
For her part, Ms. Ward rejected the judgment of anyone who might question her methods. “To be quite blunt, I don’t think anyone affected right now is going to be like, ‘Oh I don’t want that money because it came from a girl who’s selling their nudes.’”
