The Emily Hart Saga, Part 1: MAGA’s AI Dream Girl

View the full episode transcript.

Emily Hart was a pickup-driving, Trump-supporting blonde bombshell who frequently posted photos on Instagram along with captions about “deporting illegals.” Within a few weeks she gained thousands of followers. It was like she was engineered to go viral in the MAGA-sphere — because she was. A 22-year-old medical student in India who goes by “Sam” is the person behind Emily Hart, and he shepherded her to viral fame with a combination of right-wing engagement baiting and AI assistance. Reporter Ej Dickson, who wrote about Sam and Emily Hart for WIRED, describes how he was able to grift so many conservative men. And Sam himself explains how something that began as a fun side-hustle took a disturbing turn.

• Ej Dickson, senior culture writer atWired
• “Sam,” creator of AI MAGA Influencer Emily Hart

• This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men  — Ej Dickson, Wired 
• AI‑generated influencers: A new wave of cultural exploitation — Ateqah Khaki & Vinita Srivastava, The Conversation
• Meet Brandi Love, the Pro-Trump Porn Star Who Writes for The Federalist —  Marlow Stern, The Daily Beast 
• Challenges under India’s university reservation system   —  Namrata Kolachalam, The World 

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This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Morgan Sung: Hi Tabby Cats, do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends — post about it. You too, can be part of our volunteer clipping army. We can’t let the looksmaxxers win the clip wars. Okay, let’s get to the show.

Just a note, this episode contains some graphic descriptions of sexual content, so listen with care. 

Ej Dickson: So, Emily Hart was a 23-year-old nurse, I believe? Born in Buffalo, lived in New York City, who loved ice fishing and Michelob Light and America. 

Morgan Sung: Ej Dickson is a reporter for Wired. 

Ej Dickson: My job is to explain things that people are too afraid to Google at work. 

Morgan Sung: And at the beginning of the year, she started looking into this influencer… who went by Emily Hart. 

Ej Dickson: And she was a very pretty blonde girl, she looked a little bit like Jennifer Lawrence… loved posing on her pickup truck, in American flag bikinis. 

Morgan Sung: Emily frequently wore a bright red, “Make America Great Again” hat in her photos. She would post Instagram reels set to John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” with captions laden with American flag emojis. Most of her content was about deporting, quote, “illegals” and supporting Trump. 

Ej Dickson: Love posting racist memes and transphobic memes — you know, touching every single one of the MAGA bases. 

Morgan Sung: She had that no-makeup makeup look, and when she wasn’t in a bikini or ice fishing, she posted about being a nurse. Within a few weeks of starting her account, Emily Hart had more than 10,000 followers. It was like everything about her was engineered to go viral in the MAGA-sphere. 

Ej Dickson: There are certain aspects of the Emily Hart brand that are so uniquely American that people who are only from America would understand like, ice fishing or Michelob Ultra and sort of the status that it has as the beer of like, the MAGA world. 

Morgan Sung: She’s a Trump supporter’s perfect woman. There’s just one problem — Emily Hart is not real. She’s completely AI-generated. If you look past her perfect body, bleached hair, and very polarizing captions, you’d spot the inconsistencies. I mean, who goes ice fishing in a bikini? EJ said that those inconsistencies are what tipped her off. 

Ej Dickson: Her profile said that she went to school in New York and currently lived in New York and she was from Buffalo — like the chances are very low that somebody that explicitly conservative would move to New York City for college and live in New York city and be like, a real human being — honestly. I mean, I’m sure they exist — I don’t think they look like Emily Hart. 

Morgan Sung: Back in 2024, following Trump’s presidential win, EJ started seeing all of these tradwife-adjacent videos. They almost all featured a beautiful young blonde woman, in her 20s, kneading dough or sweeping the floor of a rustic kitchen. And, unlike the more modestly dressed tradwife influencers who popularized this content, the women in these videos were almost always wearing very low- cut dresses. 

Ej Dickson: There was sort of this sense of uncanny valley attached to them where it was like, “Oh these don’t really look like real people,” but they’re obviously trying to cater to a real… and honestly very terrifying audience. So, I started digging into it, because I saw one or two of these accounts and I was like “I bet there are more of them,” and just fell down this rabbit hole of AI MAGA hot girl accounts. 

Morgan Sung: Emily Hart was just one of countless AI MAGA hot girls taking over Instagram. These women are not real, but the people running their accounts are — and Ej found one of them. 

Sam: My pseudonym is Sam. I am a 22-year-old medical student. Currently, I am in my final year of medical school, and that’s pretty much it. 

Morgan Sung: Sam is the creator of Emily Hart, and what began as a get-rich-quick scheme for him quickly spiraled out of control. So, who is Sam, and what would possess him to create an AI MAGA hot girl? The saga of Emily Hart is such a wild ride that we’re actually going to split this deep dive into two parts. There’s so much to unpack here about the strange intersection of politics, AI, virtual influencers, privilege, and digital sex work. But today, we’re starting with Sam’s story. How did this 22-year-old student in India manage to dupe so many conservative men? Ready?

This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.

You know how every good deep dive starts. Let’s open a new tab: Who is the real Emily Hart?

You’ve probably picked up on this by now, but this tab is not about Emily Hart at all. It’s about the guy who made her. And in some ways, he’s like a lot of other straight guys his age. 

Sam: I’m a big time gym rat. Like, even right now like, I’m talking to you and I’m completing my daily steps. Building a lean physique, getting shredded — that gives me happiness. 

Morgan Sung: He asked that we call him Sam. We’re using a pseudonym for him because he’s in his final year of medical school, and is concerned about how this story could jeopardize his medical career and ability to emigrate to another country after graduation. Sam is 22, lives in northern India, and is studying orthopedic surgery. He’s from a middle-class family. Like a lot of Indians, he lives in an intergenerational household with his parents, grandparents, aunt, and uncle. 

Sam: Like, my cousins, they are like my real brother and sister — you get a lot of love, you get a lot of support. 

Morgan Sung: And Sam has always been fascinated by American culture. When I got on a call with him, he was like, “Wait, you live in Los Angeles? Is it really like Grand Theft Auto?” 

Sam: I follow American politics. I wanted to do my post-graduation from USA. I was super into American culture, like — playing GTA, Grand Theft Auto, like, watching, uh, you can say, TV show, of like How I Met Your Mother, Friends, and all. 

Morgan Sung: But it’s not just pop culture that made him want to immigrate here. He also wanted to leave India altogether. As close as his family is, his upbringing was, at times, strained. 

Sam: It was not pleasant, you can say. Like, there is this thing called caste system in India. 

Morgan Sung: India’s caste system is thousands of years old. Historically, castes were tied to specific occupations. The higher castes were priests and warriors and rulers. The middle caste were merchants and skilled artisans. The lower caste did farm work or were servants. And then, there were people who were considered “untouchable” — and they faced the most discrimination, even today.

To make up for generations of discrimination and economic inequality, the Indian government has a series of programs called “reservation.” It’s kind of like affirmative action — with strict quotas. A certain percentage of government jobs and public university spots are reserved for members of lower castes. The reservation system is very controversial in India, because it’s not based on current financial status. It’s based purely on caste, which is fixed at birth. 

Sam: You know, like, reservation and caste system were introduced to uplift the lower class — uplift the backward people. It started as a good idea. You know, my family has decent money, like — okay-okay money — we are not very rich. 

Morgan Sung: Sam’s ancestors were jewelers and fell into that middle tier of merchants and artisans. They’ve been solidly middle-class for generations. His family could not have afforded private school, so he had to compete for one of the very limited spots at his public university. There’s a key tension here between caste and class. Sam doesn’t come from a ton of money. He doesn’t have the same resources and safety net that the upper echelon of Indian society has.

The reservation system was designed to level the playing field. While it uplifts the most oppressed classes, Sam feels like it leaves the middle class behind. He said his own opportunities in India are limited — and that there’s no upward mobility for him. Becoming a doctor was never his great life goal… but, it’s a stable career that offers a considerably better salary than other jobs in India. And, there’s demand for doctors all over the world — he sees it as a ticket out of the caste system.

Sam had his sights set on America. He saw it as a land of meritocracy and Grand Theft Auto. But while his parents helped him with tuition and licensing exam fees, he wanted to travel. He needed to buy his protein powder so that he could, as he put it, “get shredded.” And he wanted save up for his potential move to the U.S.

So, he needed money. The problem? He’s in his last year of a five-and-a-half year medical program — and when he isn’t in class or working his medical internship, he’s studying for this big entrance exam to get into a post-grad medical specialty program. Plus, the job market in India sucks. Sam said that most entry-level, part-time jobs that college students typically get pay like, a dollar an hour. 

Sam: If you work four hours per day for a whole month, you can hardly earn like, $100 for a month. And like, I didn’t want to, you know, put so much effort for so little cash. 

Morgan Sung:  And, Sam is a product of his generation. It’s not just his gym rat tendencies. It’s what made his story so compelling to Ej. 

Ej Dickson: Sam is, I think, pretty representative of Gen Z males, in that there’s very much an emphasis on like, online side hustles. There were a lot of things that he tried to do to make money. He was doing online fitness coaching for a while, he was doing some of that like, drop shipping nonsense that all the Gen Z boys do. 

Morgan Sung: He tutored and sold notes and study guides for the U.S. medical licensing exam, which he already passed. He once saw Instagram ads about monetizing AI clips, so he started making AI Roblox videos for YouTube shorts. He was kind of just… chasing side hustles until something stuck. Then, while scrolling through Instagram, he came across this influencer. She was gorgeous, but Sam could tell she was AI-generated. And yet, she had a huge audience — all from a certain demographic. 

Sam: She uploads pictures with Donald Trump. She’s a blonde military girl that uploads pictures with Donald Trump — and like, she had like, thousands and millions of likes, thousands of followers, so I wanted to create that. Like, Donald Trump — everyone knows him, everyone knows what he is doing, and you know, even like, me and my friends who follow American politics, we used to joke around MAGA people that they are so dumb, like they don’t understand anything… and like how can someone support Donald Trump? Like, after all that he’s doing. 

Morgan Sung: He hatched a plan: make a hot AI girl, go viral, and get rich. He opened Google’s AI image generator, also known as Nano Banana Pro. 

Sam: I use a lot of Gemini. I never use ChatGPT — I am a Gemini guy. 

Morgan Sung: Sam initially tried to make the Indian version of the blonde military girl influencer, but it didn’t work out. For one, he said that because mainstream AI models are trained on American culture, Gemini struggled to generate a realistic-looking Indian woman. The hot Indian girl he was trying to create just looked… fake. And the second issue: he realized that Indian men just don’t spend money the way American men do. 

Sam:  And like USA, there is big tipping culture — people, you know, easily pay- they are more willing to pay. That’s why I changed it to an American influencer. 

Morgan Sung: But first, he had to decide what this American influencer would be like. Sam turned to Gemini, which told him the influencer shouldn’t just be a “pretty girl.” She needed depth. 

Sam: You shouldn’t create- just create a beautiful women with no personality. You want people to connect with your Instagram model — then they will be connected with you, then they will buy your services, etcetera. 

Morgan Sung: Sam had a new plan: create a hot blonde AI girl, go viral, and get rich. She would appeal to the typical American man — so that Sam could cash in on those sweet American tips. And she wouldn’t just look the part, she would have the personality of an all-American girl. Through TV shows, video games, and following American politics, he was familiar enough with American culture to pull it off. With a couple of curated prompts, he had a handful of images to start her account. The last thing he needed was a name. And that came from Gemini too: Emily Hart. 

[Clip of Emily Hart video]: Hey guys, just enjoying the sun by the pool today. This feels so good. I’m gonna dip my toes in, so refreshing. 

Morgan Sung: Emily took off — thousands of followers in just a few weeks. Sam had unlocked the formula to reach a very specific group of American men. So, how did he do it? We’re getting into that after this break. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going! You can support us by becoming a member at donate dot kqed dot org slash podcast. Okay, after the break, Emily Hart goes MAGA. Stick around.

Okay, we’re back. Time to open a new tab: Becoming Emily Hart.

At Gemini’s suggestion, Sam created a profile for Emily Hart, a blonde nurse from Buffalo who lives in New York City. It was pretty generic at first. He started posting as Emily in January, and immediately started getting attention… from a certain demographic. 

Sam: Once I created it, like, initially four or five DMs, all the DMs I got, was from, you can say, old 60, 70-year-old, MAGA people like, pro-MAGA, pro-right — like, those. 

Ej Dickson: And Gemini was apparently like, “You need to make a MAGA girl. You need to like a hot MAGA in a bikini, like, that’s gold.” 

Morgan Sung: He started posting images of Emily ice-fishing, drinking beer, and sexily firing rounds at the shooting range. He wrote captions like: 

[Clip of Emily Hart video]: If you want a reason to unfollow? Christ is king, abortion is murder, and all illegals must be deported. 

Morgan Sung: And:

[Clip of Emily Hart video]: POV: you were assigned intelligent at birth, but you identify as a liberal. 

Morgan Sung: Followed by a clown emoji.

Ej Dickson: He approached it as a craft, and he really spent a lot of time trying to perfect his craft on Gemini —because the space was so saturated, that he really needed a gimmick or a niche to kind of corner in order to be successful. 

Morgan Sung: It took a couple of weeks of consistent posting, but the payoff was real. 

Sam: It took me three weeks to get initial 1,000 subscribers. And from there, in one week, I had like 14,000-15,000 subscribers, 20 million views and like, all that. 

Morgan Sung: It helped that Emily’s audience wasn’t the most tech savvy. 

Ej Dickson: I want to be clear that Gemini did not explicitly say this, but I do think that that audience is probably less technologically well-versed than progressives are, and therefore more gullible and more prone to falling toward this kind of scheme. 

Morgan Sung: Sam echoed this… more strongly. 

Sam: I don’t want to stereotype, but — like, what I have observed, like, the liberals and the left-wing people, they are usually smart. They are — you know, they have basic common sense. And you know, the MAGA people are like, super dumb people. I should not say that, but they are like — you can say they are not that aware on, you can say, technology. 

Ej Dickson: That’s not to say that there aren’t easily duped liberals. I do think that internet MAGA has a much, much stronger digital aesthetic than progressives do, for sure. There’s an iconography attached to it — and just seeing like, a blonde white girl wearing an American flag bikini while ice fishing, I mean, how much more MAGA can you get? 

Morgan Sung: Emily’s very strong visual political identity resonated with her followers. Maybe that’s why they were less likely to be suspicious of her — the bright red MAGA hat she often wore also helped obscure some of the inconsistencies in her post. 

Sam: AI really, you know, messes up the hair also. So, to get around that, I used to include a MAGA cap in like, every image I make. So basically, like, I used to include accessories like sunglasses and MAGA cap to, you know, get two different… like, make it more believable. 

Morgan Sung: Yeah, so it wasn’t even just, like, to appeal to MAGA. 

Sam: Yeah, actually, it was — you know, it was beneficial in both ways. 

Or, maybe they didn’t suspect anything because she was hot, and that was disarming enough. Because, there were definitely red flags in Emily’s content. Video generation was less convincing. 

[Clip of Emily Hart video]: Hey, handsome. I just got back to my tiny apartment after a 12-hour shift at Bellevue. NYC is just so loud tonight, but honestly? All I can think about is how much I missed you. 

Morgan Sung: So Sam usually stuck to images — but even then, he said Gemini couldn’t quite get the eyes right. 

Sam: Like, you can say that it’s- it might not be real — there is something wrong with the picture. So you know what I used to do? Like, I used include sunglasses in every picture — every picture, I used to include sunglasses. Like, she’s wearing black sunglasses everywhere. Like she is ice-fishing, she is wearing sunglasses, like she’s inside her home, she’s wearing sunglasses. Even at night, she’s wearing sunglasses. 

Morgan Sung: Sam studied up on MAGA ideology and how Trump supporters interact online. Every day, he’d spend 30 minutes to an hour creating content that was pro-Second Amendment, anti-immigrant, and anti-abortion. The more divisive the caption, the more engagement he got as Emily. He didn’t believe in any of this, but he knew what would get attention. 

Ej Dickson: Weirdly, it was a scam that only somebody who was really interested in American culture could have pulled off, I think. 

Morgan Sung: Sam has a real knack for engagement bait: engineering content that tricks social media algorithms to boost a post. Like, he was inspired by this TikTok trend. 

Sam: There was a trend — on this song, like, it was around two years ago and it was this song — “I’m stylish, big top, big t-shirt, Billie Eilish.”

[Clip of TikTok trend video]: Bitch I’m stylish, black talk, big t-shirt, Billie Eilish. Watch on my wrist but I want that…

Morgan Sung: The videos usually started with someone getting ready, in a frumpy get-up — and, when the beat dropped, it would cut to them, fully glammed up. Sam was inspired by that split-second transition on the beat. So, using other songs, he put his own spin on it. 

Sam: I used to upload like, you can say, a catfish type of reel. There was like, four to six seconds reel of Emily Hart, a picture with her like, normal clothes. And then I used a sneak-in, like, for a millisecond, a picture of her in a swimsuit, you can say… sort of, like, a decent word — a swimsuit. 

Morgan Sung: Driven by horny curiosity, viewers would try to pause the video in time to see the picture. And if they didn’t catch it in time, they’d have to play the video again. 

Sam: And for that, they used to again and again, see multiple times, like four, five times, six times. So that Instagram gets the signal that this reel is so good that people are viewing it five to six times, so promote it. So normally I used to get like 200, 300 views, and like, these type of views used to get like, 10,000, 50,000, 25,000 views. 

Morgan Sung: Emily Hart was a hit. Within a few weeks, she had over 15,000 followers on Instagram — which is a fraction of what the most popular real influencers have, but to build this following in such a short time period with such minimal effort? Real influencers grind for months to build that. Sam felt like he had unlocked something. His MAGA influencer was going strong, but he wondered if there was an untapped market out there. So… he tried to recreate the magic of Emily Hart, but this time for a liberal audience. 

Ej Dickson: It was very stereotypical. I mean, less aggressively so than Emily Hart, but it was like a girl with dyed red hair and a nose ring who would like post cute selfies with a coffee cup in Bushwick. You know, it was very generic. It was clear that she wasn’t as fully fleshed out as Emily Hart was. 

Sam: And like, it was a complete flop because people used to know that it’s an AI flop and they like, usually didn’t interact with it, like, they didn’t comment. They were like, “This is AI slop, this is trash, we don’t have time,” something like that. And like, the MAGA people were like crazy — “Are you single? Can I message you?” Something like that. They were, you can say, a little more lusty, you can say. 

Morgan Sung: But, it was fine. Sam had his hands full with Emily, anyway. In the early days, he got a real kick out of duping conservative men who had no idea they were talking to a 22-year-old Indian guy. 

Sam: They were super racist. 

Morgan Sung: When he created Emily’s Facebook profile, he accidentally set his location to New Delhi. A random man messaged the profile. 

Sam: So, like, he went through my Facebook profile, he went through that, and he saw New Delhi. And he was like, “Have you been to India?” And I didn’t even say anything. And he used to like, “India is not a good place. It’s not safe for women. You shouldn’t have gone there.” And you know, the racist comments. And I didn’t talk to him. Like, he said, “Hi,” I said, “Hello.” Okay — then he started all this. 

Morgan Sung: But it never occurred to him that he could be just talking to someone who was Indian? 

Sam: No. It was a little fun like, you know, like, making a fool of such people. 

Morgan Sung: But this wasn’t just for fun. The entire reason he got into this was to make some cash. So, how did he monetize Emily Hart? That’s a new tab: why was Emily Hart so successful?

Instagram is very strict about nudity and adult content. So, like many real human sex workers, Emily’s Instagram account was a vehicle to drive engagement to another site: Fanvue. The most popular subscription platform for adult content is OnlyFans. Using AI tools to edit content and manage messages is allowed, but the site totally bans “synthetic personas” — fully AI-generated characters like Emily Hart. In fact, a lot of adult subscription sites do.

Instead, Sam used Fanvue, which is where a lot AI influencers sell nudes. Google’s Gemini blocks the generation of explicit content, and although there are ways to get around it, Sam’s hustle was all about doing the least amount of work for the most amount of money. So, he used Grok. He generated a couple nudes, uploaded them to Fanvue, set a subscription fee, and locked the juiciest content behind a paywall.

Then… the cash started rolling in. Sam was blown away at how easily Americans spent money. He couldn’t believe they were tipping him — or really, Emily — just to respond to their messages. 

Sam: People used to hugely tip. I don’t know why people tip in USA — like, I am 22 years old, I have never in my life once seen someone tipping in India. And like, people were like, crazy, they used to tip me $20, $10, and I was thinking like, “Why people are sending me extra money? I dont know.” 

Morgan Sung: He made a few thousand dollars within days of starting the account. Again, human adult content creators grind for years to get this kind of audience… and to generate anything close to this amount of revenue. What was it about Emily that made her so popular? Ej has a theory. 

Ej Dickson: I think that probably at the time that Sam was doing this, the space was a little less saturated, so there was less competition. And, I think, probably the most major contributor to this is the fact that there’s a really strong element of self-delusion at play here, right? In order to buy into Emily Hart’s whole persona, you not only have to believe that this woman exists, you have to be believe that she is a hot 24-year-old girl who exists and believes exactly the same things as you do — and validates every single opinion you have. I think these men got off to that probably more than anything. And I think that’s very powerful for the MAGA sect. 

Morgan Sung: There are real adult content creators who are also conservative. Ej pointed to Brandi Love, who’s known for making MILF porn and also being a vocal Trump supporter. 

Ej Dickson: I think what differentiates Emily from someone like Brandi, is Brandi does not make it integral to her persona, right? She very rarely posts about politics, and that’s Emily’s entire brand is combining politics with sex. With the conservative adult creators, the politics are kind of incidental to the main product, which is the sex. 

Morgan Sung: Sam knew he was playing into some kind of fantasy, and soon after starting the Fanvue account, started feeling really bad about it. He didn’t like the idea of deceiving anyone for money. Emily Hart’s Instagram account wasn’t labeled as AI, but Sam wasn’t making money there. 

Sam: If someone paid for my Fanvue, I used to disclose it — like, you should know this, before spending like, too much money. 

Morgan Sung: And when subscribers sent him additional tips on Fanvue, he’d actually message them back. 

Sam: And like, I used to say to them — “That you should know, I’m artificially generated.”. 

Morgan Sung: The wild thing is, the subscribers didn’t seem to care at all — even when Sam reminded them that the girl they were paying wasn’t real. 

Sam: Like, two or three people messaged me, like, “We think that you are AI-generated, but we love the reels you are making. You are supporting Trump, you are supporting the Republicans, so we will support you. We don’t care.” So, many were like that. 

Ej Dickson: I really don’t think that the majority of these men care if the woman on the other side of the screen is fake — and that’s kind of the scariest part to me, because I think that that principle applies to AI-generated content on the internet in general. I don’t think people care if something is real or fake anymore. 

Morgan Sung: What would drive Emily Hart subscribers to continue following her, subscribing to her exclusive content, and even paying to DM her if they knew she wasn’t really a hot 24-year-old, pickup truck-driving, ice-fishing nurse in New York City? They knew the pictures they were liking and saving — among other things — were generated using AI. At that point, why continue following her? Why not just chat with an AI girlfriend on Character AI or something? 

Ej Dickson: I really think it comes down to this idea of intimacy, which is the whole reason why OnlyFans blew up in the first place. Like, the whole premise of OnlyFans is that men are directly connecting with the objects of their fantasies. And, the level of intimacy that is provided by that exchange goes beyond sex, it goes beyond getting off. It really is about human connection. So I think that a lot of the men who paid for Emily Hart’s content were sort of willing to suspend their disbelief in exchange for that element of intimacy, of connection, of human interaction that they were trying to convince themselves that they were getting. 

Morgan Sung: Sam was making way more money than he ever could have made working a part-time job during school. Every day, he generates some more Emily content and come up with a racist, xenophobic caption that he knew would get attention. He kept an eye on all the viral trends that other hot girls, AI or not, were doing on Instagram and TikTok. Emily’s fans weren’t just American either. 

Sam: I got a guy from Germany, I got a guy from Switzerland, like, many different people. Like, on Instagram, I didn’t use to reply because like, my DM was filled, every day I get 100, 200, 300 messages. 

Morgan Sung: Sam ignored most of the Instagram messages, but made sure that Fanvue subscribers got a response, because they had to pay to unlock those. The site has an AI feature that generates messages based on previous chats, so he could automate responses. Although he didn’t have to respond to subscribers himself, he did have to see what they sent back. And they were getting a little too comfortable in Emily’s DMs. That’s a whole new tab: Emily Hart’s Simp Army.

On the upside? Sam made a good amount of money as Emily Hart. The downside? He was dealing with some real creeps. 

Sam: I can’t even say what people were sending me to Instagram, like, it’s inappropriate. But like, people are sending inappropriate images, inappropriate messages. “Hey, are you single? What’s up? Where do you live?” Like, these are general. But like, some people were like, so creepy. 

Morgan Sung: Navigating the internet as Emily was an eye-opening experience for Sam. 

Sam: My friends don’t even message me that much. When I started, I used to get like, 10-15 messages, easily. Like, so much attention. And I was thinking like, “Do pretty women get so much attention?” Like, I was like, surprised. But it’s not good kind of attention — it’s not the kind of attention people want. It’s super disgusting. 

Morgan Sung: As Emily Hart — patriot and rising Fanvue star —Sam experienced what women haven’t subjected to since the birth of texting: unsolicited dick pics. He was appalled. 

Sam: Like, directly, blatantly, like, no context, no “hi,” and then the image. Like, it was super weird, super creepy. 

Morgan Sung: He learned to stop checking Emily Hart’s Instagram messages, but he couldn’t ignore the ones on Fanvue, because that’s where he was making money. One guy on Fanvue sent him 50 bucks, and then to accompany the tip, the subscriber attached a video of himself, naked, humping a pillow that propped up a tablet with Emily’s nude. 

Ej Dickson: I mean, these guys were sending him cum tributes, like they were ejaculating on photos of Emily Hart, or like sending videos of themselves masturbating on Emily Hart’s photo — and he would have to see this, like, all the time. 

Morgan Sung: And then, there was the emotional toll, too. The unsolicited videos were gross, but they were nothing compared to the trauma-dumping that Emily’s subscribers did in her DMs. 

Ej Dickson: He would get messages all the time from people who would buy her videos and buy her exclusive content — and they would be like, “Are you real or are you AI?” But then they would go on and talk about their days, or talk about how lonely they were, how much they hated their wives. I found Sam very thoughtful and self-reflective. I think that he felt guilty about deceiving them, honestly. They would share things with him sometimes that went beyond the typical OnlyFans model-subscriber relationship.

Just going back to that idea of intimacy and human connection, like they would talk about how terrible their marriages were and they hadn’t slept in the same bed as and their wives in years and how they recently lost a parent or a beloved family member. When there was a theoretical audience of dumb MAGA guys paying for this content, I think he was more comfortable with that than with engaging with them all on an individual level and being like, “Oh, these are real people with real problems.”

Morgan Sung: The AI MAGA hot girl venture was supposed to be easy cash. And the fact that he was tricking Americans, whose politics he fundamentally disagreed with — who would probably be horrified to find out they were sending cum tributes to a 22-year-old Indian guy — felt like poetic justice. But the grift… stoped being fun. 

Ej Dickson: I think it got too intense. I think he got burnt out by it very fast. He wasn’t doing it for very long. 

Morgan Sung: And then the Instagram ban started. The scammer accusations followed. Emily Hart, AKA Sam, was under fire. That’s it for part one of the story, but don’t worry. We’re not finished with this deep dive yet. Next week, we’re getting into the rest of the Emily Hart saga, the scammer debate, and what happened with Sam’s lifelong dream of moving to America.

As usual, stick around after the credits for some bonus content. And if you’re dying to open more tabs before part two drops next week, we’ll link to some further reading in our show notes. We’re leaving these tabs open for now. So, come back for the rest of the story.

Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited and audio engineered by Chris Egusa. Production help from our intern, Lauren Yoon. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad.

Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.

This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his White Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches.

This episode includes AI-generated clips of Emily Hart, courtesy of Sam. We also used a clip of the song “Billie Eilish” by Armani White. Thanks for listening. 

Ej Dickson: Can I say cum tributes on here or should I just- 

Morgan Sung: Yes. 

Ej Dickson: Okay. 

Morgan Sung: But you will have to, uh — for the normies — explain what cum tributes are. [Laughs].

Ej Dickson: Okay.