In 2018, Nikole Mitchell was a small-scale mommy blogger known for preaching sermons at her local church. Her content — photos of her kids and her homegrown vegetables — depicted her life as a good Christian woman. But her politics had been sliding to the left for years, and that shift only accelerated when she came out as queer in 2017.


Then, in a small act of rebellion, Mitchell decided to post a sexy photo — or at least, what she considered a sexy photo. “I was wearing a fucking turtleneck and ankle-length leggings,” she laughs now. “I remember asking my mentors at the time: ‘Do you think I can post this on my Facebook? I don’t want to offend anyone!’”


But that fairly chaste post was a transformative moment for Mitchell. “In posting that sexy turtleneck photo, I decided I wanted to be seen as myself — not as a mommy or a pastor.”


Today, Mitchell is best-known as the “pastor turned stripper” who was grilled on Dr. Phil for identifying as a sex worker and mother with a religious past. But gone are the days of turtlenecks and sermons. “The Bible is completely irrelevant to me,” she tells me. “I dedicated my life to that book for 35 years, and I’ll never waste my time with it again.” Instead, Mitchell now is a proud, X-rated OnlyFans creator, a successful life coach and a hilarious mom-of-three, who chats candidly about everything from the ordeals of being a female pastor to dishing out dick ratings.



It was never supposed to be this way. Mitchell describes her heavily Christian upbringing — one that followed a strict, Jesus-heavy schedule — as an “indoctrination.” “There was church three times a week: Sunday morning for Sunday school and church service, Sunday night for another church service, and every Wednesday night for a youth group,” she explains. “I felt like I lived at church. Then I was at Christian school five days a week.”


Her conservative childhood also meant she felt pressured to stifle any and all sexual desires, which was difficult and confusing. In second-grade, Mitchell remembers getting horny over a glimpse of Madonna’s underboob, and getting even hornier during the iconic “draw me like one of your French girls” scene in Titanic — so much so that the movie became the backdrop to her first kiss. “Watching any sex scene, my body would scream, ‘This is what I want to do!’” she recalls.


But when Mitchell’s parents found out she had lost her virginity in high school, they sent her straight to the doctor to get tested for STIs and confiscated her purity ring. “It was my favorite ring,” she tells me. “It was my birthstone, and it was beautiful. I threw it at them. I was just so angry that they cared more about my behavior and my external representation than about my very broken, very scared heart. Nobody told me it’s actually normal to be interested in sex, or how to be safe.”


Looking back, Mitchell feels like she missed out on truly living as herself. “If I could go back, I would have been a stripper at an early age,” she says. “I’ve had to work through so many years of anger and resentment over my upbringing. I feel like I’ve been robbed of decades of a life I would have loved to live, one that I’m finally getting around to so much later in life.”


After a five-year stint teaching in South Korea — “my mom’s Korean, and I’d always wanted to go to that side of the world to learn my heritage” — she moved back to the U.S. in 2010, newly pregnant with her husband who she jokingly calls her “gateway drug to all things liberal.”


As a married mom, Mitchell ticked all the boxes of an ideal religious woman and mother, but she quickly grew disillusioned. “In fact, I was pretty miserable,“ she sighs. “At the end of the day, I’m a businesswoman. Cleaning up poop and pee at home was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do with my life.”


It was around this time that Mitchell grew angry at the church, too. After training for years to become a pastor, she found out her male peers were working paid pastoral jobs while she was told being a female pastor was an unpaid gig. “I was doing it all for free,” she explains. “I should have cussed those fuckers out. Any time I inquired, they would write me these nasty emails calling me ungrateful for even questioning it.”


Mitchell was in her mid-30s when she eventually left the church. The late 2010s were a game-changing period of her life: in pretty quick succession she denounced her religion, posted the turtleneck photo and ended her 12-year marriage.


OnlyFans, though, was the real game-changer. “I first heard of OnlyFans back in maybe 2018, and it instantly caught my attention. I had been having one of my best friends take naked photos of me for years. I had this secret album, not for my husband, but for me. I would look through them and be like, ‘I’m so hot,’’ she laughs. “I started out with fully-clothed photos, but if you scroll way back, you can see how shy, nervous and modest I was. It’s mortifying, but beautiful. I quickly fell in love with it, and if I could make a little money on the side from being a little sexy? Let’s fucking go!”



It took a year for Mitchell to get the courage to post publicly about her OnlyFans, and to work through her own nagging fears. “I had so many hesitations. What are my family going to think? What are my kids and my husband going to think? I had so many blocks to work through, but throughout that year I stepped more into my freedom and thought: ‘Fuck any of that. I’m a grown-ass woman in my mid-to-late 30s, I can do whatever the fuck I want to do.”


When she finally did share the news, subscribers trickled in. “I remember a guy asking me how much I charged for a dick rating, and I had to fucking Google it,” she laughs. This led her to Reddit threads of dick and pussy ratings, and she was in awe. “Every single comment was like, ‘That is the most beautiful pussy I have ever seen.’ I couldn’t believe it. I had so much shame around my own pussy that I never wanted my husband to go down on me. I didn’t have an orgasm in my entire 12 years of marriage. Those pussy ratings healed something inside me.”


High on horny adrenaline, Mitchell started pitching her story to media outlets. As well as getting sexy online, she was building a life coach business, offering advice to other women navigating thorny issues like single motherhood, the church and struggling to pay the bills. The idea was to pitch herself as a “pastor turned stripper,” and sell her story of leaving the church and finding sexual liberation in a bid to attract more clients as a life coach.



In what Mitchell considers a moment of sweet revenge, her religious history turned out to be her meal ticket. The idea of an ex-pastor posting nudes online was too tantalizing for the mainstream media to ignore — a former Good Christian Woman being decidedly un-Christian in her increasingly explicit videos.



But although Mitchell welcomes the media attention, she admits to finding the usual lines of questioning — like, how can she be both a mother and sex worker — challenging. “The first couple of years were brutal,” she says. “I so badly want people to understand where I’m coming from, so it hurts when people misrepresent or intentionally smear what I say. I would write practice questions and film my responses, and I’d write out my worst-case scenario questions,” most of which, she says, are about her kids.


Speaking of which, Mitchell believes that her career has actually brought her closer to her kids because they no longer live with the stress of being poor. “We went from living on food stamps and not being able to afford a $700 mortgage to now being able to pay people to do my cooking, cleaning and shopping, so I can swim in the pool with them or go for a bike ride,” she explains.


Better still, Mitchell’s “pastor-turned-stripper” story has become her own personal gold mine, which she describes as a kind of retribution for the decades she spent feeling shamed by religion. “The church used me for all those years and paid me nothing,” she smiles. “Now, I’m using them.”