Adult content star Belle Delphine has revealed she’s finally been paid for the used bathwater stunt that made her famous – five years after the fact.
Delphine – whose real name is Mary-Belle Kirschner – went viral in July 2019, when she hawked jars of “gamer girl bathwater” online for $43 a piece.
The 24-year-old made $90,000 in profits – only for it to be taken by PayPal, she shared in a thread on X.
“Not only did I not earn any money selling my bathwater, I in fact LOST money doing it,” the OnlyFans creator said.
“@PayPal without any warning closed my PayPal account and took the $90,000 that I earned from selling my bathwater. There was nothing I could do, I tried phoning them up and they just said ‘sorry, nothing we can do!’
“I knew it would be a better news story to say that I made ‘SOoOo (sic) much money’ from selling my bathwater so I just kept this secret … Ultimately I’m glad I did it since it was a really funny time on the internet when it happened, and I still did mail out all the bathwater people bought from me (which I did all by myself).”
Under PayPal’s current terms of service, the payment processor allows “US-only transactions for sexually oriented physical goods that are physically delivered to the customer” – which the bathwater would fall under.
According to Business Insider, after Delphine posted about the lost proceeds, PayPal reversed its decision, and returned the funds.
But, she told the publication, if it weren’t for her social media following, “they wouldn’t have given me my money back”.
“Which is so sh*tty because what are all the normal non-social media users meant to do in this situation? I followed all the normal protocols and was roadblocked and gave up,” Delphine said.
“The Twitter post I made about it had SO many comments of people saying PayPal did the exact same thing to them. It was shocking, to be honest.”
Delphine, who was 19 when she bottled her bathwater, told The Guardian at the time she was “lucky” to “do crazy things and get to see the world react to it”.
“There’s definitely enjoyment in that, even if it’s sometimes a little scary,” she said.
“I get a bigger reaction to my weirder content but I think that’s only possible because I also make risque content.”
On an episode of The Louis Theroux Podcast in February, Delphine said she’d ultimately like to “disappear” from the internet one day.
“I’m not really interested in the fame aspect so there will be nothing really holding me on at that point,” she told Theroux.
“I think once it’s run its course, I’ll just leave it.”