Dallas-area fitness influencer Brittany Dawn rose from a self-described insecure college graduate to a social media celebrity with hundreds of thousands of followers.
As she shared fitness and lifestyle tips that sculpted her into a professional bikini competitor, she turned her passion into a business — selling what she marketed as personalized diet and workout plans for as much as $300 each.
Then, even faster than her rise to fame, the 27-year-old whose legal name is Brittany Davis found herself at the center of an epic backlash over what her followers described as years of unfulfilled promises.
The very people she said she set out to help began accusing her of scamming them, and she ended up on ABC's Good Morning America last week trying to explain to a national audience what went wrong.
Her experience illustrates the double-edged world of social media, says Caitlin Mitchell, a social strategy director at The Richards Group, a Dallas advertising agency that works with hundreds of businesses looking to bolster their image on Instagram, YouTube and other popular social media platforms.
"Social media is both a blessing and a curse,” Mitchell said. “It's a blessing in that you can build and scale your business faster than ever, but you can also completely destroy and tarnish your brand faster."
For Davis, that’s where she now finds herself — trying to restore her personal brand while making good with upset customers.
Building a brand
Davis started building her public persona with the help of social media in 2014, according to a biography on her website. At the time, she had already established herself in the fitness industry, having earned a Professional Natural Bodybuilding Association bikini pro card in Texas in 2013.
For Davis, the encouragement from social media’s highly engaged fitness community was the support she needed at the time, she said.
"I didn't have a lot of confidence, I wasn't happy in my own skin. That was what initially propelled me," she said.
Over five or so years, Davis grew her following by posting pictures and videos about her own transformation and a seemingly idyllic lifestyle. Her feed is filled with inspirational messages ("It takes $0.00 to be a decent person with a good heart"), images of her modeling fitness wear, healthy snacks and 2-foot pizzas, trips to Hawaii, a pit bull with 10,000 followers of its own and a Range Rover.
Many of her followers say her life looked like something they wanted for themselves — someone who practiced what she preached. They also liked that she appeared to be able to achieve a bikini model body while eating foods they loved.
Sprinkled throughout her posts are side-by-side images of her own body progress as well as several of her clients’ progress pictures.
Her Instagram account totaled nearly 550,000 followers and her YouTube channel boasted close to 300,000 subscribers.
Davis said she decided to turn her platform into one where she could help other women who were in the same position she had been, unsatisfied and looking for advice on how to better their lives.
Social media analytics site SocialBlade estimates Davis' annual income from YouTube alone at almost $60,000 today. Davis also advertised brands and products on her social media pages, another common source of revenue for influencers.
She promoted her own fitness and diet plans and began selling them on her website, which at one point boasted she had helped around 5,000 clients. She charged clients extra to exchange personalized text messages with her as motivation. Almost all of Davis' services were removed from her website by Tuesday.
![A screenshot of Brittany Davis' website taken Tuesday morning, before most services were...](https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/A6T3HACKA5XGCXZOX3RVBX6X7U.png?auth=49fd0ade1e1832c309278142a5476f7f24c079e91b1706ad2ea393746493559c&width=830&quality=80)
Fitness coaches offering personalized instruction say that even working with 10 clients at a time can be overwhelming for them. When asked if the client count listed on her website was accurate, Davis and her manager both said they didn't know how many clients she’s had. "That's a really difficult question to answer," she said.
Social media influencers have amassed large and loyal followings in recent years that then become lucrative to monetize.
That's partly a result of sophisticated business pages, with high quality photos and materials, that convey credibility, said Stanford researcher Rosanna Guadagno.
“Once you start attracting customers with that credible facade, even if what’s underneath is not credible, word of mouth kicks into high gear,” said Guadagno, who formerly taught at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Essentially, that’s a formula for virality.
But not all influencers are building their brands ethically. For example, industry professionals have recently cracked down or halted business with Instagram accounts that buy followers to boost their numbers, artificially adding to their perceived credibility.
As it becomes harder to get noticed in the saturated social media sphere, even brands like Mercedes-Benz and Pepsi have been accused of paying third-party services which, for a fee as low as $90, will follow your account from thousands of inactive or active accounts owned by the service. Those aren’t actual engaged users, but they boost a bottom-line following that genuine users may perceive differently.
![Lifestyle influencer Brittany Davis built her following by sharing her transformation from...](https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/VJWQMRWZ7IMHZGCOXN2FGDIWUQ.jpg?auth=0f7f911f05e07b5fcbca52b99efddf325030831938b8a82ef8c04e2ea32806c6&width=430&quality=80)
‘A blessing and a curse’
In 2019, after more than 14 million YouTube views, Brittany Dawn Fitness LLC faced an epic backlash as complaints mounted about Davis’ business practices. Most said they felt scammed, receiving generic workout or diet plans and then getting the online equivalent of the cold shoulder when they complained or demanded refunds.
Davis blocked them from her social accounts, deleted their comments or simply stopped responding. In some cases, she even asked customers to sign non-disclosure agreements before issuing refunds.
Davis' public confrontation with YouTube prankster Cassady Campbell was shared on his channel Feb. 5 and received viral attention. Campbell's channel has 700,000 subscribers. In the video, Campbell approaches Davis at a fitness expo and calls her out while pretending to be the father of someone she "stole money from."
Responding to her critics a day later, Davis took to YouTube.
"I am scared to film this video," Davis said in a video testimonial uploaded to YouTube Feb. 6 with links below it to purchase some of the products she recommended. She pleaded with her audience to stop sending "hundreds" of death threats and harassing remarks.
Davis later told The Dallas Morning News that those threats came mostly from men after the Cassady Campbell prank video, and tallied in the dozens. About 90 percent of her followers are women, Davis said.
As the backlash grew, Davis’ followers gathered on Facebook and realized just how many of them had similar experiences. Nearly 4,000 of them joined a private Facebook group called Brittany Dawn Fitness Complaints, where they openly shared their experiences.
“For far too long, people have remained quiet to not rock the boat because any attempt to do so is met with fierce opposition and/or attempts to silence,” the group’s description reads.
Almost 10,000 people now have signed a Change.org petition to "dissolve the Brittany Dawn Fitness brand." Her accounts on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook began losing thousands of followers.
This past week, Davis acknowledged in a video she uploaded to Instagram that she deleted comments critical of her and blocked other users.
"There are no longer any NDAs, no blocking, deleting comments, nothing of that nature. No excuses. I'm done hiding,” she said.
‘Another dollar sign in her bank account’
By Tuesday, she had agreed to speak publicly about the claims made against her, going on ABC's Good Morning America. The segment aired Wednesday morning on the show that typically draws an audience of almost 4 million viewers.
After Davis' GMA interview, The News heard from Emily Campbell, who said she's waiting for a full refund from Davis.
Campbell said she had sympathy for Davis at first. She understood a social media influencer's life had to be busy. "I just wrote it off as she's busy or going through something personal. Looking back, I realize how naive that was and how that should've been a red flag right off the bat," she said.
The coaching services she bought from Davis in 2017 as part of a "Holiday Accountability Challenge" were never followed through on, she said.
Campbell even paid extra for text message check-ins with Davis that were intended to provide accountability for women trying to improve their lives — the very improvements Davis touted in her own life through her social media accounts.
After Campbell stopped hearing back from Davis and received "generic" responses weeks apart, she said, Campbell began feeling unimportant, ignored and disregarded.
"I had just become another dollar sign in her bank account," she said.
The majority of resources and plans Davis provided her with were PDFs locked behind a password and she was never able to access them, Campbell said.
Asked how she feels about claims she exploited women in the very position she once found herself, Davis said, "From the bottom of my heart, I apologize to every single female that's come forward with their own situation."
Over the course of last week, Davis stood behind a consistent message: There’s no instruction manual for the uncharted territory she finds herself in.
Guadagno, the Stanford researcher with a Ph.D. in social psychology, said Davis’ case is a variation of trust-and-exploit scams often carried out on dating apps. In those, she said, a perpetrator builds a relationship with someone that feels authentic and then takes advantage of that trust.
“It has absolutely been done before ... and it will happen again,” Guadagno said.
Guadagno said social media doesn’t do a good enough job of helping people discern credibility. Yet those same circumstances force accountability on businesses in ways that no other technology has before, she said.
"If anything, people who want to run a successful business on social media have to be more careful about having good accountability and integrity,” she said.
Once people realize they aren’t alone, as Davis’ followers have, “it’s going to bite you,” she said.
![Fitness influencer Brittany Davis says she set out to help others improve their lives.](https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/EXSUYHHCT7YE5NTRQ6VB3WDGL4.jpg?auth=1183800097b35c922a215d280280a0062cdf19ca6b26e9b3a8ea54f2de4f47a6&width=430&quality=80)
Davis said she never intended to mislead her followers. She acknowledged reaching a point when she realized she was in over her head — essentially doing every task that comes with running a business on her own.
"I think for any small business that scales quickly, everyone reaches a point like that," Davis told The News. "When I realized that I was at that point, I should have gotten more employees, I should have hired another employee to help me and I didn't."
She said she takes full responsibility, suspending her personal coaching services to now work on doing what she can to make things right. She started by hiring a manager and a PR team.
How she recovers largely rests on her ability to satisfy her vocal and unhappy customers. On Saturday, Davis' main Instagram account appeared to have been deactivated.
Most businesses that aren’t able to fulfill promises to customers either go out of business or are “sued into oblivion,” Guadagno said.