As a schoolgirl, growing up in a small Derbyshire village in the Noughties, Tia Billinger had big dreams. Dazzled by the stars burning bright in her young eyes, she lapped up reality TV shows such as Celebrity Big Brother, I’m A Celebrity and The X Factor.

This was exactly the kind of fame the pretty blonde teenager grew up craving; the kind that comes from exposure and hype rather than any discernible talent.

To be fair, such a desire is hardly unusual among young people today. But Tia’s longing for fame and attention was to take her in an extreme, horrifying direction – one which, as the Mail has discovered this week, has been almost unbelievable for those who remember her as a sweet schoolgirl, utterly devoted to her privately educated long-term boyfriend.

Because Tia, now aged 25, has finally hit the headlines, not under her real name but as her alter ego Bonnie Blue, an adult content creator for the explicit OnlyFans online channel who has stirred up a storm of controversy by offering to ‘bonk’ hundreds of ‘barely legal’ teenage boys for free.

For those as yet unfamiliar with her ‘work’, Bonnie’s professional achievements include bedding 158 male students during Nottingham Trent University’s ‘freshers’ fortnight’ in September.

Interestingly, when Tia boasted about this achievement on a podcast called Saving Grace, the broadcast was interrupted by an advert by the Department of Work and Pensions relating to pension credits. (The DWP was a paid partner of the Acast podcast company and a spokesman said it did not endorse her activities and has since had the department’s advert removed from the episode).

She did something similar in the Mexican resort of Cancun last March with 122 students from the US on their spring break.

Another of her alarming ambitions is to beat the world record for having 𝑠e𝑥 with the most men in 24 hours. She plans ‘to do 1,000’ and beat the current record of 919 men currently held by American woman Lisa Sparks.

With a brutal nonchalance that is truly upsetting for any right-minded person to read, she has said: ‘I’ll need a lot of painkillers and a hot water bottle after that.’

Were she to succeed she would need to sleep with 41 men an hour. If that’s not appalling enough, she also believes men should cheat on their ‘lazy’ wives.

Not surprisingly, her activities have provoked an outpouring of outrage, most recently on Australia’s Gold Coast, where she has offered her services to 18-year-old boys leaving school later this month who are traditionally let loose in group holidays known locally as ‘schoolies week’.

An online petition was launched calling for her 12-month visitor visa to be cancelled. Yesterday, after more than 20,000 concerned residents signed a petition calling on the authorities to refuse her entry, the visa was revoked on character grounds.

Not that fame-hungry Tia cares about those who have lambasted her as a ‘predatory 𝑠e𝑥 worker’ who is ‘preying on just-legal boys’.

As she claimed to the Mail this week, she is raking in up to £750,000 a month – without having to get out of bed.

A more disturbing state of affairs it is hard to imagine.

And while mothers across the globe have been disgusted and deeply alarmed by her stated aim of defiling their teenage sons, what on earth does Tia’s own mother think?

The extraordinary answer is that she’s been at Tia’s side in recent weeks, happily working as her daughter’s PA, even helping to hand out condoms to young clients and cleaning up stained sheets and discarded boxer shorts once they’ve gone. ‘I’m always there 100 per cent to support her,’ 50-year-old hairdresser Sarah Billinger said during a joint interview with her daughter, while admitting that she was initially ‘shocked’ when she found out what Tia was up to via a leaked video.

A brief glance at the rather racy profile picture on Sarah’s own Facebook page suggests that Tia’s mother also isn’t adverse to posing in front of the camera.

For those questioning what her daughter has achieved, the mother-of-two has this explanation: ‘We’ve had nice holidays and nice gifts.’ Or as Tia puts it: ‘My mum said to me as a kid, ‘Don’t be a town bike’, but now me being a bike has paid for our bills.’

Tia has paid off the mortgage on the family home and taken everyone, including her maternal grandmother, on extravagant trips abroad.

A stroke of business genius? Or is this grim spectacle a depressing indictment of modern society, the terrifying consequence of a generation raised to worship at the twin altars of fame and wealth, whatever the cost?

For while Tia would certainly have us believe that she is ‘grateful’ for her fabulous career and enjoying every minute of it, those who knew her in the days when she was a pupil at Friesland School in the Derbyshire village of Sandiacre, remember her as a popular girl who once dreamed of becoming a professional dancer or a midwife and was madly in love with her long-term boyfriend.

She was, they say, a million miles away from the promiscuous, self-promoting media star she has since become.

‘I was completely gob-smacked when I saw her all over the media this week,’ one who was at school with her told me.

‘I recognised her face straight away but I’d never heard of Bonnie Blue. I was so shocked I had to check it was her. I just can’t believe that this is what she is now doing for a living. It’s horrifying that she has become an OnlyFans star.’

Tia was born in Derbyshire in May 1999 and took her mother’s surname. Sarah Billinger, who used to cut hair at Shortcuts salon in Long Eaton, went on to have another daughter in 2004 and moved in with her long-term partner, welder Nicholas Elliott, a man whom Tia came to regard as a parent. As a teenager, however, she lamented on social media that she didn’t really know her biological father.

‘Love receiving letters from my dad. Really wish I knew him,’ she wrote on Twitter in 2014 when she was 15 years old, after posting a photograph of a handwritten letter and envelope, apparently from him. She wrote, too, about having a half-brother and half-sister.

It wasn’t clear to whom she was referring, then – her biological father or her mother’s partner – when she was interviewed on TikTok last month by Kate Moss’s younger sister, Lottie, another OnlyFans star, who asked her: ‘What does your dad say about it?’

Tia replied: ‘Honestly, he loves it. Obviously he doesn’t sit watching the videos. He’s just proud seeing how happy I am, how much I’ve been able to support the family. It’s really changed my life and my family’s life.’ She went on to describe how she’d had an ink stamp made for her clients which says: ‘I slept with Bonnie Blue’ and then tried it out ‘on my dad’.

Laughing, she added: ‘My dad was like, “I need to go to the pub after this”, and he’s got stamps all up his arms to say he slept with his daughter.’

A joke, obviously, but one in the worst possible taste.

While many will wonder if Tia’s early life informed her adult choices, Tia insisted this week: ‘I don’t come from a broken family. I don’t have daddy issues. You can do the job I do because I love 𝑠e𝑥 and come from a completely normal family and people seem to struggle to understand that. Just because they [have] got family issues doesn’t mean I have.’

Her stepfather Nicholas Elliott told the Mail this week: ‘What my daughter does is none of my business. She’s her own person.

‘She’s an adult. She’s free to make her own choices. I don’t know anything about the internet and I don’t do social media. It’s all another world to me.’

As a child growing up in the sleepy village of Draycott, Tia was passionate about dancing and considered a ‘star pupil’ at Vibez Danceworks in Long Eaton. As well as taking exams in ballet and tap, she competed nationally, along with her sister, in the British Street Dance Championships in Glasgow in 2015.

She also had a Saturday job at her local Poundstretcher store but often bemoaned her lack of money online.

‘Bank card just got declined. Too poor for the life I want to live’ she wrote online in 2016, hinting at the kind of future she was hoping for.

‘She was really popular and wore loads of make-up,’ says a former pupil at Friesland School. ‘She was friends with the girls and boys in the years above as well.’

Aged 15, she began dating private schoolboy Oliver Davidson, a talented swimmer and rugby player, and the son of a well-off local businessman, who was a pupil at Trent College, a private day and boarding school in Nottingham where fees can reach £45,000 a year.

Before long she was spending every weekend at his detached home in the nearby village of Kegworth and, in December 2016, still aged only 16, she jetted off on holiday with him and his parents on an all-expenses-paid trip to Mexico.

According to one of her friends: ‘Both her and Olli were young when they met but they were close and had big plans for their life together. It was a very stable relationship which is quite unusual when you’re that age.’

After leaving school, she found work in recruitment, first at the Sellick Partnership in Derby before moving in 2018 to another firm in Nottingham.

She set up home with Olli in a £250,000 semi-detached house in Stapleford near Nottingham, bought with financial support from her boyfriend’s parents.

According to her friend: ‘The rest of the girls really envied her because they thought she had her whole life worked out and was going to marry Olli. They had their own house while the rest of us were living with our parents. In some way, she was living the dream.’

But Tia, it seems, had her eyes on a bigger prize than a 9 to 5 job in the area where she grew up.

She and Olli married in February 2022 in Westminster and around the same time moved to the Gold Coast of Australia, where Tia soon abandoned the recruitment job she had found to become a ‘cam girl’ on porn sites after watching TikTok videos of young women doing the same thing.

Tia referred to her ‘husband’ earlier this year when describing her time in Australia to a podcaster, saying he had given her the confidence to enter the adult entertainment industry.

She said: ‘At the time, neither of us wanted to work Monday to Friday. We wanted more out of life. We knew continuing to do our jobs, doing the same, you’re not going to change.’ While believing she was ‘not pretty enough’ and ‘people wouldn’t want to watch me,’ she says Olli told her: ‘No, you’re beautiful. Do it’.

Before long, she was making close to £5,000 a week.

‘Him seeing the potential money I could make doing this was a step in the right direction,’ she added. ‘He was fully supportive from that side because of the money. And then also was just more than happy for me to give it a go and at the time I was his and it was just in a bedroom and it was completely separate so he had no problem with that.’

No problem? Despite being together for almost a decade, the once-besotted couple split up soon afterwards. According to Tia, it was ‘nothing to do with me in the industry’.

It is not known if Olli returned to the UK or when Tia came back to Britain, but Olli’s mother was less than impressed this week when asked by the Mail about Tia. ‘I don’t want to get involved. I don’t want anything to do with this or her,’ she said.

The former pupil from her old school adds: ‘She seemed to have it all but it doesn’t look like that now. There’s something so soulless about what she’s doing. Behind all that 𝑠e𝑥ual bravado she doesn’t look happy.’

Tia started her own OnlyFans account last year and swiftly focused her attention on young men after realising there was a space in the market ‘for someone being with a schoolboy’.

‘From a business point of view,’ she told the Mail this week, ‘I knew there was a massive gap that I could exploit. And sleeping with 18-year-olds makes the content a lot more relatable to the subscribers who are younger.’

She has been accused of online ‘rage-baiting’, deliberately causing outrage as a way to promote herself.

And there has been some suggestion that not all of her videos are quite as they seem. Not content with bedding teenage students she announced recently that she was also sleeping with some of their fathers – but critics quickly pointed out that a video she posted to accompany the outrageous claim was found to contain a known 𝑠e𝑥 worker.

Not that any of this appears to matter to Tia. In fact, she happily admits stirring up online fury. It’s the perfect marketing ploy. ‘Thank you for making me rich,’ she sneered in a video message to her critics this week.

As for her future plans, it seems she won’t stop here. ‘What I really want is to go on I’m A Celeb’, she told the Mail this week.

Prospective campmates beware.