Creator on Netflix’s ‘Bad Influence,’ Growing Up Online

P
iper Rockelle’s pug, Frank, scuttles around the room as she sits cross-legged on her bed in a pink hoodie and pajama pants patterned with teddy bears, the shades drawn against the waning California sunlight. Her long brown hair falls over her shoulders and she clicks her french-tipped nails together as she talks. She looks like any other teenager in suburban Los Angeles, even though she has 15.4 million followers on TikTok, 12.1 million subscribers on YouTube, and 6.3 million followers on Instagram. Hugely famous since before she hit double digits, Rockelle became the face of child internet stardom, and then, almost as quickly, the unwilling poster child for its dangers. “People don’t want to work with me,” says Rockelle, sitting in the bedroom of the modern farmhouse she shares with her mother, Tiffany Smith, and Smith’s boyfriend, Hunter Hill. “People want nothing to do with me.” 

The 17-year-old content creator has been putting off having this conversation, but she’s known for a while it was probably coming — ever since Netflix announced Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing. The three-part series tells the story of Piper and the Squad, a group of child influencers who got together in 2017, reaching the heights of viral fame. But after a few years, the kids slowly started to break out of the group. In 2022, 11 former members filed a lawsuit against Smith, the de-facto head of the Squad; Hill, who often filmed and edited the videos; and Piper Rockelle, Inc., alleging “emotional, verbal, physical, and at times, sexual abuse.” The plaintiffs also claimed they weren’t sufficiently compensated by Smith, and that Smith and Hill used “dirty tactics” (including embedding videos of minors into porn sites) to sabotage the YouTube channels of Squad members after they left. They sought $22 million in damages. The defendants roundly denied the claims. 

When the lawsuit was settled in 2024 for a reported $1.85 million, Rockelle says she thought God was answering her prayers. Finally, after two years of lawyers, it was over — but of course, it wasn’t. When the documentary came out on April 9, it shot to the top of the Netflix charts, bringing in millions of viewers and reigniting a conversation about the ethical considerations of child influencers. It criticized the way Smith ran the house and acted around the children, and questioned Rockelle’s post-Squad content, which many have called overly sexualized. Though Piper and Smith loom large in the series, neither of them agreed to be interviewed for it, and they say they didn’t consent to their likeness and images being used. (A source familiar with production says all footage used in the documentary was appropriately licensed or permissible through fair use guidelines.) Instead, the former Squad members and their mothers were interviewed, telling viewers about their harrowing experiences with child-influencer stardom — laying much of the blame on Smith, while saying that they saw Piper as a victim, and only want the best for her in the future. 

The plight of the child star is not new — in the 1930s, there was Shirley Temple; in the 1990s, there was Macaulay Culkin — but the internet has supercharged the experience of childhood fame. Unlike their predecessors, child influencers are not famous for playing a role; they’re famous for being themselves. Because of the endless churn of content creation that life as an influencer requires, fans have near-constant access to their favorite child influencers. The boundaries between work and life are blurred; a child influencer’s work is their life, and their home, oftentimes, is their set. They’re also much less legally protected than child actors — in the Wild West of the influencer industry, there are few legal protections for the kids at the center of the content, leaving advocates worried about the financial, ethical, and privacy implications. As their platform grows larger, the fame of the child influencer becomes a family affair, with parents managing their careers — or, as detractors accuse, exploiting their kids — because in this multi-billion dollar industry, there are fortunes to be made on the backs of children.

To hear Rockelle tell it, the most distressing part of her career was not her days in the Squad as a famous kid influencer, but the onslaught of hate she and her mother have received in the wake of the lawsuit and the docuseries. There are the mean comments, the anonymous calls to Child Protective Services, the death threats. The offers for collaborations largely dried up; YouTube demonetized her channel. These kids — now teenagers — were Rockelle’s friends, and despite their tearful, on-camera pleas for her safety, she says she hasn’t heard from them, and she doesn’t believe their motives are altruistic in the slightest. “I’m safe,” she says. “I don’t need to be helped. They want publicity. They want sympathy. It’s my turn now.”

ASIDE FROM SOCIAL MEDIA posts winking at the documentary’s existence, Piper hasn’t addressed it publicly; that’s why I’ve been invited to her house, which is behind a gate in an otherwise unassuming Southern California neighborhood. Smith, the boogey-man of the docuseries, opens the door with a PR representative. She shakes my hand and thanks me for coming, offering me water or a probiotic soda. Outside the front door is a Piper-branded vending machine next to a chair and table with a jigsaw puzzle spread over it. Smith takes a seat there and tells me I can go upstairs. Hill comes down as I go up. Before I can knock on her bedroom door, Piper opens it. 

On YouTube, the Squad became known for challenges (“Last to Leave the Trampoline Wins $10,000,” viewed over 4.7 million times), pranks (“RANDOMLY CRYING THROUGHOUT THE DAY PRANK!!,” viewed over 3.1 million times), and sometimes, blending challenges and pranks into one (“Who Can MAKE the MOST MONEY in 24 Hours Challenge **KISSING BOOTH PRANK,*” viewed 11 million times). 

How these videos came together, as well as the moments that didn’t make it to YouTube, has become the crux of the allegations. Piper, Smith, and Hill stand together on one side. On the other, it seems, is everyone else. According to the ex-Squad members featured in the series, they were scripted into intimate interactions with each other, like the times they were instructed to kiss or talk about their crushes, which left them feeling uncomfortable. They also say they were put into situations that made them feel unsafe; there’s footage in the documentary of one prank where a Squad member is arrested by actors playing police officers, and kids are seen sobbing before the prank is revealed. Yet Rockelle maintains all the videos were scripted ahead of time. “We knew who was going to win a challenge. We knew who was going to prank the person,” she says before adding, “And I’m not trying to discredit any of the victims, but we all knew how to cry on command.”

The docuseries also alleges that Rockelle and Smith took advantage of the other Squad members, having them appear for free in her videos, making money off their likeness without appropriate compensation. But Rockelle, the center around which the group revolved, claims it was the moms of her fellow Squad members who were using her. “I was in everyone’s videos because all the moms would constantly be like, ‘I want Piper in my kids’ video,’” Rockelle says. When the Squad would go out to dinner, Piper remembers the moms urging their kids to sit next to her. “It was a competition like, ‘Who’s going to be Piper’s best friend? Who’s going to be Piper’s boyfriend?’ It made this stigma in my brain that everybody that’s ever nice to me is just trying to get close to me to have me be in their videos.” 

Some of the claims have to do with how Smith marketed Rockelle when she was still a preteen. In the lawsuit, plaintiffs alleged that Smith had sent “several of Piper’s soiled training bras and panties to an unknown individual.” Piper is adamant that never happened — that it was, instead, related to an arrangement she had with a popular app that sells second-hand clothes. “I had a Poshmark that I was selling my old clothes on because I had a brand deal,” she says. “I never sold any of my underwear.” 

The most serious of the allegations in the lawsuit and docuseries, however, have to do with Smith, who former Squad members accused of acting sexually inappropriate. That included the allegation that Smith would assume the alter-ego of Lenny, a cat they’d had who died, and tell the kids things like, “I’m going to touch you in your sleep,” or ask whether they’d ever had sex before. A male Squad member claimed that she asked about the size of his penis, and if his testicles had “dropped” yet. Two members said that she would enter their rooms while they slept. Then there was the time she kissed Squad member Reagan Beast, then just 17, directly on the lips on a live stream, which is shown in the series.  

While Smith declined an interview with Rolling Stone, she did reply to detailed questions in writing. “There’s never been any kind of abuse. No physical abuse, no sexual abuse. No verbal abuse. Nothing,” she wrote. In Smith’s telling, some of the claims in the lawsuit — like the allegation that she would say sexually explicit things to the kids — are “terrible exaggerations.” There was a Lenny voice, Smith says, but it was done in jest with the other parents, and it was alongside other voices the moms would do with each other. “It was just silly, stupid humor, but totally G-rated in front of the kids,” Smith says. And that weird kiss with Beast? She insists it was “a bad joke” and “the most overblown kiss in history.” 

Smith also addressed the claims that she sabotaged ex-Squad members’ YouTube channels. “The truth is that the other kids did way better on social media when Piper was a part of their videos. But if they left, or stopped making videos with Piper, their numbers dropped because Piper was no longer carrying them, and they were no longer making content that worked. It wasn’t engaging,” she wrote. “That may be sad for those moms and kids to admit, but it wasn’t bots or dirty tricks. Piper has always been the star. And not because of bots.” These days, Smith says, she’s not very involved in Piper’s content creation. Smith suggested her daughter distance herself from her infamous mother to save her own reputation, but Rockelle wouldn’t do it. “She’s had so much taken away from her already,” Smith wrote. “Piper is the real victim in this whole thing.” In response to a request for comment, ex-Squad member Claire Smith, who is Tiffany’s niece, said, “Piper is a victim — of her own mother. Sharing our story was about protecting other kids from suffering the same kind of harm we did.”

ROCKELLE HASN’T WATCHED the Netflix documentary, but says she can’t escape it, especially on her TikTok For You Page. Sometimes, she says, she scrolls away; other times she watches. She knows the crux of the allegations made in the documentary. “They’re not making it up, but they’re extending the truth,” she says. “I was there. I witnessed every day.” It’s not that everything was perfect, Rockelle says, but she doesn’t believe it was as bad as the documentary presents, either. “I think that they believe what they are saying, but I was there and I saw everything.” 

When the trailer dropped in March, Piper didn’t cope well, and things got worse after it was released. “I just completely fell apart,” she says, her voice cracking. “I did not think I was going to get through it.” She started having “awful thoughts”; she kept them to herself instead of telling her mom because she felt Smith was already going through enough. Piper worried about her mother being taken away by police; she feared what would happen if someone recognized Smith in public. “That’s something I have to worry about is people coming and trying to take away my mother because they always envied my mom and I’s relationship,” Piper says. “My father was never in my life so it’s always just been her.” As a daughter raised by a single mother, Piper is especially protective of Smith, who she says has been slandered by the claims against her. 

The insistence from the former Squad members that they took part in the documentary for a positive reason — to save her from the clutches of her mother — doesn’t fly for Rockelle. “You know where I live. Come get me if you want to save me,” she says. “If you want to ‘Save Piper,’ stop talking please. Because by hurting my mother, you’re hurting a part of me.” In an interview for Teen Vogue, Piper’s ex-best friend Sophie Fergi told me she wants Piper to know, “It’s not her fault and she needs to get away.” At the mention of these comments, Piper says simply, “She knows I don’t need to be saved. The reason why people keep talking about you sometimes is because when they start talking about themselves, nobody listens.”

The version of her childhood and adolescence Piper is laying out is at near complete odds with the one portrayed in Bad Influence, but she’s disinclined to speak of the specifics, at least while she’s still underage. Of the allegations her former friends have made against her mother, she says, “They’re stretching the truth. I was there every day.” She declines to talk about Smith using the Lenny persona to say inappropriate things to her friends: “I can get into that in the future,” she says. Does she think her mother ever said sexually suggestive comments to the other kids? “I don’t really think I should answer that yet,” Piper says firmly, without elaborating. “I think I should wait until I’m old enough to speak about it.” 

ROCKELLE IS LOOKING FORWARD to her 18th birthday, which is just a few months away. Maybe then, she thinks, people will take her more seriously. “They won’t think that I’m just a puppet. And once I’m 18, people won’t go and hurt my mom necessarily. If they want to sue me, they’ll sue me, not my company or whatever.” Having been a viral social media star since she was nine, establishing herself as a young adult has been a challenge for Rockelle, who has been criticized for the way she presents herself these days on social media. “People definitely have not let me grow up. But I guess what I have to say is, if you’re looking at it in a sexual way, why are you looking at it in a sexual way?” she asks.

In addition to maintaining a presence on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, Piper posts on BrandArmy, a subscriber-based platform similar to OnlyFans. Though BrandArmy doesn’t allow nudity, some of the looks featured there are not exactly safe for work. Piper’s bio on the site reads, “I’m so excited to share more of me with you.” There are three subscription tiers, including one for $100 a month which allows users to “request custom looks.” 

“[Being on BrandArmy is] one of my favorite things to do and I apologize if people don’t agree with it,” she says. “It’s the same photos I post on Instagram and I just get paid for it a little bit.” But does she worry about who her subscribers may be? “I mean, I don’t worry about it because you’re well aware of what happens on the Internet. So I just let it be. There’s a lot of good people out there. There’s probably a lot of bad people out there, but you can’t control who follows you and who doesn’t. Because if they’re supporting you, then let them support you.” But Rockelle has seemed to lean into this image, visiting BopHouse — a Miami content house made up of prominent OnlyFans creators — at the invitation of house co-founder Sophie Rain just weeks before the documentary dropped. “Why would I not take that opportunity, just because she does something that she’s of age doing, and I won’t be part of? I had the best time of my life,” she says. “I just did TikToks with them, it was great.”

Piper spends her days making content and taking care of her many animals. (She declines to say how many cats she has, but when I walk into the house, I see multiple cages placed next to each other.) She’s not the most social person, she says, and she doesn’t have many friends. The closest relationship she has is with her mother. “She somehow always has a way of making me feel better and making me feel like everything’s going to be okay,” she says. She recently started dating content creator Capri Jones, which, she explains, actually started out as a “social media relationship. It was for business. We were just working.” The teenagers arranged to meet in person and film content together — a collaboration of sorts, not unlike the Squad; during the filming of that content, they realized they actually liked each other. But while she now calls him her boyfriend, business isn’t far from her mind. “We’re so smart and we think about everything,” she says. “We can go so many ways with this relationship. On social media and in real life.” 

She loves animals and cooking and tanning, and posting content that she knows will make people mad. “Like rage bait,” she says. “I love doing stuff that people are going to be like, ‘Oh, my God. Why did you do that? You’re so annoying.’” For April Fool’s Day, she and Jones posted that Piper had cheated, and the two had broken up. Piper lost 100,000 TikTok followers, but to her, the attention was worth it. “You have to think about social media. It’s a job. You have to take risks. And that was a risk that I was willing to take… to popularize our Twitch.” She shrugs. “It did really, really well for both of us.”

As the afternoon stretches into early evening, Piper grabs her phone from where it’s charging on a bedside table. She scrolls through her camera roll until she gets to a video of hundreds of fans clamoring for her from a few days before, when she was visiting Six Flags. “Look at all these [people],” she says. “We had to leave.” The footage from the video looks wildly overwhelming but as Piper watches it, she smiles. “I love getting recognized,” she says. “Being known is one of my favorite things ever.”

None of this — the Netflix exposé painting her childhood as hellish and her adolescence as haunted by the specter of a controlling, manipulative mother; the rabid backlash to it and endless coverage of it — is pushing Piper off social media. Online, she posts her usual content, smirking into the camera despite the hundreds of comments on each post referencing the documentary. “I can’t make it look like it’s affecting me,” she says. “I won’t. Social media is about entertaining people and I want to entertain them and make them happy.” One day, Piper hopes, the allegations against her mother will only be a footnote in her long, illustrious career. “I’ve gotten this far,” she says with a flick of her hair. “I’ll be fine. I’m getting the hard stuff out of the way. By the time I’m 30, I’ll be Zen. I’ll be good.”