In her first interview since
she became a viral sensation, Kendra Sunderland talks about her experiences
doing shows for MyFreeCams and the infamous library video that brought her sudden
fame and a citation for public indecency. Sunderland, 19, said she hopes the
hype helps her jumpstart a modeling career.
Kendra Sunderland’s mom started
getting panicked texts from friends last week about her daughter.
Then her phone died, and for a
few minutes, she could only imagine the worst. Maybe Kendra had been hurt or
killed in an accident.
She charged her phone and
learned the real news: Sunderland, a 19-year-old former student at Oregon State
University, had been cited by state police after a video of her stripping in
the school’s library went viral.
“When she turned her phone on,
she was relieved a bit because she was thinking things way worse than that,”
Sunderland told the Daily News in her first interview since her summons last
week.
She said her mom told her,
“This is just something you can learn a lesson from and move on.”
But for Sunderland, her ticket
wasn’t just a lesson — it was the big break she needed
Sunderland told the Daily News
she’s dreamed of posing for Playboy since she was a girl and wants to become a
professional model. The X-rated show in Oregon State’s Valley Library was just
one of many performances for MyFreeCams, a live webcam sex site with tens of
thousands of models, that was recorded by a viewer.
But that video attracted way
more heat than she ever imagined. After someone uploaded it to the video site
Pornhub sometime in the past month, it got hundreds of thousands of views and
suddenly turned Sunderland into one of America’s hottest amateur models.
It also
got her slapped with a citation from state police on Jan. 27. She faces a fine
of up to $6,250 and up to one year in jail.
But that might just be a small
price to pay on her way to the top of the modeling world.
“When I first started working for MyFreeCams,
I was hoping that it would open to modeling and doing magazines and shoots like
that,” she said. “I knew that eventually everyone would see everything
about me and see me naked. I just didn’t think that would happen so fast and
have my actual name on it.”
“I’m not like most other girls
that are insecure with their bodies or don’t want to show off,” she said. “I’ve
always been the type of girl who’s not afraid to show off, so I didn’t feel
weird about it.
Sunderland
grew up in Salem, Ore. and graduated from West Salem High School two years ago.
In the fall of 2013 she enrolled at Oregon State University in Corvallis, one
of the state’s largest colleges. She said she first wanted to become a
counselor, and took a few classes in human development.
She
lost interest in that and switched to business and economics classes, thinking
she’d be an accountant.
Eventually, she decided the
9-to-5 world wasn’t for her.
“I didn’t want to work in an
office all the time,” she said.
During her fall semester, she
applied to about a dozen waitressing jobs around Corvallis and said she never
got any calls back.
Around the same time, she was
lured to MyFreeCams, a site where girls strip and chat with users who pay them
in real time
She said she did her first show
in October and made about $150 for an hour’s work.
This was a calling.
“Working a minimum wage job,
there’s people that are just mean to you when they’re having a crappy day,” she
said. “On MyFreeCams, (users) had nothing but nice things to say. And I made way
more than I would working any other job.”
She started regularly making
MyFreeCams shows in her Corvallis home, when her roommates weren’t around,
including one where she had sex with her boyfriend at the time. (She’s single
now.)
Each video brought in big
bucks. But one user suggested she’d get a lot more attention — and money — if
she took her show to a public place.
One night in October,
Sunderland shot the now-infamous library video, where she flashes her breasts
and masturbates at a desk as oblivious classmates walk by in the background.
Various versions of the video, ranging from five minutes to half an hour, are
now circulating a plethora of porn sites, but Sunderland recalls the actual
show lasting more than an hour.
And she says the user’s
prediction about a public place was right: She earned about $700 that night.
Weeks later, she dropped out of
college and started doing MyFreeCams shows up to five times a week —
presenting, by her estimate, about 100 shows by the end of January.
She loved the work, but decided
once was enough for public shows.
“After that, I just thought
about the consequences and what could've happened,” she said. “It definitely
made me not want to go back.”
One night last week, Sunderland
says she was watching clips of the Comedy Central show “Key and Peele” on her
phone when her Facebook app started blowing up with notifications.
It was friend requests — about
a hundred, “all frat boys,” she said.
“So then I kind of knew
something was going around.”
She checked the anonymous
gossip app YikYak and saw that Oregon State students were now talking about the
“library girl.”
By the end of that week, she
was the webcam girl equivalent of a household name, with a criminal record to
prove it.
Porn users started digging up
and republishing other MyFreeCams shows, several people made fake social media
accounts in her name and she says she’s now been bombarded with so many
Facebook friend requests that she can’t receive any more.
She said she has “no clue” who
recorded the video and put it on Pornhub.
Oregon State University is
hardly happy to have its own Belle Knox now. After Sunderland’s citation, the
school quickly released a statement saying her X-rated behavior “does not
represent the values of the university,” which has more than 30,000 students.
Sunderland
is now banned from the campus, school spokesman Steve Clark said.
She’s also been banned from
MyFreeCams as of Monday for violating the site’s guidelines with the library
clip, according to the website’s attorney.
And she says a few friends have
cut ties with her since the video went viral.
Meanwhile, Sunderland, who
turns 20 in June, is more popular than ever now. She says she’s already
fulfilled one request for a professional photo shoot, which is coming out soon,
and many more offers are flooding in. She’s hoping to earn enough to “move
somewhere sunny.”
Her parents aren’t so
supportive anymore — she says they didn’t punish her, but after their initial
relief, they cut off the funding they gave her as a student.
“They’re kind of upset now,”
she said.
Well, would she be okay if she
had a daughter one day who did webcam shows?
“If it makes her happy, sure,”
Sunderland said. “I could probably give her some pointers.”
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