Close All Tabs - The Emily Hart Saga | Part 1

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Emily Hart was a pickup-driving, Trump-supporting blonde bombshell who frequently posted photos on Instagram along with captions about “deporting illegals.” Within a few weeks she gained thousands of followers. It was like she was engineered to go viral in the MAGA-sphere — because she was. A 22-year-old medical student in India who goes by “Sam” is the person behind Emily Hart, and he shepherded her to viral fame with a combination of right-wing engagement baiting and AI assistance. Reporter Ej Dickson, who wrote about Sam and Emily Hart for WIRED, describes how he was able to grift so many conservative men. And Sam himself explains how something that began as a fun side-hustle took a disturbing turn. Guests: Ej Dickson, senior culture writer at Wired “Sam,” creator of AI MAGA Influencer Emily Hart Further Reading/Listening: This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men  — Ej Dickson, Wired  AI‑generated influencers: A new wave of cultural exploitation — Ateqah Khaki & Vinita Srivastava, The Conversation Meet Brandi Love, the Pro-Trump Porn Star Who Writes for The Federalist —  Marlow Stern, The Daily Beast  Challenges under India’s university reservation system   —  Namrata Kolachalam, The World  Read the Transcript here Email us at [e-mail] Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠ Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

from KQED. Support for KQED podcasts comes from San Francisco International Airport. Whether you're chasing the sun or escaping the heat this summer, SFO can get you there with nonstop flights to more than 140 destinations worldwide. FlySFO.com slash nonstop. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Stanford's Master of Liberal Arts, inviting students on a journey of ideas, culminating, in a Stanford graduate degree.

An info session will be held on August 20th, mLA.standford.edu. Hi, Tabbycats. Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review close all tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends, post about it.

You too can be part of our volunteer clipping army. We can't let the looksmaxers win the clip wars. Okay, let's get to the show. Okay. Just a note, this episode contains some graphic descriptions of sexual content, so listen with care. So Emily Hart was a 23-year-old nurse, I believe. Born in Buffalo, lived in New York City, who loved ice fishing and Mickalogue Light and America. E.J. Dixon is a reporter for Wired.

My job is to explain things that people are too afraid to Google at work. And at the beginning of the year, she started looking into this influencer who went by Emily Hart. And she was a very pretty blonde girl. She looked a little bit like Jennifer Lawrence loved posing on her pickup truck in American flag bikinis. Emily frequently wore a bright red, Make America Great Again hat in her photos. She would post Instagram reel set to John Denver's Take Me Home Country Roads with captions laden with American flag emojis. Most of her content was about deporting, quote, illegals and supporting Trump. Love posting racist memes and trans-wemic memes, you know, touching every single one of the MAGA bases.

She had that no-make-up makeup look, and when she wasn't in a bikini or ice fishing, she posted about being a nurse. Within a few weeks of starting her account, Emily Hart had more than 10,000 followers. It was like everything about her was engineered to go viral in the Magasphere. There are certain aspects of the Emily Hart brands that are so uniquely American that people who are only from America would understand like ice fishing or Michelob Ultra and sort of the status that it has as the beer of like the Maga world. She's a Trump supporter's perfect woman. There's just one problem. Emily Hart is not real. She's completely AI generated.

If you look past her perfect body, bleached she. hair and very polarizing captions, you'd spot the inconsistencies. I mean, who goes ice fishing in a bikini? EJ said that those inconsistencies are what tipped her off. Her profile said that she went to school in New York and currently lived in New York and she was from Buffalo. Like, the chances are very low that somebody that explicitly conservative would move to New York City for college and live in New York City and be like a real human being, honestly. I mean, I'm sure they exist. don't think they look like Emily Hart. Back in 2024, following Trump's presidential win, EJ started seeing all of these

trad wife-ad-wife-ad-ad-ad-jacent videos. They almost all featured a beautiful young blonde woman in her 20s, kneading dough or sweeping the floor of a rustic kitchen. And unlike the more modestly dressed trad-wife influencers who popularized this content, the women in these videos were almost always wearing very low-cut dresses. There was sort of this sense of, um, Kenny Valley attached to them where it was like, oh, these don't really look like real people, but they're obviously trying to cater to a real and honestly very terrifying audience. So I started

digging into it because I saw one or two of these accounts and I was like, I bet there are more of them and just fell down this rabbit hole of AI MAGA Hot Girl accounts. Emily Hart was just one of countless AI MAGA Hot Girls taking over Instagram. These women are not real, but the people running their accounts are. And E.J. found one of them. My pseudonym is Sam. I'm a 22-year-old medical student. Currently, I'm in my final year of medical school. And that's pretty much it. Sam is the creator of Emily Hart. And what began as a get-rich-quick scheme for him quickly spiraled out of control. So who is Sam? And what would possess him to create an AI MAGA hot girl? The saga of Emily Hart is such a wild ride that we're actually going to split this deep dive into two parts.

There's so much to unpack here about the strange intersection of politics, AI, virtual influencers, privilege, and digital sex work. But today, we're starting with Sam's story. How did this 22-year-old student in India manage to dupe so many conservative men? Ready? This is Close All Tabs. I'm Morgan Sugg, tech journalist. and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives.

Let's get into it. You know how every good deep dive starts? Let's open a new tab. Who is the real Emily Hart? You've probably picked up on this by now, but this tab is not about Emily Hart at all. It's about the guy who made her. And in some ways, he's like a lot of other straight guys his age. I'm a big time gym rat.

Like even right now, like, I'm talking to you and I'm completing my daily steps. Building a lean physique, getting shredded. That gives me happiness. He asked that we call him Sam. We're using a pseudonym for him because he's in his final year of medical school and is concerned about how this story could jeopardize his medical career and ability to emigrate to another country after graduation. Sam is 22, lives in northern India, and is studying orthopedic surgery.

He's from a middle-class family. Like a lot of Indians, he lives in an intergenerational household with his parents, grandparents, aunt, and uncle. Like my cousins, they are like my real brother and sister. You get a lot of love. You get a lot of support. And Sam has always been fascinated by American culture. When I got on a call with him, he was like, wait, you live in Los Angeles? Is it really like Grand Theft Auto?

I follow American politics. I wanted to do my post-graduation from USA. I was super into American culture, like playing GTA, Grand Theftotto, watching. You can say TV show, like, how I met your mother, friends and all. But it's not just pop culture that made him want to immigrate here. He also wanted to leave India altogether. As close as his family is, his upbringing was, at times, strained. It was not pleasant, you can say.

Like, there is this thing called caste system in India. India's. caste system is thousands of years old. Historically, castes were tied to specific occupations. The higher castes were priests and warriors and rulers. The middle castes were merchants and skilled artisans. The lower cast did farm work or were servants. And then there were people who were considered untouchable, and they faced the most discrimination, even today. To make up for generations of discrimination and economic inequality, the Indian government has a series of programs called Reservation.

It's kind of like affirmative action, with strict quotas. A certain percentage of government jobs and public university spots are reserved for members of lower caste. The reservation system is very controversial in India because it's not based on current financial status. It's based purely on caste, which is fixed at birth. You know, like reservation and caste system were introduced to uplift the lower class.

uplift the backward people. It's a parted have a good idea. You know, my family has decent money like, okay, okay money. We are not very rich. Sam's ancestors were jewelers and fell into that middle tier of merchants and artisans. They've been solidly middle class for generations. His family could not have afforded private school, so he had to compete for one of the very limited spots at his public university.

There's a key tension here between caste and class. Sam doesn't come from a ton of money. He doesn't have the same resources and safety net that the upper echelon of Indian society has. The reservation system was designed to level the playing field. While it uplifts the most oppressed classes, Sam feels like it leaves the middle class behind. He said his own opportunities in India are limited and that there's no upward mobility for him. Becoming a doctor was never his great life goal. But it's a stable career that offers a considerably better salary than other jobs

in India. And there's demand for doctors all over the world. He sees it as a ticket out of the caste system. Sam had his site set on America. He saw it as a land of meritocracy and grand theft auto. But while his parents helped him with tuition and licensing exam fees, he wanted to travel. He needed to buy his protein powder so that he could, as he put it, get shredded. And he wanted to save up for his potential move to the U.S. So he needed money. The problem. He's in his last year of a five-and-a-half-year medical program. And when he isn't in class or working his medical internship, he's studying for this big entrance exam to get into a post-grad medical specialty program. Plus, the job market in India sucks.

Sam said that most entry-level part-time jobs that college students typically get pay like a dollar an hour. If you work four hours a day, for a whole month, you can hardly earn like $100 for a month. And I didn't want to, you know, put so much effort for so little cash. And Sam is a product of his generation. It's not just his gym rat tendencies. It's what made his story so compelling to E.J. So Sam is, I think, pretty representative of Gen Z males in that there's very much an emphasis on, like, online side hustles.

There were a lot of things that he tried to do to make money. He was doing online fitness coaching for a while. He was doing some of that, like, drop shipping. nonsense that all the Gen Z boys do. He tutored and sold notes and study guides for the U.S. medical licensing exam, which he already passed. He once saw Instagram ads about monetizing AI clips, so he started making AI Roblox videos for YouTube shorts.

He was kind of just chasing side hustles until something stuck. Then, while scrolling through Instagram, he came across this influencer. She was gorgeous, but Sam could tell she was AI generated. And yet, she had a huge audience, all from a certain demographic. She uploads pictures with Donald Trump. She has a blonde military girl that uploads picture with Donald Trump. And she had like thousands and millions of likes, thousands of followers. So I wanted to create that.

Like Donald Trump, everyone knows him. Everyone knows what he is doing. And, you know, even like me and my friends who follows American politics, We used to joke around the people that they are so dumb, like they don't understand anything. And like, how can someone support Donald Trump? Like, after all he's doing. He hatched a plan. Make a hot AI girl.

Go viral and get rich. He opened Google's AI image generator, also known as Nano Banana Pro. I use a lot of Gemini. I never use Chad GPD. I'm a Gemini guy. Sam initially tried to make the indie version of the blonde military girl influencer, but it didn't work out. For one, he said that because mainstream AI models are trained on American culture,

Gemini struggled to generate a realistic-looking Indian woman. The hot Indian girl he was trying to create just looked fake. And the second issue, he realized that Indian men just don't spend money the way American men do. And like UFA, there is big tipping culture. People, you know, easily pay. They are more willing to pay. that's why I changed it to an American influencer. But first, he had to decide what this American influencer would be like.

Sam turned to Gemini, which told him the influencer shouldn't just be a pretty girl. She needed depth. You shouldn't just create a beautiful woman with no personality. You want people to connect with your Instagram model. Then they will be connected with you. Then they will buy your services, etc. Sam had a new plan. create a hot, blonde AI girl, go viral, and get rich.

She would appeal to the typical American man so that Sam could cash in on those sweet American tips. And she wouldn't just look the part. She would have the personality of an all-American girl. Through TV shows, video games, and following American politics, he was familiar enough with American culture to pull it off. With a couple of curated prompts, he had a handful of images to start her account. The last thing he needed was a name. And that came from Gemini. Emily Hart. Hey guys, just enjoying the sun by the pool today. This feels so good. I'm going to dip my toes in. So refreshing. Emily took off. Thousands of followers in just a few weeks. Sam had unlocked the formula to reach a very specific group of American men. So how did he do it? We're getting

into that after this break. But first, we wanted to remind you that close all taps depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kweed.org slash podcast. Okay, after the break, Emily Hart goes maga. Stick around. Minions don't wait, especially for Wi-Fi. Someone's same-day Wi-Fi from Xfinity and get the same price for five years and seen minions and monsters only in theaters. Xfinity. Imagine that. Restrictions apply not available in all areas. Learn more at Xfinity.com slash same-day Wi-Fi. Okay, we're back. Time to open a new tab. becoming Emily Hart.

At Gemini's suggestion, Sam created a profile for Emily Hart, a blonde nurse from Buffalo who lives in New York City. It was pretty generic at first. He started posting his Emily in January and immediately started getting attention from a certain demographic. Once I created it, like initially four, five DMs, all the DMs I got. What's from, you can say old 60-year-old mega people, like pro-mega people. pro-right, like those. And Gemini was apparently like, you need to make a maga girl.

You need to make like a hot maga girl in a bikini. Like, that's gold. He started posting images of Emily, ice fishing, drinking beer and sexily firing rounds at the shooting range. He wrote captions like, if you want a reason to unfollow, Christ is king, abortion is murder,

and all illegals must be deported. And P.O.V. You were assigned intelligent at birth, but you identify as a liberal. Followed by a clown emoji. He approached it as a craft, and he really spent a lot of time trying to perfect his craft on Gemini

because the space was so saturated that he really needed a gimmick or a niche to kind of corner in order to be successful. It took a couple weeks of consistent posting, but the payoff was real. It took me three weeks to get initial thousands of tribers. And from there, in one week, I had like 14, 15,000 thousandths ofcribers,

20 million views, and like all that. It helped that Emily's audience wasn't the most tech savvy. I want to be clear that Gemini did not explicitly say this, but I do think that that audience is probably less technologically

well-versed than progressives are and therefore more gullible and more prone to falling toward this kind of scheme. Sam echoed this more strongly. I don't want to stereotype, but like what I have affirmed, like the liberals and the left-wing people,

they are usually smart. They are, you know, they have basic common sense. And you know, the baga people are like super dumb people. I should not say that, but they are like, you can say they are not that aware on, you can say technology. That's not to say that there aren't easily duped liberals. I do think that internet manga has a much, much stronger digital aesthetic than progressives do, for sure.

There's an iconography attached to it. And just seeing like a blonde white girl wearing an American flag bikini while ice fishing. I mean, how much more MAGA can you get? Emily's very strong visual political identity resonated with her followers. Maybe that's why they were less likely to be suspicious of her. The bright red MAGA hat she often wore also helped obscure some of the inconsistencies in her posts. Yeah, I really, you know, messing up the hair also. So to get around that, I use.

used to include a MAGA cap in like every image I have made. So basically, like, I used to include accessory, like sunglasses and MAGA cap to, you know, get through this and like make it more believable. Yeah, so it wasn't even just like to appeal to MAGA. Yeah, actually, it was, you know, it was beneficial in both ways. Or maybe they didn't suspect anything because she was hot and that was disarming enough. because there were definitely red flags in Emily's content. Video generation was less convincing.

Hey, handsome. I just got back to my tiny apartment after a 12-hour shift at Bellevue. M.C. is just so loud tonight. But honestly, all I can think about is how much I missed you. So Sam usually stuck to images. But even then, he said Gemini couldn't quite get the eyes right. Like you can say that it might not be real. there is something wrong with the picture.

So you know what I used to do? Like, I used to include sunglasses in her every picture. Every picture I used to include sunglasses. Like, she's wearing black sunglasses everywhere. Like, she's wearing sunglasses. Like, she's inside her home, she's wearing funglasses. Even in night, she's wearing sunglasses. Sam studied up a MAGA ideology

in how Trump supporters interact online. Every day, he'd spend 30 minutes to an hour creating content that was pro-second amendment, anti-immigrant, and anti-abortion. The more divisive the caption, the more engagement he got is Emily. He didn't believe in any of this, but he knew what would get attention. Weirdly, it was a scam that only somebody who was really interested in American culture could have pulled off, I think. Sam has a real knack for engagement bait, engineering content that tricks social media algorithms

to boost a post. Like, he was inspired by this TikTok trend. There was a trend on this song, like it was around two years ago, and it was this song, I'm stylish, big talk, big t-shirt, Billy Eilish. This I'm stylish, black talk, big t-shirt, Billy. The videos usually started with someone getting ready, in a frumpy get-up, and when the beat dropped, it would cut to them fully glammed up. Sam was inspired by that split-second transition on the beat. So, using other songs, he put his own spit on it. I used to upload, like, you can say a catfish type of reel.

There was, like, four to six-second reel of Emily Hart, a picture with her, like, normal clothes. And then I used to sneak in, like, for a millisecond, a picture of her in a swim food, you can say. Sort of, like, a decent word is swim food. Driven by horny curiosity, viewers would try to. try to pause the video in time to see the picture. And if they didn't catch it in time, they'd have to play the video again. And for that, they used to again and again see multiple times, like four, five times, six times. So that Instagram gets the signal that this reel is so good that people are viewing it five to six times or promoted. So normally I used to get like 200, 300

views. And like these type of real views used to get like 10,000, 50,000, 25,000 views. Emily Hart was a hit. Within a few weeks, she had over 15,000 followers on Instagram, which is a fraction of what the most popular real influencers have, but to build this following in such a short time period, with such minimal effort, real influencers grind for months to build that. Sam felt like he had unlocked something.

His MAGA influencer was going strong, but he wondered if there was an untapped market out there. So he tried to recreate the magic of Emily Hart. But this time for a liberal audience. It was very stereotypical. I mean, less aggressively so than Emily Hart, but it was like a girl with dyed red hair and a nose ring who would post cute selfies with a coffee cup in Bushwick.

You know, it was very generic. It was clear that she wasn't as fully fleshed out as Emily Hart was. And like it was a complete flock because like people used to know that it's an A.F. and they like usually didn't interact with it. Like they didn't comment. They were like, this is AI flop, this is trash, we don't have time with, something like that. And like the mega people were like crazy. Are you single?

Can I message you? Something like that. They were, you can say, a little more lusty, you can say. But it was fine. Sam had his hands full with Emily anyway. In the early days, he got a real kick out of duping constern. men, who had no idea they were talking to a 22-year-old Indian guy. They were super racist.

When he created Emily's Facebook profile, he accidentally set his location to New Delhi. A random man messaged the profile. So, like, he went through my Facebook profile. He went through that. And he saw New Delhi. And he was like, have you been to India? And I didn't even say anything. And he used to, like, India is not a good place.

It's not safe for women. You shouldn't have gone there. And you know, the racist comments. And I didn't even talk to him. Like, he said hi, I said hello. Okay. Then he started all this. But it never occurred to him that he could be just talking to someone who was Indian.

No. It was a little fun, like, you know, like making a fool of such people. But this wasn't just for fun. The entire reason he got into this was to make some cash. So how did he monetize Emily Hart? That's a new tab. Why was Emily Hart so successful? Instagram is very strict about nudity and adult content.

So, like many real human sex workers, Emily's Instagram account was a vehicle to drive engagement to another site, fan view. The most popular subscription platform for adult content is only fans. Using AI tools to edit content and manage messages is allowed. But the site totally banned. synthetic personas, fully AI-generated characters like Emily Hart. In fact, a lot of adult subscription sites do. Instead, Sam used FanView, which is where a lot of AI influencers sell nudes.

Google's Gemini blocks the generation of explicit content, and although there are ways to get around it, Sam's hustle was all about doing the least amount of work for the most amount of money. So, he used Grock. He generated a couple nudes, uploaded them to fans, view, set a subscription fee, and locked the juiciest content behind a paywall. Then, the cash started rolling in. Sam was blown away at how easily Americans spent money. He couldn't believe they were tipping him, or really, Emily, just to respond to their messages. People used to hugely tip.

I don't know why people tip in USA. Like, I am 22 years old. I have never in my life once seen someone tipping in India. And people who are like crazy, they used to take me $20, $10. And I was thinking, like, why people are sending me extra money? I don't know. He made a few thousand dollars within days of starting the account. Again, human adult content creators grind for years to get this kind of audience

and to generate anything close to this amount of revenue. What was it about Emily that made her so popular? E.J. has a theory. I think that probably at the time that Sam was doing this, the space was a little less saturated, so there was less competition. And I think probably the most major contributor to this is the fact that there's a really strong element of self-delusion at play here, right? In order to buy into Emily Hart's whole persona, you not only have to believe that this woman

exists, you have to believe that she is a hot 24-year-old girl who exists and believes exactly the same things as you do and validates every single opinion you have. I think these men got off to that probably more than anything. And I think that's very powerful for the MAGA set. There are real adult content creators who are also conservative. E.J. pointed to Brandy Love, who's known for making milf porn and also being a vocal Trump supporter. I think what differentiates Emily from someone like Brandy is brandy does not make it into. girl to her persona, right? She very rarely posts about politics, and that's Emily's entire brand, is combining politics with sex. With the conservative, adult, creators, the politics are kind of

incidental to the main product, which is the sex. Sam knew he was playing into some kind of fantasy, and soon after starting the Fanview account, started feeling really bad about it. He didn't like the idea of deceiving anyone for money. Emily Hart's Instagram account wasn't labeled as AI, but Sam wasn't making money there. If someone paid for my fan view, I used to disclose it. Like, you should know this before spending, like, too much money on it. And when subscribers sent him additional tips on fan view, he'd actually message them back. And like, I used to say them that you should know that I'm artificially generated.

The wild thing is, the subscribers didn't seem to care at all. Even when Sam reminded them that the girl they were paying wasn't real. Like two, three people messaged me. Like, we think that you are AI-generated, but we love the deals you are making, you are supporting Trump, you are supporting Republican. So we will support you. We don't care. So many were like that. I really don't think that the majority of these men care if the woman on the other side of the screen is fake.

And that's kind of the scariest part to me, because I think that that principle applies to AI generated content on the internet in general. I don't think people care if something is real or fake anymore. What would drive Emily Hart's subscribers to continue following her, subscribing to her exclusive content, and even paying to DM her, if they knew she wasn't really a hot 24-year-old pickup truck driving ice fishing nurse in New York City? They knew the pictures they were liking and saving, among other things, were generated using AI. At that point, why continue following?

following her? Why not just chat with an AI girlfriend on character AI or something? I really think it comes down to this idea of intimacy, which is the whole reason why OnlyFans blew up in the first place. The whole premise of OnlyFans is that men are directly connecting with the objects of their fantasies and the level of intimacy that is provided by that exchange goes beyond sex. It goes beyond getting off. It really is about human connection. So I think that a lot of the men who paid for Emily Hart's content were sort of willing to suspend their disbelief in exchange for that element of intimacy, of connection, of human interaction that they were trying to convince themselves that they were getting. Sam was making way more money

than he ever could have made working a part-time job during school. Every day, he generates a more Emily content and come up with a racist, xenophobic caption that he knew would get attention. He kept an eye on all the viral trends that other hot girls, AI or not, were doing on Instagram and TikTok. Emily's fans weren't just American either. I got a guy from Germany. I got a guy from Switzerland, like many different people. Like on Instagram, I didn't use to reply because my DM was, every day I get 100, 200, 300 messages.

Sam ignored most of the Instagram messages, but made sure. sure that FanView subscribers got a response because they had to pay to unlock those. The site has an AI feature that generates messages based on previous chats so he could automate responses. Although he didn't have to respond to subscribers himself, he did have to see what they sent back. And they were getting a little too comfortable in Emily's DMs. That's a whole new tab. Emily Hart's Simp Army. On the upside, Sam made a good amount of money as Emily Hart. The downside, he was dealing with some real creeps. I can't even say what people were sending me to Instagram.

Like, it's inappropriate. But, like, people were sending inappropriate images and appropriate messages. Hey, are you single? WhatsApp, where do you live? Like, these are general. But, like, some people were, like, so creepy. Navigating the internet as Emily was an eye-opening experience for Sam. My friends don't even message me that much.

When I started, I used to get, like, 10,000. 15 messages, even. Like, so much attention. And I was thinking, like, do pretty women get so much attention? Like, I was, like, surprise. But it's not a good kind of attention. It's not the kind of attention people want. It's super disgusting.

As Emily Hart, Patriot and Rising Fanview Star, Sam experienced what women have been subjected to since the birth of texting. Unsolicited Dick Picks. He was appalled. Like, directly, blatantly, like, no context, no high, and then the image. Like, it was super weird, super gritty. He learned to stop checking Emily Hart's Instagram messages.

But he couldn't ignore the ones on FanView because that's where he was making money. One guy on Fan View sent him 50 bucks. And then to accompany the tip, the subscriber attached a video of himself, naked, humping a pillow that propped up a tablet with Emily's nude. I mean, these guys were sending him come tributes. Like they were ejaculating on photos of Emily Hart or like sending videos themselves masturbating on Emily Hart's photo, and he would have to see this all the time. And then there was the emotional toll, too. The unsolicited videos were gross, but they were nothing

compared to the trauma dumping that Emily subscribers did in her DMs. He would get messages all the time from people who would buy her videos and buy her exclusive content, and they would be like, are you real or are you AI? But then they would go on and talk about their days or talk about how lonely they were, how much they hated their wives. I found Sam very thoughtful and self-reflective. I think that he felt guilty about deceiving them, honestly. They would share things with him sometimes that went beyond the typical OnlyFans model subscriber relationship.

Just going back to that idea of intimacy and human connection, like they would talk about, how terrible their marriages were and they hadn't slept in the same bed as their wives and years and how they recently lost a parent or a beloved family member. When there was a theoretical audience of dumb MAGA guys paying for this content, I think he was more comfortable with that than with engaging with them all on an individual level and being like, oh, these are real people with real problems. The AI MAGA Hot Girl Venture was supposed to be easy cash. And the fact that he was tricking Americans whose politics he fundamentally disagreed with,

who would probably be horrified to find out they were sending cum tributes to a 22-year-old Indian guy, felt like poetic justice. But the grift stopped being fun. I think it got too intense. I think he got burnt out by it very fast. He wasn't doing it for very long. And then the Instagram ban started. The scammer accusations followed. Emily Hart, aka Sam, was under fire. That's it for part one of the story, but don't worry, we're not finished with a steep dive yet. Next week, we're getting into the rest of the Emily Hart saga, the scammer debate, and what happened with Sam's lifelong dream of moving to America.

As usual, stick around after the credits for some bonus content. And if you're dying to open more tabs before part two drops next week, we'll link to some further reading in our show notes. We're leaving these tabs open for now. So come back for the rest of the story. Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Kueva and edited and audio engineered by Chris Agusa, production help from our intern, Lauren Yun.

The Close All Taves team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Mahasinod. Jen Cheon is our director of podcasts and Ethan Tovin Lindsay is our editor-in-chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California, Local. This episode's keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white eponemaker high 75 keyboard with foggerton red samurai keycaps and gator on Milky Yellow Pro V2 switches. This episode includes AI generated clips of Emily Hart, courtesy of Sam. We also used a clip of the song Billy Elish by Armani White.

Thanks for listening. Can I say cum tributes on here? Or should I use it? Yes. Okay. But you will have to, for the normies, explain what com tributes are. Okay. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union.

Give your savings account the love it deserves. When you keep your money with Star One, you keep more of your money. Star One credit union in your best interest. Support for KQED podcast comes from Stanford's Master of Liberal Arts, inviting students on a journey of ideas culminating in a Stanford graduate degree. An info session will be held on August 20th, mLA.standford.edu. Each story you hear on Planet Money starts with a question.

What happens if we refund tariffs? Why are groceries so expensive? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious because the forces shaping our world can be hard to see. Follow NPR's Planet Money, wherever you get your podcast, and start seeing how the economy really works.