It’s no secret that the 2000s were a particularly difficult time to be a person in the public eye. That decade saw the rise of gossip blogs, the proliferation of camera phones, the heydays of Perez Hilton and TMZ, and the very public downfalls of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. The 2000s were the wild west of reality TV, elevating all sorts of kooky characters to national fame. Suddenly, people were famous just for being famous, and there were tons of shows on the air that chronicled antics that would’ve been unthinkable just a few years earlier.

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One figure who emerged out of that cultural stew was Tila Tequila, a pint-sized singer who made a name for herself in the pages of Playboy and on the online wasteland that was Myspace.com. The now-defunct social network encouraged users to amass as many friends as possible, and Tequila turned her willingness to be open about her life online into a reality-television empire. For a few years there, it was impossible to avoid her; every time you turned on the television or visited your favorite blog, she’d be acting up again.

In the years since she first got famous, Tequila has been involved in a series of scandals that have continued to follow her everywhere. For example, she’s angered homophobes and the queer community for the same show, courted online Nazis, and angered real-life rap fans. These are the controversial moments that will always haunt Tila Tequila.

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In 2007, Tila Tequila got her own reality show. “A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila,” one of the worst reality dating franchises, was about a group of people competing for her affections. What made the show different from anything else on air was the fact that she had both male and female contestants trying to win her over. Just like that, America had its first bisexual dating show.

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“A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila” was massively controversial. Perhaps in an effort to head off criticism, Tequila took to her Myspace blog to talk about her relationship with God. “The church should understand that they have a higher responsibility to teach the youth about unconditional love, and how we can spread the love, not why being gay is a bad thing,” she wrote (via The Christian Post). “In a perfect world, God would have the churches teach us how to love one another, no matter who, what, when and where.”

The show wasn’t just criticized by people who thought it was inappropriate for a woman to be into girls and boys, though. It was also criticized by members of the queer community, who felt that the competition format played into stereotypes about bisexual people — namely, that they’re merely indecisive about which gender they prefer. An op-ed that ran in The Minaret read: “Unfortunately, she has only exacerbated these misconceptions by treating her sexuality as the driving force of petty drama and cheap entertainment.”

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Ever since her Myspace days, fans have been fascinated with Tila Tequila’s personal life. After all, that was the driving force behind her MTV reality show — who would the chaotic bisexual choose? — so it’s only natural that her love life would continue to make headlines after the show went off the air. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before things got quite dark.

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In 2009, Tequila was dating an NFL player named Shawne Merriman. She called the police on him and claimed all sorts of abuse, including choking and that he’d prevented her from leaving his house. In a statement to the New York Daily News, however, Merriman insisted that she was too drunk to drive and that he was simply keeping her there until she sobered up. “At the time, I was concerned about her welfare given the intoxicated state she appeared to be in and I encouraged her to stay until safe transportation could be provided,” he said.

The two went back and forth at length on X, formerly Twitter, trading insults and barbs about the incident. She insisted that she hadn’t been drinking and claimed to be allergic to alcohol, but a nightclub owner named James Brennan told the Associated Press (via USA Today) that this wasn’t the case. “She wasn’t like falling down or anything of that nature, but she was visibly intoxicated. It sounds like she’s allergic to the truth,” he said. The two wound up suing each other.

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Tila Tequila has long been open about the mental health struggles she’s faced. In a Myspace blog post ahead of the premiere of her show “A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila,” for example, she wrote about having had suicidal thoughts. “Growing up, I felt like I had no one to turn to in times of need, who would be there for me with open arms without judgment when I felt hopeless,” she said (via The Christian Post). “I lived in a lonely shattered world and tried to commit suicide quite a few times from a very young and tender age.”

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In 2017, she made fans concerned for her mental health when she uploaded a long, rambling video to YouTube claiming to be God. The video, which stretched for more than twenty minutes, featured the controversial personality claiming that she had accidentally signed a contract that would turn her into an all-powerful being. “My dumba** self, I signed this contract without reading the fine print because I’m lazy like that,” she said (via the Houston Chronicle). “I signed my soul away to become God without reading the fine print.”

Furthermore, she simultaneously claimed that she would cure the world’s problems, but also lead us until war. “Now that I know I created all these things … I’m going to fix it,” she said. “… Whether I want World War III to happen or not. I do, so it will happen.”

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If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.

In addition to being a reality television personality and a person known for her outbursts online, Tila Tequila’s transformation also led her to technically being a musician. She’s released singles like “Stripper Friends,” “I Love U,” and “I Love My DJ,” which were apparently enough to get her invited to perform at the Gathering of the Juggalos. For the uninitiated, Juggalos are fans of the Detroit rap group Insane Clown Posse, who paint their faces in characteristic black-and-white clown makeup and love to drink Faygo soda. They throw a yearly festival that draws Juggalos from around the country, and in 2010, Tila Tequila was one of the festival’s acts.

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The Juggalos didn’t like that. When she took the stage, they pelted her with bottles and other debris, including rocks. She spoke with TMZ about the incident, sending the online tabloid photos of herself cut and bleeding. “I went onstage and immediately, before I even got on stage, DUDES were throwing HUGE STONE ROCKS in my face, beer bottles that slit my eye open, almost burnt my hair on fire cuz they threw fire crackers on stage,” she said. Though she was injured, the “Ballin’ Round the Clock” songstress managed to escape. She threatened to sue the organization on X, writing (via CNN), “Pretty soon, the owners who run the juggalos will be bankrupt.”

In 2011, years after “A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila” went off the air, a porn company called Vivid Entertainment threatened to sell a sex tape of the MTV star engaging in intimate sex acts with another woman. She was quite unhappy — understandably so, as revenge porn is a crime that deserves to be taken seriously — but she was ultimately unsuccessful in blocking the sale of the tape.

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A Vivid executive spoke with RadarOnline about the situation, insisting that they’d offered Tequila the chance to purchase the rights to her own sex tape back from them.  “I met with Tila last week,” Steve Hirsch told the website. “She went crazy saying it was too much money.” You might call such a thing “blackmail,” but then again, if you’re in the courts, you apparently might not!

Sales of the tape were apparently successful, with Radar noting that she’d sold almost as well as revenge porn tapes of Kim Kardashian and one featuring Pamela Anderson and ex Tommy Lee. She released a statement to the website about the situation, writing, “Although this video was not meant for the public to see, I hope that this will not affect my career and that I will continue to work hard at achieving my goals in this industry.”

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In a 2010 interview with Out Magazine, Tila Tequila addressed accusations that she had faked being bisexual and had only done “A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila” for the attention. “You can’t hoax this — unless I could win an Academy Award for my fantastic acting,” she said. “These were real feelings — those were not actors and I’m not acting.” She also insisted that she opened doors for bisexual people in culture, adding, “So I definitely think that it allowed people to talk about it and pay attention to it and not turn a blind eye to what’s out there. So, you don’t have to like me but I did it first.”

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Just a few years later, however, the “Paralyze” singer came out as straight and claimed that she had indeed only ever faked being queer for attention. In 2018, she posted a lengthy video to YouTube and claimed that she’d made the whole thing up. “Confession: I WAS NEVER BISEXUAL OR HOMOSEXUAL AT ALL!!! SURPRISE!!” she titled the video. In the description, she blamed Hollywood, dabbling in conspiracy theories that tie the queer community to something shady. “It was all gay for pay and it is required of you in order for you to sell your soul to Satan!!! Hollywood is full of filth and they will be burned!” she wrote. Guess those rumors were right after all; where’s that Academy Award?

In the years since Myspace collapsed and Tila Tequila’s reality show was taken off the air, she’s developed an unfortunate, antisemitic fixation with Jewish people. It all started back in 2012, when she actually claimed that she was converting to Judaism. In an interview with TMZ, the shock artist insisted, “I just feel like the Jewish people have such a beautiful way about them, and I can’t wait to officially be Jewish! Shabbat Shalom.”

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This was just another grab for attention, however, which became clear after Tequila began posting overt Nazi statements online. Just a year after she claimed to have been converting, Tequila wrote a lengthy blog post titled “Why I Sympathize With Hitler Part 1: True History Unveiled.” It’s as awful as you might imagine, full of Holocaust denialism, an insistence that Hitler had some good ideas, and musing about the fact that we don’t see more pictures of Hitler doing nice things. 

Over the years, Tequila has firmly allied herself with the alt-right, a growing group of people sympathetic to the Nazi cause. In 2016, her account on X was suspended after she posted a photograph of herself giving a full-on Nazi salute at an alt-right conference. She also began sharing images of herself in Nazi regalia. 

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In 2015, despite the fact that she’d already posted about her love of Adolf Hitler, Tila Tequila was cast on the British reality show “Celebrity Big Brother.” A modified version of the iconic reality competition saw multiple celebrities picked to live in a house together, followed by cameras 24/7. That year, the cast also included, Jenna Jameson, MTV’s “Teen Mom” star Farrah Abraham, and Janice Dickinson, who is unrecognizable from her modeling days.

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Typically, the celebrities try to last as long as possible in the “Big Brother” house before being evicted. In Tequila’s case, she only lasted one day before she was yanked from the show. Her posts in praise of Adolf Hitler had gone viral online, leading fans to wonder why she’d even been cast on the reality show; rather than defend their decision, producers chose to pull her from the game. “When [the posts] were brought to our attention, she was called to the Diary Room for a discussion with producers and was subsequently removed from the house,” a spokesperson told the BBC. “The views Tila had expressed, and permitted to remain uncorrected, are totally unacceptable and, accordingly, her continued involvement in the program was untenable.”

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Jonathan Sacerdoti, Director of Communications at the Campaign Against Antisemitism, had harsh words for the star. “The British public has little time for attention seeking Nazi sympathisers like ‘Tila Tequila,'” he said, sarcastic quotes around her name included.

In 2014, Tila Tequila announced that she was expecting a child. In a lengthy blog post about her decision to have a kid, she wrote (via E! News) that her whole career in the public eye had been an effort to secure enough money to someday start a family. “So be it my reality TV show, the music, the sex tapes, or whatever it was that I did in my past … you better believe that it was all done so that I could save up money for the child that I did not yet have,” she wrote.

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In a later interview with the Daily Beast, the reality show veteran told the outlet that becoming a mother had made her more conservative. She was interested in getting rid of pornography, for example, and wanted the government to crack down on law and order. “Most people are so used to being all about their ‘freedom,’ so they becomes these little crybabies,” she said. “They can’t live by laws and rules. Civilization needs to be civilized.”

Unfortunately, Tequila soon began using her child to score political points online with the alt-right. In 2016, she shared a photo on Instagram (via Buzzfeed) of her daughter with a Hitler-style mustache. In the caption, she wrote, “One day when you grow up, you’re going to have to apologize for this picture, young lady!” Commenters were unimpressed, with one writing, “Get a life! You are so stupid.”

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