'I watched Bonnie Blue's documentary. She had me convinced until the final 5 minutes.'

Something about Bonnie Blue has always intrigued and confused me. I don't quite understand her.

When 1000 Men & Me: The Bonnie Blue Story was on the homepage of my Stan on Friday night, my first instinct was to keep scrolling — I didn't want to watch it. But curiosity got the better of me.

What I didn't expect was to find myself, 45 minutes in, feeling sorry for her. What I really didn't expect was how quickly that sympathy would evaporate.

For those with perfectly clean search histories, Tia Billinger — known to the world as Bonnie Blue — creates subscription-based adult content. She's known for performing stunts so outlandish they go viral — sometimes even before they happen.

She sleeps with "barely legal" 18-year-olds. She performs group sex with random men for free. "I love pleasuring normal people," Billinger explains.

She makes a lot of people very angry.

1000 Men & Me: The Bonnie Blue Story centres around her biggest stunt yet: sleeping with 1,000 men in 24 hours. She compares what she's doing to athletics.

"Because I'm trying to push my body in a sex perspective, everyone's like, whoa. You've gone too far," she says.

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The documentary is directed by British filmmaker Victoria Silver, who explains she knows about Bonnie Blue because of her 15-year-old daughter.

"In terms of feminism, are you not maybe sending us backwards?" Silver asks Billinger.

"I do get what you mean, but this is what I enjoy. I always say, this is what I want [and] this is not for everybody," the 25-year-old replies.

"I look at it as, I'm now a millionaire, I'm a woman, I'm independent, I use my body to empower me, I don't let other people sexualise me, I sexualise myself. For that, I'm showing, I can take control."

A key aspect of Billinger's business model is rage bait. She posts approximately 200 videos daily across several social media profiles with the sole intention of pissing people off.

She uses language the media has used to describe her and her stunts to garner engagement.

"Barely legal"? It's a term journalists first labelled the young men she offered to sleep with while they were on Schoolies or the UK equivalent. It's now a staple term in her videos.

"Whether you are barely breathing or barely legal, I want to pleasure you," she says in a video featured in the documentary.

When we've written about Billinger in the past, it's always sparked commentary.

People ask how, as a women's media company, we can give her airtime. They say what she's doing is awful — and that's valid. It's highly controversial and not to most people's taste. But there's fascination. There's intrigue.

"She says some things that if I didn't know her, I wouldn't like either," her publicist admits.

But controversy drives engagement and engagement drives subscriptions.

Watch: Bonnie Blue shares how she has made money. Post continues after video.

The documentary features both her mum, Sarah, and her husband, Ollie — the latter of whom I didn't know existed.

She provides for her entire family so they no longer need to work. She also has no friendship circle because of what she does. The porn industry doesn't agree with what she does, and most of the time, it's just her and a team — who profit from what she does.

Several moments in the 53-minute documentary had me feeling sorry for her.

When she admits the last time she went out by herself was at least six months ago. Most telling is the quiet moment where she is at home beading, realising that, because of her stunts, she has no friends.

That was until the final five minutes.

Silver handles the documentary with the same curious nature as Louis Theroux would. You aren't entirely sure how she feels about Billinger, but you assume it's probably with the same scepticism I have — unsure but interested to know more.

As the documentary wraps up, Billinger shares that she's off to Romania to appear on Andrew Tate's podcast. A man who, Silver points out, is an alleged rapist and human trafficker, and a self-proclaimed misogynist.

"You talk about female empowerment, but how do you square that with aligning yourself and your brand with the most misogynistic man on the internet?" asks Silver.

"Just because you interview someone, it doesn't mean you're that person," Billinger responds. "He has been labelled multiple things by the media and so have I. We're probably two of the most misunderstood people out there."

Silver ends the documentary by saying Billinger's trip isn't one she needs or wants to go on. She says she now completely understands how Bonnie's world works. The stunts. The rage bait. The contradictions.

"It feels like the right time to put the camera down — the trickier thing will be explaining this to my daughter," she says, before asking one final question.

"Would you f**k Andrew Tate?" Silver asks Billinger.

"Yeah, I'd f**k Andrew Tate," she replies.

No pause. No hesitation. In that moment, every carefully constructed argument Billinger's made about what she does collapsed. This wasn't empowerment — it was opportunism in its rawest form.

Whether she was lying to viewers or to herself, she had me partly convinced. For a while, I thought I understood her logic, even if I'd never make the same choices.

But in admitting she would sleep with Tate, that's when she lost me.

The saddest part isn't her isolation or the risks she takes — it's that she truly believes her own marketing.

That's not empowerment — that's someone willing to do anything, and I mean anything, to stay relevant.

The documentary made me question whether I'd judged her too quickly. But in the end, Tia Billinger showed me exactly who she was.

1000 Men & Me: The Bonnie Blue Story is now streaming on Stan.

Feature image: Stan.