Bonnie Blue requested an interview with us. We almost said no.

The email arrived without warning.

Bonnie Blue's manager was requesting their client be interviewed for a Mamamia podcast. Specifically, No Filter. It landed with a thud.

It was one of those moments that carries so much cultural weight it immediately feels complicated. In media, you learn to recognise these pitches quickly. They're the ones that feel too hot to touch. A kind of editorial hot potato.

Watch: Kate Langbroek explaining the decision to interview Bonnie Blue.

Like any hot potato, it didn't sit still. It was passed around quietly at first, then more openly. Conversations stretched out over days, then weeks. Meetings spilled beyond their allotted time. Phone calls happened after hours. The question underneath all of it was the same: should we even be considering this?

As Executive Producer of No Filter, my job is to help decide which conversations are worth having and which aren't. That doesn't mean decisions happen in isolation. Particularly not on something like this. Bonnie Blue was never going to be a straightforward yes or no. And there was no shortage of hesitation.

That wasn't surprising. Bonnie Blue is one of the most confronting figures to emerge from the internet's attention economy in recent years. The shock value of what she does is obvious. So is the anger she provokes, particularly in women. For many of us, that anger was immediate and visceral. It sat somewhere between disgust, exhaustion and disbelief.

So the question wasn't whether this interview would be controversial. That much was a given. The real question was whether giving her any space at all was responsible.

What complicated things was this: Bonnie Blue hadn't been offered the interview. She had asked for it. She specifically wanted to speak to Mamamia.

That detail mattered more than it might sound. It kept resurfacing every time we thought we were close to a decision.

Why approach a platform whose stated mission is making the world better for women and girls? What did she think she had to say to an audience that has largely been hostile to her? And, perhaps most importantly, what did she want from us?

Those questions ultimately tipped the balance. We didn't agree to the interview because we felt compelled to platform her. We agreed because we wanted to understand why she wanted this conversation, and whether there was anything to be gained by having it on our terms.

In the lead-up, Kate Langbroek and I watched and listened to every media profile Bonnie Blue had already done. Podcasts, panels, viral clips, a documentary tracking her rise. A pattern quickly emerged. Most conversations fell into one of three categories: sensationalist, openly hostile, or uncritical cheerleading. None of them asked what we actually wanted answered.

We weren't interested in using her for clicks, and we weren't interested in rehabilitating her image. But we also weren't interested in bullying her for sport. That felt both lazy and dishonest. What we were looking for was a third option: a serious, women-led interview that didn't pretend neutrality, but also didn't rely on cruelty.

When I asked Kate Langbroek if she would do the interview, she didn't hesitate. She jumped at it. Kate takes every interview seriously, but this one in particular. She watched the documentary, listened to every appearance, read widely, and thought deeply about how to approach someone who is highly media-trained and acutely aware of the outrage she generates. We spoke constantly throughout the process; before the interview, during preparation, and long after it wrapped.

We knew the first question had to be simple and direct: why us?

Kate asked it at the very top of the interview. Bonnie answered without defensiveness. In fact, she answered with remarkable clarity.

"I would never have been able to achieve sleeping with 1,000 people if it wasn't for the women," she said.

"The women are not my target audience, but they are the ones that re-share my TikToks, the ones that build the comment sections, the ones that show how frustrated they are, which escalates the press. And within that, it's been able to allow me to build a bigger name for myself."

She went on to explain that she rage-baits women deliberately because it works. Women's anger, she knows, travels faster than anything else online. It drives attention. It drives headlines. And attention, in turn, drives money.

That admission re-framed everything.

Behind the stunts and the shock headlines is a marketing operation that Bonnie Blue directs herself. Outrage is not a by-product of her work; it is the engine. Forget the Bang Bus. What she is really driving is a rage machine.

Men are the consumers. Women are the accelerant.

Bonnie Blue, it became clear, is extremely practised. She is polite, articulate, composed. She has neat, pre-packaged responses to most criticisms. The hypotheticals rarely unsettle her. But there were moments where the scripting fell away.

One came when Kate asked her about morality.

Bonnie responded carefully, explaining that she believes morality is subjective, that what she does is consensual, and that she doesn't see herself as responsible for how others interpret her work. She framed her choices as individual ones, detached from broader cultural impact.

Another moment came when Kate asked a question Bonnie clearly hadn't anticipated: what her value was beyond her work. Not her income. Not her notoriety. Her worth.

There was a pause. Then Bonnie said, "I think my value is in my honesty. I'm very open about what I do. I don't pretend it's something else."

It wasn't an especially satisfying answer, but it was one of the few moments where she didn't immediately reach for a polished line.

Kate also asked about Bonnie's marriage. We had been given parameters ahead of the interview about topics that were supposedly off-limits, including her divorce.

Kate asked anyway and to her credit, Bonnie answered. For the first time publicly, she spoke about her marriage breaking down as her public profile exploded, and about the personal cost of the choices she has made. She didn't dramatise it. She didn't shut it down. But it was the clearest glimpse we had of the woman behind the brand.

The interview did not resolve neatly. Bonnie Blue understands exactly what she is doing. She understands the outrage. She understands the economics of attention. She understands how to convert rage into relevance, and relevance into money. What she does not appear particularly interested in is interrogating the broader consequences beyond that.

And perhaps the most uncomfortable truth to emerge is this: for everyone who wants Bonnie Blue to disappear, she gave us the clearest explanation of how to make that happen.

Ignore her.

Her relevance is built on attention, on shares, on commentary, on women doing the emotional labour of amplifying something they despise. If that attention dries up, the machine slows. That does not absolve men, who remain the engine of demand, but it does force a harder reckoning with how outrage functions online and who benefits from it.

In the end, the hot potato did what hot potatoes always do. It cooled. Not because it stopped being uncomfortable, but because we handled it carefully.

This episode unsettled us. It frustrated us. It raised questions we still don't have clean answers to. But it sits at the intersection of sex, power, misogyny, internet fame, and a culture that rewards outrage above almost everything else.

We didn't do this interview to promote Bonnie Blue. We didn't do it to excuse her. And we didn't do it to tell anyone what to think.

We did it, so listeners could hear her unfiltered and decide for themselves.

You can listen to this episode of No Filter: 'Bonnie Blue Requested An Interview With Us. We Almost Said No.' now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Feature image: Instagram/ @onlybonnieblue.