How a high-risk pregnancy, true crime TikToks, an apartment fire, and publicly losing my job made this nepo baby "famous"

I signed up for TikTok in 2020, after having initially been resistant, mostly due to writing it off as a “kids app”. After all, Musical.ly was fucking cringe (I’ll die on that hill), and it was the offspring of that app. I was 28 years old, a full-time Apple employee working as a repair technician, and it was the very beginning of a global pandemic. The entire company had been sent home from work, all in-person locations were closed for the foreseeable future, and to top it all off… I was about to find out I was pregnant. My pregnancy had been planned, I’d even started to wonder if something was “wrong”, thinking things had taken so long. However, upon finding out about the pandemic, the idea was to put that plan on hold. Little did I know, that plan had already embedded itself into my uterus. I was excited, but I recognized the timing was shit.

To make matters even worse, I wound up enduring a horribly uncomfortable, high risk pregnancy. I was diagnosed with ICP (Intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy) at only 14 weeks. ICP is a serious, and very rare liver disorder occurring in only up to 2% of pregnancies. Usually, the disorder develops much later in pregnancy. Digestive bile liquid builds up in the liver, causing function to lower, the fluid leaks, and results in an unbearable itching sensation. In many cases, this extreme discomfort is localized to the hands and/or feet, however mine spread through my whole body. My doctor believed this was likely due to how early I developed the condition in my pregnancy, and how it only worsened the further along I got. The only cure for ICP is to give birth, and the cure is instantaneous - I can confirm! Within moments of giving birth, your bile acid level usually returns to normal, and all itching disappears. However, to reach this moment, which can only be described as pure bliss, one must first practice a delicate dance. You see, not only does the bile travel within your body, making you feel as if you are writhing in the flames of hell, it also travels its way to your baby’s placenta, slowly calcifying it and cutting off your unborn child from it’s life source. For this reason, the goal is to monitor you daily, in an attempt to keep the baby in for as long as possible, but ensure labor is induced before there’s too much damage to the placenta.

At the time, I lived in an apartment in Williamsburg. However, My OB’s office was all the way uptown, in the city, at Mount Sinai Hospital. Mount Sinai, I admittedly chose intentionally because it’s where I was born. I did this… for the plot (you’re welcome), but also before I was made aware I’d have to make the journey there daily for months, during a global pandemic, while severely ill, and pregnant. I put on a mask, took three trains each way, huffed and puffed my way from the closest station and sat there, at the hospital every day for an hour, tight band around my ever-growing belly, monitoring my baby while I scrolled TikTok. I was never not scrolling TikTok. I’d scroll on the train, loading whatever I could between the countless stops. I’d scroll at home, sitting at my desk while listening to Apple’s customers scream at me over not knowing their own Apple ID passwords. I’d scroll while laying in bed, naked and covered in BioFreeze, window AC unit blasting on my self-declared “flesh-hell,” AKA my pregnant body, in an attempt to relieve the itching from the ICP. I wasn’t posting, but I was locked in.

Prior to all of this, back when life was “normal”, I had a history of secretive, and failed attempts to become a “performer” (musical theater, stand up, acting), or become a social media thing (blogging, vlogging, etc). However these attempts I’d quickly cover up before they’d spread wide enough to risk appearing on my actual social media accounts, which I only used at the time for personal use. This, in reality, kept me from having any ability to grow, but I had deep insecurity shit (not that I no longer do). I’d always worked a “regular” job, each time starting at the lowest, entry-level position and working for a minimum, hourly wage. I was lucky I’d worked for companies who all provided pretty good benefits, I always had my own health insurance, and I was responsible by auto-deducting some of my pay into a 401K from the time I started my very first retail job, but by no means did I have any money. I always lived paycheck to paycheck. I mention this because it goes hand-in-hand with my insecurity shit. Inevitably, at every job I ever held, I’d walk into the break room one day to one of my co-workers saying something, loudly, along the lines of, “hey, Paris! Guess what? I googled you last night! I read all about your family!” then this was usually followed by some sort of “joke,” effectively implying what the fuck do you need this job for, then?

It was true, I grew up a “spoiled little rich girl” by all accounts. If you Google me, you’ll find plenty of facts among the sites that pop up, all of which paint a very neat and tidy picture of generational wealth, and impressive social status. You’d read that I grew up in Jackie Kennedy’s old house, that my grandmother was Miss. America in 1951, my mother was an actress once “engaged” to Charlie Sheen, my grandfather was the Vice President of Universal Pictures, and my step-grandfather was the Ambassador of Algeria to the US. These things are all true. You’d read that my father, who was a “blues legend” (also true) is dead, due to “sudden heart failure,” tragically leaving behind a music career on the cusp of breaking into the mainstream, my mother, and a six month old baby - me. What you wouldn’t read is my father actually died from an accidental opioid overdose, almost instantly stopping his own heart after doing what he thought was a John Campbell-sized, massive rail of cocaine. It was heroin. This spiraled my mother into a deep depression, and without getting into details I was too young to speak on with any sense of clarity, it was determined I’d be raised by my grandparents.

The relationship of all parties involved, the family as a whole, was volatile. Tensions between my grandmother and mother were always high. It always bled onto me, both of them leaning on me from a young age to vent about the other, or use me to do their bidding against one another. My grandfather was frequently traveling to France or Algeria, back and forth pretty regularly, and always busy holding meetings when home in Washington DC. We lived in that massive house in Georgetown (The Newton D. Baker House), and when my grandfather was out of town the whole third floor was mine. I spent my childhood glued to a 1998 Compaq Presario, dial-up screeching to connect me to anywhere outside - message boards, AOL chatrooms, MySpace, The Sims Online. I was addicted to online shopping by the age of ten, and was catfishing as a 27 year old woman named Julianna. Neither of my grandparents even knew how to turn on a computer, and I was unstoppable. I always had a nanny, but I was left alone, usually only interacting with my nannies if I wanted to go out or do something. I really only liked to do two things - go to Barnes & Noble for books, and to the mall, to FYE for VHS tapes. Otherwise, I had my growing movie collection at home, and I sat in my room, on my computer, focused on two worlds between two screens - just not the real world I lived in.

When I was forced to leave my house, it was for completely unrelatable experiences, which made me completely unrelatable to most of the children around me, thus I was bullied endlessly in school. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, my grandmother was renting another one of her homes in Georgetown to the White House’s Chief of Staff. His family was always like extended family to us, so my stories at school of “what did you do last weekend?” frequently included roaming free-range through the literal White House, or attending an event, such as the Easter Egg Roll or annual Christmas parties, where I’d have my photo snapped with the First Family, and could wind up in Washington Life for all my classmates’ to see their parents flip through during breakfast. If people didn’t dislike us over assuming we were snobs, they disliked us due to being snobs themselves. My grandmother had a prestigious history of being outspoken, one to not be messed with, a woman with strong opinions, but by the time I was around she really kept to herself, declining invites to most social gatherings. This also seemed to rub people the wrong way, seemed to bleed onto me, and by 5th grade I was pulled out of school to be “homeschooled” due to bullying.

I refused to participate in my homeschooling, finally having full-time access to stay in my room and be among the worlds I much preferred, online. At the start of 7th grade, I was sent to an all-girls boarding school in Pennsylvania. By the end of 8th grade, I was put in a wilderness program and shuffled between 3 TTI (Troubled Teen Industry) facilities, ultimately ending up right back to that first boarding school by the age of 16. Somewhere in there I studied abroad in France and South Africa, then managed to graduate high school in 2011. I attempted to go to a few colleges, ultimately dropping out. By the end of 2012, I was working full-time at Urban Outfitters, I was financially “cut off” by my family, but back to living on the third floor of my grandmother’s DC mansion, rent-free. By the end of 2013, I was living in Harlem, NYC, in my own apartment, still working full-time retail (except for Diesel by then, no longer Urban), and at that point completely financially independent. So, that’s why I needed the jobs — except you can’t explain all of that to your co-worker in the break room when your corporation only gives you a 30-minute lunch. The pressure from my remaining, living, family members to maintain the facade of the perfect “Blue Blood”, American family, coupled with the deep fear I would never reach my family’s own legacy to begin with always stunted me from “putting myself out there.”

After giving birth to my daughter, I undoubtedly had serious Postpartum Depression. I was still stuck at home, still glued to my phone. I felt I had no creative outlet, and I was exhausting myself as a new, first-time mom. The only options for standup were still on fucking Zoom. I started posting TikTok videos to blow off steam, and kept it completely separate from all of my other social media accounts. I only had 23 followers, most of them random phone contacts from jobs I no longer worked, maybe a couple people from high school, but nobody damning. I didn’t think anything would take off, so I started engaging here and there in trends, mostly just coming up with a funny caption for whatever top sound was trending. My first video that took off was one of me pretending to be a little kid in front of a shitty looking, green screen car, lip syncing the lyrics to ‘Semi-Charmed Life’ by Third Eye Blind. The caption on the screen read something like “me as a little kid with my grandparents in the car”, and the lyrics were, of course, the part “doing crystal meth will lift you up until you break…” I don’t remember how many views it got, but I had a few thousand followers after that.

A couple days after my first successful video, I got word that some random Canadian guy on the platform had copied it, made the same video essentially, with the same song and idea. I was fucking furious. I DM’d him, telling him off, saying he needed to at the very least give credit for totally ripping off my idea, and he had the audacity to message me back pretending like he never saw my video, claiming it was all a coincidence. He had more followers than I did, around 20,000 or something, and I think it was my drive to destroy him (if I’m being honest) that made me take things to the next level. I started posting all sorts of videos, seeing if anything would stick. I started getting some traction with series-based videos, you know, those annoying ones where you have to go to part two, three, four, and suddenly you’re on part thirty-eight. I’d cover topics in the pop culture realm - people, places, things, events, conspiracies. A few months later I was close to 50,000 followers. I can’t remember what that Canadian guy’s username is anymore.

By this point, I was getting paranoid someone at Apple might find out I was making TikTok videos, but I was still working from home, and I had gone ahead and blocked all keywords, such as “apple, williamsburg,” my address, and any other things I thought could connect my slowly growing TikTok presence to my real life. I briefly went back to work in person around this time, but was still dealing with a plethora of medical issues from my pregnancy, resulting in officially going on a medical leave from Apple, driving me further into a depression, but also into posting more videos. Feeling perpetually lonely, I also started leaning more towards opening up, sharing more about my day to day life, sharing old “crazy stories”, and attempting to build community on the app. I also slowly started going back to open mics, recording myself, and using clips at times for my TikTok videos. By spring of 2021, I had well over 100,000 followers. I was regularly posting my series-based content, and was beginning to open up more to the idea of being a “personality”, sharing more about who I was and my background, somewhat in an attempt to gear my platform towards being able to perform again.

On September 13, 2021, I came across a local news story of a missing woman named Gabby Petito. I remember thinking the story was odd, and I hadn’t seen it anywhere yet. Gabby was missing, her boyfriend, Brian, had returned back to their home in Florida without her, but driving a van she owned. I saw a video of Gabby’s mother, tears streaming from her eyes, pleading with the public for help to find her missing daughter. Being a new mother, I couldn’t imagine what she must have been feeling. I’d seen people boost stories of missing people on TikTok, and having over 100,000 followers, I thought I could help spread the word. I quickly posted a video with Gabby’s missing poster green screened behind me, giving only the basic details. Within a couple hours, the video had a quarter of a million views, by 24 hours it had hit over half a million, and was continuing to grow. I scanned through the comments, mostly people also trying to attract attention and boost the story, but came across a comment from someone claiming to be Gabby’s cousin, asking for TikTokers to continue spreading information about Gabby.

Suddenly, I was a full-on couch reporter. I felt invigorated by what I interpreted as an actual opportunity to help, and for the first time in a long time, I felt I had a personal purpose and mission besides being a mother, and wanna-be comedian. I couldn’t even keep up with how many people were coming in at this point, my follower account had grown to over 300,000 overnight and every time I reloaded my profile, the number was higher. I was fueled by comments from strangers asking me to keep following along, and spent the next month or so posting video after video, dozens a day - real time updates on the Gabby Petito case. I got in deep. I was on the news doing commentary, I was taking calls as the “social media case expert” for podcasts, every day I was getting flooded with emails asking to take meetings about hold agreements for future documentaries to be made on the case. This is when things started to get weird. I thought I had been doing a good thing, sharing information on a missing woman, but I started to receive some well-deserved criticism. Why was I only talking about Gabby - an affluent, attractive, white woman? What about all the other missing people in this world? I started getting flooded with other types of comments - “grifter!” , “YOU’RE NOT HELPING ANYONE” — I even started receiving death threats.

I wasn’t profiting off any of my videos, I wasn’t yet in TikTok’s “Creator Fund”, and wouldn’t end up joining until well after this era on the app, but that didn’t stop people from assuming I was. I never accepted any “deals”, I never actually agreed to any of the documentaries or series that you can now spot my TikTok videos in the frames of. Regardless, even without my making a direct monetary profit, there was validity to the criticism, and I took it to heart. At first, my instinct was to spread my reach. I started covering cases of other missing people, along with Gabby’s, but by that point there weren’t many developments on the case. I tried to focus on featuring cases that weren’t getting attention in mainstream media, and focus on the cases of missing people of color, as well as other marginalized communities of people. My mental health started to take a nosedive. I felt like I was facing impossible choices, suddenly having to pick between families who were reaching out en masse, knowing I could only make so many videos. I began to resent the attitudes of some of my followers, who seemed angry with me any time I posted anything that deviated from true crime content. They felt I owed them this content, and this alone - I felt I had been working so hard to build a presence, and I didn’t want to be who they wanted me to be forever. I also felt shame in this anger, knowing in some ways my feelings were also selfish in nature. I wasn’t a reporter, I never intended on becoming one, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sustain creating this type of media forever. I was drowning, and I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t begun to really understand the initial criticism, that I had grown my platform on the backs of these cases. I decided it was against my ethical boundaries, and I wanted out.

I stopped posting true crime content, essentially swearing off the genre, and for a while I slowed my posting all together. The switch felt sudden, I could tell people were thrown off (I could also tell my older followers were relieved). It was all so nuanced, I didn’t want to discuss it at the time, and I still wouldn’t open this discussion on TikTok. As much as I love(d) the platform, there was never any space for really getting into the nitty-gritty of it all. I knew I’d be demonized, alongside being praised by many. I felt I had made mistakes, and covering my nuanced reasoning for no longer wanting to participate in the discussion somehow felt more “grifty” to me than simply acknowledging it was time for me to shut the fuck up. I started drifting back into posting more original content, and sharing about my life. Many people cycled out who had come in for the “true crime era”, my growth on the platform slowed during this time, sometimes dipping into losing followers, but it was fine - I was grateful people were actually letting me move on. I slowly stopped getting requests for videos about missing people, and I vowed to myself to learn from the experience and take into account the many implications of the types of videos I create, on TikTok specifically.

Before my daughter’s first birthday, her father and I had ended our romantic partnership. I was still on a medical leave from Apple, unable to perform the more intense, physical demands of my job, but felt well enough to live normal life otherwise. For the first time since my traumatic pregnancy, followed by that whirlwind of a year in my apartment, I was able to use the little time I had to attempt to venture out of the apartment. I started integrating myself back into the NYC standup scene, and “for shits and giggles”, I made accounts on the apps. Dating content, particularly Tinder content, was big on TikTok back in 2021, and while I was by no means looking for anything serious, given what was going on in my life, I was totally drawn in by the countless videos popping up on my FYP of other women’s shocking or hilarious messages from idiotic guys. I started swiping, and started using the app for content on TikTok.

Towards the end of 2021, I was sitting in bed one night, swiping on Tinder, and I saw a guy pop up who had left a “swipe message” (a feature Tinder had at the time that let paid members leave messages without matching with them). All the message read was “Catfish.” I looked at this man’s profile - nerdy looking finance bro, not at all anyone I would ever swipe right on. All his profile said was “6’1”, followed by the neighborhood he lived in. I don’t know why I thought to do what I did next, but I found myself screenshotting all the pictures in his profile, googling items I could identify to find their dimensions and began measuring them against his figure. He made it easy, he had full length photos, name brand sunglasses - I used his Ray Bans and swim trunks, and I measured his height. Homeboy was five-foot-ten. I made a video, demonstrating how I had determined the calculations, uploaded it, and went to bed. When I woke up, the video had over 7 million views - The Sun had written an article, and The New York Post, followed by Newsweek had already picked it up.

Things like this seemed to keep happening for a while, over and over. I’d post a video, a dating related gag, resulting in headlines like “Woman baffled after Tinder date gets in touch six months after ghosting her” - I existed on the app in this fashion for the rest of the year, again returning to my series-based content, and began a new series of “hate watching” TV shows with my followers. I was starting to dislike my content again, I felt I was again pigeonholing myself into a niche that I didn’t fit in. In reality, I wasn’t dating-crazed. I had been casually seeing another comic in the NYC scene, a relationship only growing more serious during this era, and one I look back on with much regret over entering. A relationship I will spare the details of, but needless to say, I eventually stopped making this random dating content all together. I spent the following year really growing into what I actually wanted on TikTok at the time, gearing my content towards my presence in the standup scene, posting clips, and live-vlogging my daily life in a comedic, yet authentic and vulnerable way. By 2022, I had reached over 500,000 followers, a number I once never thought possible. I had an audience that felt like a community, often going live and having what felt like conversations. My life was certainly not perfect, but things on TikTok were at least going well for me. I had started monetizing my content through TikTok’s Creator Fund, but things were on the rocks with my job at Apple - constantly in and out on medical leaves, parenting issues, scheduling struggles. I had stopped seeing Apple as a longterm goal, but still was insecure over the idea of losing the stability.

Then, on July 1, 2022, I woke up in a burning building. My building, my Williamsburg apartment, engulfed in flames. I’m lucky my daughter wasn’t with me the night before, but I shook my regrettable boyfriend awake, and we were rescued out of my living room window by firefighters. The fire had started in the deli I lived above, early in the morning before anyone had arrived to open. They later determined the stove had “spontaneously combusted”, likely due to not being cleaned for so long that the grease buildup was so thick it was able to generate enough heat on its own and burst into flames. I hated my actual apartment, but I loved the location, right on the corner of Union and Meeker, and I’d lived there for almost five years. Before the pandemic, I’d worked for a couple years at the Apple store on Bedford Avenue, getting to walk only seven minutes to and from work. I really never left my neighborhood, never felt the need to take the train into the city. It was an easier, simpler life, looking back. Most if it was gone by then, my job had changed, I’d had a child, everything was different - and now the apartment was gone too.

The fire went viral on TikTok for several reasons. One, because I posted a video of it about three minutes after I was dragged out by firefighters, where I announced there was no need to update you on my “roach situation” (I had a roach infestation prior to the fire), because I “no longer had an apartment.” Along with the video I posted, there were several news stations at the scene. One had been filming me, on the phone, probably trying to contact my mother or step-father to tell them I was about to be without a home, from afar. In a state of shock, I gave a quick interview to a news reporter on the scene, at one point seemingly casually, and in a kind of jumbled way, saying the phrase “idunnowhatimmado” (I don’t know what I’m going to do). This news clip also went viral. I was intentionally meming myself by posting it, but was getting memed by the app in return. I think it was beautiful, and exactly what I needed in the moment.

After the fire, my life was in shambles. My personal life, things with that regrettable relationship I mentioned, finally ended, but not without it only becoming more regrettable towards the end. All these regrettable things led to more regrettable life decisions, and all the while - I kept making TikToks. After living for a month in an AirBnb, moving into an apartment I hated, and going into an incredible amount of debt over attempting to rebuild my life, I kept stumbling. Additionally, I was dealing with projects surrounding my standup falling through left and right. Then came the Apple thing. In truth, I almost forgot.

A couple months after the fire, I was in my new apartment, feeling crazed, likely while taking a break from unpacking, and I came across a video on my FYP of a woman asking for help with her stolen iPhone. Having worked for Apple for five years, I knew exactly what her issue was, and for some reason I decided to stitch the video. I didn’t directly identify myself as an Apple employee, but I definitely alluded to it. Apple had never mentioned knowledge of my TikTok videos before, but it didn’t take long for this to spin out of control. The video went super-viral, next level viral. At this moment, it has 13 million views, and almost 2 million likes. The original video got picked up by a couple news outlets as general advice on how to deal with a stolen iPhone, and this prompted Apple to contact me about it within a matter of a couple days. From the moment I spoke to my manager, I knew I’d be fired over the video - one way or another. At first, he was asking me to remove the video, but I pushed back. I hadn’t technically violated any of the company’s standing policies at that time, and I knew that. It wasn’t against the rules for me to make a video about public-facing information regarding Apple’s products. It wasn’t even against the rules for me to publicly identify myself as an Apple employee. I was strategic in how I worded my responses on the call, citing policy I had pulled up through the company’s HR website. The call ended with my manager asking me to do “nothing, for now” - do not delete the video, please do not make any more videos about anything Apple related, and wait to hear back for further guidance.

I knew how these things went, I’d been working for the company for a long time. I’d seen many employees make similar mistakes, perhaps not to the degree of mine, but I knew my situation was hopeless. However, no matter how out the door I already was with Apple, I also knew that this moment in my life was no time to lose my long standing job - I needed to at least delay the process, so I made another video. This time, I made a video directly identifying myself as an Apple employee, and appealed to Apple publicly to not fire me. By the next day, it was all over the place. The Daily Dot, Inc, Fortune, The New York Post, Mac Rumors, Newsweek, Tech Crunch, list goes on and on and on…

This kept Apple from being able to fire me for another six months or so, ultimately being unable to actually fire me over the video. Officially, for the video, I was given a written warning. Apple later ended up firing me over a medical leave, technically. Despite all the chaos, I was starting to build connections with other creators on the app. I had found management who was willing to take me on, and they started sending me to events and appearances where I was able to meet some of the familiar faces from my FYP, and even befriend a few. By 2023, I had reached 550,000 followers on TikTok, and that puts us to what I consider to be my most recent major influx on the platform. My TikTok today sits at around 600,000 followers.

Although this ends us only a little before the start of what I consider to be the happiest, and most exciting part of my life, leading me to life I live today - I find myself wondering if the place all of this occurred, my once precious third-space, even aligns with the person I’ve grown into. With all that is going on with the app, I find myself drifting further to spaces where I once found that initial sense of community, finding myself less focused on the numbers, and more focused on the nuance.