‘Naked Philanthropist’ Raises Over $1 Million For Australia Wildfires With Promise Of Nude Photos

J.W.

While celebrities are donating out of pocket and bloggers are selling their digital wares to benefit Australia, one woman has taken an entirely different approach.

Kaylen Ward, AKA the Naked Philanthropist, says she has raised $1 million for the cause by offering nude photographs in exchange for donations.

Related: Chris Hemsworth Pledges $1 Million As Fires Continue Burning In Australia

The 20-year-old influencer was racking her brain on how she could help when she came up with the idea. Since she already sells nude photos online, she decided to do it for charity.

On January 3, she tweeted out to her followers that anyone who sent proof that they had donated $10 or more to a list of provided charities would receive a surprise in their Twitter DMs.

To BuzzFeed News, she explained:

“I was seeing all the posts on Twitter about the Australian fires and I was really concerned there wasn’t a lot of media coverage and not a lot of people donating.”

The tweet from the Los Angeles based personality took off, and at the time of writing, has 85,000 retweets and 211,000 likes. Her inbox has been flooded with responses and she has even had to hire a team of four people to sort through the thousands of DMs she has received:

“I was expecting to raise maybe $1,000, but the tweet blew up.”

By midday Sunday, Ward shared the donations had amassed $500,000 (AKA the same amount some celebrities donated with their own funds). Per SocialBlade.com, Kaylen has gained over 275,000 followers and counting on Twitter since Sunday.

Unfortunately, as her team works round the clock to verify donation confirmations and reply with the photograph, a wrench was thrown into her plans by another social media site.

Though the campaign was being run through Twitter, word had spread to Instagram. On Saturday, Kaylen says her account was deactivated by the app, claiming she had violated community guidelines:

Also on Saturday, Kaylen shared a more personal update:

“My IG got deactivated, my family disowned me, and the guy I like won’t talk to me all because of that tweet. But f**k it, save the koalas.”

A spokesperson for Facebook told the publication:

“This account was disabled for violating our policies. Offering nude images is not allowed on Instagram.”

Since her deactivation, several fake accounts have popped up on IG claiming to be Ward:

While she has received mostly positive responses to her charitable efforts, the growing spotlight has brought out some negativity. On Monday night, she took to Twitter to address some voiced criticism:

“For everyone saying I only did this to promote my only fans… y’all are insane. I raised over a million dollars, offered my product (my nude photos) for FREE and spent money and time sending that free product to thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people.”

She continued:

“I did not make a single dime from those donations. And if I want to promote MY only fans on MY platform I sure as f**k will. This was my platform before I raised the money and it will continue to be how I make money.”

Ward finished, bringing attention back to the reasoning behind the controversy:

“I raised $1mil for Australia at the sake of my naked body being exposed on the internet to millions and millions of people. That’s a scary feeling to be that vulnerable and exposed to the world. But I did it because I wanted to do something good.”

That’s a whole lot of money! Just a really inneresting way to go about it…

Thoughts on all this, Perezcious readers?? Sound OFF (below) in the comments with ’em!!

[Image via Kaylen Ward/Twitter.]

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