This Woman Left TV to Become a Dominatrix to 'Blackmail' Rich Dudes
All photos via Sean K. Robb

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This Woman Left TV to Become a Dominatrix to 'Blackmail' Rich Dudes

The money sure is better in the blackmail fetish industry.

It was the commute from Jersey to Manhattan that kicked off Yevgeniya Ivanyutenko's career as a dominatrix.

Ivanyutenko, better known as @yevgen1ya on Twitter, was working towards a promising career in the TV industry in 2010. Then in her early 20s, Yevgeniya had managed to snag a paid position in a new program with BBC America where she was teamed up with company executives to gain the skills and experience needed to work behind the scenes. But the commute from New Jersey to New York and back was long and expensive, and her work was taking time away from school.

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Looking for a quick way to make money, she was introduced to camming, which she managed to do while working home. That is until her boss noticed Yevgeniya hadn't been in the office for a few weeks, which resulted in her quitting.

It was through her successful camming that she found her niche and segwayed from cam work into financial domination. She's now based in Montreal, where she lives with her husband and runs a prolific Twitter profile, filled with misandry, support for women and sex workers and screenshots of her daily deposits.

VICE: What made you choose sex work over a career in media?
Yevgeniya: I wasn't making enough money and after a classmate introduced me to the idea of camming, I started doing it and realized that I was making more money through camming than I was at my dream job. It sucked because then I had to make a tough choice. Do I stay with this, do I go to work? I eventually chose camming. Later, another cam girl told me I was wasting my time and should be a phone sex dominatrix. When I put my clothes back on and started using my brain and communications more, I was making more money once again.

Do you ever regret having left your potential career to do what you do now?
Yeah, I felt like shit for the next few years, but you never know. I'm not going to sit here and pretend like I made a huge mistake because with the job I have now, I can just chill at home whenever I want, I don't have to answer to anyone, and it's nice.

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What exactly is financial domination?
Well, do you know what a dominatrix is? I do that but online, and men have to pay me for every message sent, or every minute on the phone/cam.

Your Twitter makes you seem a lot meaner than you do in person. What's up with that?I don't think I'm as interesting as my Twitter character. I mean we share a lot in common but, she's much more of a bitch than I am, she hates men a lot more than I do. I actually have a lot of male friends. But followers want provocative, re-tweetable things. What a lot of people don't understand about Twitter, and for sex workers especially, is that it's kind of like wrestling… I mean when you see John Cena on the screen, do you think he's like that in real life? He plays a character named John Cena, that happens to be his real name as well. I play a character named Yevgeniya, that also happens to be my name.

So when you tweet about the rights of sex workers, is that you?
Oh yeah, that's me. The tweets about sex workers' rights are 100 percent me. As online sex workers, we don't seem to think a lot about the ramifications of not being as privileged as we are, so I like to use my voice to address these kinds of issues whenever I can. The sort of sex work that I do allows me to be as vocal as I am without fear of getting arrested, of being attacked, for the most part.

What's it like having a husband when you're in this type of work?
He knew I was a sex worker from before we started talking on OkCupid. I don't do much cam work anymore because we live together. He works from home and I don't feel comfortable pushing my boobs up on cam with him home. It takes me out of character.

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So what happens when you do cam?
I hardly do it, but when I do, I ask my husband to leave the apartment for an hour. And by being less available, I'm actually able to command higher rates.

Can you give me an example?
I had this one client who was constantly asking me to cam with him. I always told him no but one day he just had to see me. He offered me X amount of money, but I told him no. It would be in an hour's time and he'd pay my base rate of $10/minute, plus $100 for my husband having to leave. He agreed and asked for 30 minutes. As I was getting ready, he messaged me again asking to cam right then instead. I told him it would be another $200. He paid it and almost as soon as we started, he asked for another 30 minutes. It doesn't happen every day but once you establish that the guy wants you and your time more than you want his money, you're able to command more.

I suppose you use humiliation when you work online or over the phone. Do you use blackmail?
Blackmail is illegal. Blackmail fantasy, on the other hand, can be legal—or allowed, depending on the platform you're using. The website I use doesn't have a problem with blackmail fantasy. Some guys are into the fantasy of it, so I always play like I'm going to do it, but I never actually do. It's talking about my sort of demands, and what I would do. Clients might give you all the info, their wife's phone number, their in-laws' e-mail, their boss' name—you can't do it. It's illegal as fuck.

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Another example?
In 2014, I had this executive from [a big corporation] message me. He's like, "I'm just so enamoured, I'm really interested in being blackmailed by you." He sent me all the information I asked for, he also sent a photo of him holding up his driver's license so that I know that was him, with his real name and address. He kept calling me, asking what I was going to do, but I wasn't going to do anything. A few days later he calls me, telling me, "I'm sorry, this is getting too real for me. Is there any way I can back out now?" I told him he'd have to buy his way out of it—five grand, right now. He told me he couldn't because his bank only allowed $1,000 per day. I told him, "Well that sounds like a personal problem." He told me he'd figure it out but I told him I was going to go through with the blackmail, to which he offered to pay $1,000 per day for the next week. I told him it had to be sent by a certain time each day, and if not, he was fucked. And he did it. He fucking sent me $1,000 a day for seven days. [Note: the client did agree to be "blackmailed" like this beforehand.]

Do you straight-up ask your clients what they're into?
Usually the guys will tell me because they don't lose anything in telling me, but I gain a lot. The more I know about them, the more I know about their particular kinks, the more I'm able to push their buttons then later on, as I get to know them better, I'm sort of able to expand their limits. I've had clients who've started out with very rigid limits and then I push them more and more, very slowly, and after a year or two of talking to them, they're completely different. I had one client who started off liking the idea of being vaguely humiliated to feminization (wearing women's panties), to fantasizing about being cuckolded and eventually telling me, he was beginning to fantasize about sucking dick.

It's also important to be well-versed in the different types of fetishes, because not all guys like having their penis size mocked, but some girls will do it anyway, and the client won't come back.

So are you nice to your clients from the start?
Whereas most sex workers are consistent, where they're really mean and nasty or really sweet, I'm neither and I'm both at the same time. I always start off nice because it softens them up— they're expecting me to be a bitch. And a lot of these guys are into mind fucking and stuff like that. Since I start off nicely, clients think I'm a regular person. It's the other way around, they thought I was going to be mean, but I was really nice, and then I get meaner and meaner. It's a very slow progression, it takes a lot of time for me to get there… but when I get there, they fucking love it.

How did you start your sex work consultations?
I've had over 15,000 followers on previous Twitter accounts and often found myself answering questions about what I do and how I do it, but found that no one was following my advice. I was spending time giving away information to people, for those same people to ignore what I said, so I started charging for my consultations. And when I started charging, people actually did what I told them to do, because all of a sudden my opinions and suggestions had worth. I now have one consultation booked every day. I think one of the reasons I was able to make my consultations work is because NiteFlirt [the website evgeniyaworks from] is one of the most difficult websites to use, so I made a video where I show you all the features on the website, or I made another Q&A video about NiteFlirt. Those videos are still selling months after they were initially published.

Any plans for the future?
I'm involved with an organization called Stella, it's by and for sex workers. For the most part, I am a really privileged sex worker because I work from my own home. So, I've been wanting to hold free classes at Stella, teaching the street-based workers how to work online, how to find clients on the internet instead of standing on the street, basically waiting to be arrested.