Jasmine Teaa never showed her face in a single photo.
She forgot about the meatball.
That’s her name for the birthmark on her left buttock.
It’s also how a fraternity member at the University of California, Santa Barbara, worked out that the anonymous woman posting nudes on Reddit was the linguistics student down the road.
Before long her pictures were circulating around campus, and her sorority wanted a word.
Jasmine is now 29, a multi-millionaire living in Las Vegas, with 198,000 followers on @jasmineflowerteaa.
Back then, she was washing pots and prepping food in two kitchen jobs and planning a career at Google.
The birthmark her fans called a watermark
“The birthmark is on my left butt cheek,” she said.
“I’ve always called it my meatball because it’s shaped like one.
“My fans also called it my watermark because it makes my butt so recognisable.”
The flaw in her plan only occurred to her later.
“Before I got caught, it never crossed my mind that some of the hundreds of thousands of people who had seen my ass could be on my college campus.”
According to Jasmine, the frat member found her content by accident.
Nobody has explained what he was doing on Reddit in the first place.
Stop posting or leave
She found out her secret was out when her sorority president texted asking to meet privately.
“She sat me down and told me that a frat member recognised me from Reddit and told the board members they found my pics,” Jasmine said.
“She told me that posting nudes online was tarnishing the sorority name because the gossip was already spreading even beyond our campus.
“She gave me an ultimatum: stop posting nudes or leave the sorority. I was completely blindsided.”
The meeting landed in the middle of her midterms. She broke down.
She was also nine weeks into pledging, the trial period American students go through before becoming full members of a sorority or fraternity.
It ends in a formal initiation ceremony and an oath. Jasmine’s version also involved a lot of wall sits.
“During pledging, they had us come to the sorority house at 11pm and kept us there until 5am doing exercises like push-ups and wall sits in perfect form and in sync, while chanting the Greek alphabet from memory,” she said.
“If someone messed up, we all had to start over again. It was so physically demanding and emotionally intense that lots of girls ended up crying.”
She said yes. She didn’t mean it
Jasmine chose the sorority. She promised to stop.
Then she opened Photoshop and started editing out the meatball.
“I had bills to pay and this was my main source of income, so there’s no way I would’ve given that up completely,” she said.
“I wasn’t harming anyone and I was an adult; I didn’t deserve to be punished.”
The sisterhood, it turns out, kept a close eye on her Reddit account.
When they spotted it was still active, they summoned her again.
This time three board members sat across from her.
“They started interrogating me about it,” she said.
“I told them that the posts they saw were pre-scheduled. That was a lie but there was no way to prove it.
“They told me that I better delete all the future scheduled posts if I wanted to be welcomed into the sorority.
“It was kind of scary to be in a room with three very angry-looking, older girls glaring at me, but it didn’t shake me enough to stop posting.
I just put a pause on it for two weeks and hoped they got tired of monitoring me.”
They did, apparently. Jasmine became a full member, though she says not everyone welcomed it.
The Google plan
Her degree was in linguistics, with an emphasis on language and speech technologies.
For two years she worked as a research assistant on a project studying Mixtec, an endangered Indigenous language, helping document it and code a translation tool to keep it alive.
“I wanted to be a computational linguist at Google,” she said.
“I was very serious about it. But computer science is a very competitive field.”
The money never added up. University in the US cost $12,240 a year in 2015.
Student loans and two kitchen jobs didn’t cover it, so the anonymous account slowly became her main income.
After graduating she applied to NLP and language-learning tech start-ups.
When nothing came through, she went full-time with adult content and started showing her face.
Her earnings quickly overtook anything computational linguistics would have paid.
Double, or don’t bother
“I think that version of me would have never believed that posting a nude here or there would lead me to being a multi-millionaire before 30,” she said.
“College Jasmine would be so happy and proud that she stuck to her guns and didn’t give in to what the sorority wanted her to do.”
She’s still close to some university friends, who back her career. The ultimatum still stings.
“They were asking me to choose between the sisterhood and my livelihood,” she said.
“I couldn’t listen to their threats. I was just a girl who was doing what I could to get by. I needed to put food on the table.”
Would she take the Google job now?
“Hell no. They would have to pay me at least double my yearly earnings for me to even consider it.
I feel very lucky and privileged that I get to be my own boss and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Why it matters
Plenty of adult creators start out anonymous, and Jasmine’s story shows how thin that cover really is.
A face is easy to crop. A birthmark, a tattoo or a bedroom wall is not, and the people most likely to recognise them are the ones who live nearby.
Her biggest threat wasn’t a stranger online. It was an organisation she wanted to belong to.
Rising tuition and living costs have pushed more students towards online sex work, often in secret and often with no plan for the day someone finds out.
Jasmine’s plan, as it happened, was to lie convincingly and wait. It worked.
Whether it would work for the next student, with a sorority that doesn’t get bored, is another question.
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