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Palmer Haasch
- Piper Rockelle is a 14-year-old YouTuber with over 8 million subscribers.
- She started posting on YouTube in 2016, and she has major followings on Instagram and TikTok.
- This week, Pink accused Rockelle's parents of exploiting her by photographing her in a bikini.
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Piper Rockelle is a YouTuber with over 8 million subscribers.
Rockelle is a social-media star, musician, and content creator with over 8 million subscribers on YouTube.
Recently, the singer Pink tweeted about photos posted on Rockelle's Instagram account that showed the teenager in a bikini, alleging that Rockelle's parents were exploiting her.
Rockelle's life has been documented online since 2011, when photos of her when she was about 4 years old were posted on Instagram. Now she's the center of a YouTube channel in which she appears alongside family and friends posting pranks, challenges, and vlogs.
From early YouTube videos showing how to make slime to starring roles in web series, here's how Rockelle became one of the most famous teenagers online.
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Rockelle began making content on YouTube in 2016.
The first publicly available video on Rockelle's YouTube channel, posted on November 29, 2016, shows Rockelle at about 10 years old making fluffy slime from scratch. The video has over 4.6 million views.
Her subsequent early videos focused on dance, crafts, and toys. It appears that at about the same time in 2016 and 2017, Rockelle posted on Musical.ly, the music-focused video app that eventually became TikTok.
Rockelle's TikTok account appears to have been created in April 2020.
Posts on Rockelle's Instagram account, which has 4.8 million followers, date back to 2011. The account's description says it's managed by her family.
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Rockelle has starred in web series and a reality-TV show.
The Brat TV web series "Mani" follows a nanny named Mani (Lawrence Wayne Curry) tasked with taking care of a young girl named Sky, played by Rockelle. She appeared in seasons one through three, released in 2017 and 2018, before departing.
In 2018, Rockelle got her own unscripted reality series, "Piperazzi." According to a cast interview with the celebrity-index website Famous Birthdays, the story follows Rockelle's journey out to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams in entertainment. The series appears to be no longer available to view on YouTube.
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Rockelle's YouTube content is now primarily based on social-media challenges.
Many of Rockelle's videos over the past several years have been vlogs and social-media challenges, particularly ones she does with her friends (referred to as "The Squad") and her boyfriend, Lev Cameron.
"Shalom, guys, I hope your day's been good but better watching this video," Rockelle says at the beginning of many of her videos.
Her channel's "about" page says the videos show Rockelle and her family and friends doing "crazy challenges, Boyfriend challenges, crush challenges, 24 hour challenges, last to challenges, and more," in addition to DIY, makeup, and tutorial content.
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Rockelle denied that her parents had "exploited" her after Pink tweeted about photos of Rockelle in a bikini.
On Sunday, Pink tweeted about photos of Rockelle in a bikini that had been posted on Rockelle's Instagram account.
"How many kids like Piper Rockelle are being exploited by their parents?" the singer said. "And at what point do the rest of us say … 'this isn't okay for a 13 yr old to be posing in a bikini whilst her MOTHER takes the photo?!?!'"
—P!nk (@Pink) August 29, 2021
"Pictures of teenagers in bikinis having fun are not sexual," Rockelle told Insider in a statement, which was first reported by Today. "They're only sexual if you view us that way."
She and her mother, Tiffany, also pushed back on the tweet in a statement to Insider. Tiffany said she wanted to support her daughter's passions and protect her.
Rockelle also told Insider that she didn't believe Pink had watched her YouTube videos. "If she did," Rockelle said, "she'd see it's just my friends and me having fun and acting like ourselves."
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Courtney Stodden appeared to support Pink's criticisms.
Courtney Stodden, a former model who has said they were groomed as a child, weighed in on Tuesday on Pink's tweet about Rockelle.
"It's hard for children to separate attention they receive online from predatory behavior from adults," Stodden wrote in an Instagram caption. "It's our responsibility as a society to step up and protect our kids as much as we can from falling victim to this cycle of digital grooming. As adults, we can see what they can't."
A post shared by Courtney Stodden (@courtneyastodden)
Stodden married the actor Doug Hutchison when they were 16 and Hutchison was 51. In March 2020, Stodden announced their divorce.
In an interview with The Daily Beast earlier this year, they referred to Hutchison as a "groomer" and "predator."
"It took me a really, really long time to understand what happened to me," Stodden said, "and I'm still going through the repercussions of being groomed."
Read more stories from Insider's Digital Culture desk.
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