In the last few days, cosplay model Jessica Nigri has been accused of receiving money from a company called Fit Tea that she was supposed to donate to the Orlando Shooting fund, but instead took most of it for her own personal use.

Let me just start by saying this rumor is completely false. This whole "rumor" was started by Jessica herself, but let's start from the beginning.

Jessica nigri is a cosplayer who first came to public attention in 2009 when she dressed up as "sexy pikachu" for San Diego Comic-Con. Ever since, she recieved a large amount of both criticism and support. While she likes to pretend that the only criticism she recieves is from people who are upset with her sexualising characters, the truth is that a large amount of the criticism she gets is about the fact that she is a compulsive liar, irresponsible, smug and greedy.

Several examples to things she have done in the past include:

• Constantly denying she got breast implants, despite the fact that it's unbelievably obvious and even her ex confirmed it.
• Stealing a photograph of herself from a photographer who paid money to do a shoot with her, removing his watermark and selling prints of the photograph on her store while he got nothing from it.
• Claiming she makes her costumes by herself while in a lot of cases it's simply not true.
• Failing to show up to a meet and greet she was getting paid to attend and her fans paid to meet her. She did not inform anyone and left both her fans and the convention managers in the dark. Instead, she chose to visit the aquarium next door to the convention center and even posted pictures of herself to social media.

 

Her response to criticism is always the same. She goes on facebook and posts a long rant, plays the victim and says she feels sorry for all her "haterz" and that she really doesn't care for rumors, while at the same time obssesively deleting and censoring any comment that has any sort of criticism towards her.

Things really started going south earlier this year when she opened her patreon. The whole patreon thing is very strange, because she already said in interviews before that she makes "so much that she could retire right now" (Her words, not mine). The real reason she opened up a patreon is that she's getting old, and since she has no redeeming qualities other than her average face and a pair of implants, she decided to squeeze as much money as possible before she becomes completely irrelevant. She now makes almost 300k a year from patreon alone, in addition to making "well into the 6 figures" a year (Again, her words, not mine) from her other exploits. In her patreon, she offeres those who paid her more than 10$ a month an early access to a photograph once a week or so. These photographs would then be posted by her to all her social media sites a few days later, meaning the patrons don't really get anything.

After she started her patreon, people on her subreddit /r/jessicanigri started posting those photographs. she heard about it and suddenly decided she "wants to be a part of the community" and joined reddit. She then started telling people to take down the photos and stop posting them because they are hers and she didn't give them permission (Which is a very hypocritical statement since she stole photographs in the past and sold them for money).

On the 24th of Feburary, one of the mods of /r/jessicanigri, who was critical of her behavior in the past, suddenly did a 180 and gave her mod privileges. She then started to completely censor the subreddit, by not only removing any photograph of herself she didn't like, but also deleting any comment that wasn't a compliment or praise. That includes both insults and valid criticism against her. She received a big backlash and many of the users moved to new subreddits, the most prominent being /r/jessicanigri2. 

Around that time, due to the backlash she was receiving, users on reddit started digging and found some very intersting things. Jessica often uploads to her youtube channel videos titled "Mail Monday" where she claims to receive mail from "fans", which she opens on camera. A user on reddit has submitted a post where they showed that the supposed "fan mail" just happend to be products that were posted on FameBit and Reelio for promotion. FameBit is a website that allows brands to offer sponsorship deals to creators for money. It was shown that In almost all of her videos, Jessica was supposedly receiving products from "fans" that were offered for sponsorship at the same time she uploaded the video. Furthermore, the user even predicted Jessica will promote Pixel Panties next according to sponsorship deals offered on FameBit. That prediction turned out to be correct.

For those of you who are not aware, failure to inform your audience you are being paid to endorse a product is a violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act and therefore illegal in the United States.

Her response was the same as always. She denied everything, played the victim, said she felt sorry for the "haturz" and completely silenced anyone who dared to voice their opinion.

A few days ago, a user submitted a post to /r/jessicanigri2 claiming he was working with a company called Fit Tea. The user claimed that Jessica and her boyfriend, Ryan Brandt, signed up for a paid promotion of their product. He claimed Jessica planned to fake a diet and then say Fit Tea helped her lose the weight without saying it's a paid promotion. After the post was made many evidence started to pop up that supported the poster's claim. Jessica did mention several times she was going to diet. Her boyfriend Ryan posted a photo to Instagram where he clearly advertises Fit Tea, while at the same time saying they just like the product and did not receive payment. Jessica even commented on his photo several times saying that she just started using it (Note that her comments were made after the original post claiming they were being paid, not before). 

After that a lot more evidence started to surface(Which you can find with a quick google search) and people started asking her questions. One of the most suspicious things about this whole thing is that Jessica and Ryan completely censored any question regarding Fit Tea and blocked anyone who even mentioned the subject. After a while it became too big to censor, and Jessica realized she had to respond somehow, so what did she do? She posted a rant on facebook where she addressed the rumor about her receiving 8,000$ from Fit Tea to donate to the Orlando Shooting Fund but instead only donated 3,000$.

Now, you must be asking yourself "What? Where did that come from?". Well, this accusation was made by a single troll on tumblr, and it had nothing to do with anything that was happening. The only reason anyone even saw that post was because Jessica addressed it in her rant. Jessica started this rumor herself.

"But why would she do that?"

The reason she did that is because she knew it was false. By claiming that the backlash she was receiving was due to that false rumor, she was freely able to deny it and disprove it while diverting people's attention from the actual accusations made against her. She then started doing damage control, by deleting the comments she made on Ryan's instagram and claiming she never used Fit Tea on twitter.

Luckily, the post was archived before she deleted her comments and can be viewed here: http://archive.is/Ks2hZ

So no, she did not receive money from Fit Tea to donate to the Orlando Shooting Fund. She did, however, use the deaths of 50 people to divert attention from legitimate accusations made against her.

But unfortunetly for her it didn't stop after that. The whole thing just got bigger, and even a few of her former friends decided to step up and share details. They claimed she was indeed sponsored in the past and pretended it was fan mail, and posted status updates from her personal facebook page which only those who were friends with her could see. Jessica responded by deleting over 150 friends from her personal facebook.

In addition, her friends claim she has large sums of cash in her parents house, which was probably not declared. This adds possible tax evasion to the list of allegations.

Many people in the past and now tried to report her to the FTC and IRS, but only received automated email responses, and nothing was done. This petition was made to get the attention of the FTC and IRS, so that they would conduct a formal investigation on the matter.

tl;dr: Jessica Nigri is a criminal, and shouldn't get away with it just because she's rich and famous.