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When Ryan O’Neal was making the promotional rounds for “Paper Moon,” in 1973, the actor informed the press that he did not want his nine-year-old daughter and co-star, Tatum, to make any more movies until she reached adulthood. “I’ve seen what has happened to child stars,” he said. He alleged that on “Peyton Place,” the prime-time soap opera that made him famous, babies who appeared in scenes were sedated to keep them from crying, except for one occasion when a scene actually called for a baby to cry, which was achieved by sticking pins in the child’s foot.
By Tatum’s account, O’Neal was a jealous and violent father, and a neglectful one—when she won an Academy Award for “Paper Moon,” neither he nor Tatum’s mother attended the ceremony. And yet even a man as limited as O’Neal possessed the moral discernment to hope, however idly, that his child might climb out of the Hollywood threshing machine into which he had tossed her. (She didn’t: Tatum made five more movies before she turned eighteen.) More than fifty years ago, any semi-sentient being could recognize the dangers of forcing minors to work gruelling hours performing emotions for the delectation of large and unseen audiences, long before their brains had finished developing.
Given this history, the aggrieved posturing of the many stage mothers in “Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing,” a three-part documentary series now streaming on Netflix, is dumbfounding. All of them permitted their tween and teen kids to generate content for the social-media star Piper Rockelle—whose ensemble of supporting players was known as the “Squad”—and for their own channels. Kids and parents describe logging upward of twelve-hour days at the home of Rockelle’s “momager” and creative director, Tiffany Smith. The kids filmed inane skits, creepy “crush challenges” (“Last to Stop KISSING BOYFRIEND Wins $10,000 **COUPLES Challenge**💋”), and increasingly unhinged pranks that were orchestrated by Smith and her boyfriend-director-editor, Hunter Hill. One involved staging a boy’s arrest (“Getting ARRESTED In Front Of My CRUSH To See Her Reaction PRANK!! **SHE CRIED**). In another, Rockelle faked passing out (the postmortem of this episode was titled “Something TERRIBLE Happened To My BEST FRIEND **CHALLENGE GONE WRONG**🚑🤕”). At times, cameras caught unwitting Squad members becoming hysterical in the midst of what turned out to be pranks. “We didn’t know a lot of the things that were going on—we weren’t allowed to be there,” one mother told “Inside Edition.” But a lot of the “things that were going on” were on YouTube. That’s where the money was coming from.
The families of eleven Squad members eventually filed a lawsuit against Smith and Hill, alleging that Smith perpetuated an “emotionally, physically and sometimes sexually abusive environment,” one that included inappropriate touching and a barrage of insults and innuendo. They’ve also claimed that Smith flouted child-labor laws and did not provide adequate breaks or allow for regular, on-set tutoring; in “Bad Influence,” one of the kids remarks that she would wake up early to “do school” on her tablet for a couple of hours before starting a full day of shooting. (Smith and Hill have denied all accusations of wrongdoing, and the suit was recently settled out of court.)
The lawsuit, one of the mothers says, is a means of raising awareness about “what happened to all of us,” as if she were talking about a listeria outbreak or a tornado. Another says, “I hope that we can prevent other kids going through the situation that our kids went through.” A third mom, who worked for a time as a Squad stylist—which meant sourcing crop tops and stiletto heels for girls as young as eleven—breaks down in tears while discussing the revelations in the lawsuit. It’s as if each of them pushed her kid out of an airplane and then feigned shock that the ground was so hard.
“Bad Influence” invokes infamous recent examples of parents who used abuse and coercion to generate lucrative content, including the vloggers Ruby Franke (convicted for felony aggravated child abuse, now in prison) and Michael and Heather Martin (convicted of child neglect, now on probation). But Franke and the Martins were operating within essentially closed family systems, whereas Smith was attracting contract players into her own little quasi movie studio. The documentary underscores the cultlike aspects of the Piper Rockelle experience, and maybe the cultlike properties of the entertainment industry writ large. Smith is cast as the gifted but erratic leader whose magnetism may be inexplicable to outsiders; she isolates her followers, makes them emotionally and financially dependent on her favor, and metes out harsh penalties for dissent or departure from the fold. Several of the kidfluencers who left the Squad discovered that their content had been mass-reported as violent, or embedded in porn or in gambling sites, which sabotaged their S.E.O. results and tanked their revenue.
Smith, Hill, and Rockelle, who is now seventeen, did not agree to be interviewed for “Bad Influence,” but they are constantly present in the footage—especially Rockelle. She is the beaming, seemingly indefatigable cipher at the center of the whole sordid mess; always on but never there. Toward the end of the documentary, the mothers and their attorney agree that Rockelle is the first and biggest victim in the Squad debacle. As a small child, she did hard time on the pageant circuit and appeared on a “Dance Moms”-esque reality show; she has apparently never attended school and struggles with reading (Smith claims Piper was homeschooled), and most of the friends she has known are the ones whom her mother recruited into her acting troupe. After the lawsuit was made public, Rockelle’s YouTube account was demonetized and her brand deals vanished. She moved over to the site BrandArmy, where subscribers over the age of eighteen can pay three-figure sums to unlock premium content, and where her uploads included bikini shots and other things I don’t feel like describing.
The year 2025 has thus far been dominated by people who hold obscene amounts of power over vulnerable groups, and who abuse their power for money in the cruellest and stupidest ways. These people are enabled by their ostensible opponents, who throw up their hands, ask what they could have possibly done, and leave it to the courts to figure out. It’s easy to believe that the moms of “Bad Influence” feel heartsick for Piper Rockelle, but there is a dissonance in their sorrow and concern. After all, they saw what Rockelle had—all that her mother had given her—and decided that they wanted the same for their own children. That’s why they’re in the documentary. That’s why we’re giving them views. There will always be somebody willing to stick the pins in the baby’s foot. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
