The 900 Lives of Tana Mongeau
The vibe in the West Hollywood mansion of Tana Mongeau, the influencer wild child, is surprisingly wholesome. It’s an early-September afternoon, and the sun streams through big windows into her Nancy Meyers–esque kitchen, where she perches on a stool at a long marble countertop. In the same open-concept room, her assistant, Paige Camerlin, is quietly typing on her laptop on one end of a leather sectional; on the other, Mongeau’s boyfriend, Makoa, is curled up in a hoodie reading a book. “It’s about cacao farmers in the early 1900s,” he tells me, “and the industrialism of how that all took place.” Mongeau looks amused. “That shows the difference between the two of us,” she says with the raspy voice of someone who stays in the club past last call. “I will be sitting there reading, like, a Pamela Anderson autobiography.” Despite the domestic tableau, Mongeau is still more troublemaker than tradwife: Her nipples show through a white tank top, her hair is dyed platinum blonde, and she constantly pulls from a pale-pink nicotine vape.
In 2020, her homelife was comically lawless by comparison. Mongeau, pronounced “mojo,” was renting a ten-bedroom glass mansion with eight friends in the same Hollywood Hills compound where Justin Bieber and Nelly used to live. It had a movie theater and stripper pole, she says, and was next door to the Hype House, where a gaggle of Gen-Z influencers slept, filmed content, and threw ragers. “There would be 100 random influencers circulating in and out of my house to make TikToks every single day,” she says. “I thought I wanted that.” Now, her ambitions have changed along with the weight of her influence.
Mongeau was a teenager when she became a master of YouTube’s “storytime” genre, in which mostly young women turn low-stakes anecdotes into soap operas told from their bedroom floors. She dished with the brash confidence of a popular girl yet had the vulnerability of an outcast when addressing her screwups. In close to ten years as a content creator, she has successfully moved the raunchy videos about her life and feuds with other internet figures from YouTube to TikTok. She now co-hosts the Cancelled podcast, a drama-fueled, sometimes-viral-for-the-wrong-reasons talk show, with fellow influencer Brooke Schofield, which they are touring through October. She has survived multiple scandals with a cockroachlike tenacity, and at 26 — roughly 100 in social-media years — Mongeau has managed to stay relevant by refusing to play it safe.
But something changed in her when she turned 25. “I felt my frontal lobe switch,” she says. “I no longer desired any toxicity.” She didn’t want to keep club-hopping until bleary-eyed and, this year, went cold turkey for six months, putting her drunk alter ego, “Tina,” on ice. “I would just see myself at a club in Hollywood at 3 a.m. with all of these other influencers and celebrities who are fucked up,” Mongeau says, “and over time, I kind of realized, Are we all chasing some type of numbness? ” Mongeau minus the mess is like Vegas without roulette: impossible to imagine. But she rejects the idea that “I can either be the chaotic, insane party girl who’s, like, ruining my life and everyone is loving to watch my downfall or I’m a grandmother knitting upstairs,” she says. “There’s a medium where I can have a glass of wine, tell a silly story, do a crossword puzzle with Makoa, and still provide entertaining content. There’s a tamable chaos to be had.”
In some ways, this identity shift didn’t happen by choice. In late May, during a segment of a live Cancelled show in Sacramento, Mongeau answered an audience question regarding who in her sexual history has the “smallest dick.” “Oh my God, no one look at me. Cody Ko,” she said, putting a hand over her face while the crowd erupted in laughter. “I can say that. I was literally 17. I can say that.” Although filming was not allowed, clips leaked online and people did the math, realizing that, if true, Ko, a well-liked YouTuber known for his reaction videos, would have been 25 at the time. Online, many pointed out that her funny anecdote alleged statutory rape. With others taking the situation seriously on her behalf, Mongeau was forced to do the same on an episode of Cancelled in which she explained her tendency to downplay upsetting situations and that, despite laughing onstage, she understands that her accusation “isn’t just some crazy tea.” “I’ve always been the type of person who will bread-crumb trauma in a very flippant manner and make a joke out of it,” she tells me. “I have to know the weight of doing that to millions. I have to be willing to unpack it.” (Ko has since stepped down from his podcast company and stopped uploading to his other channels. He did not respond to a request for comment.)
That said, Mongeau tells me she doesn’t feel traumatized by her relationship with Ko, even though she recognizes that his alleged behavior was illegal. What did piss her off was being victim-shamed. “I was so incredibly enraged seeing the amount of comments saying, ‘Well, it’s Tana. She was crazy and wild when she was 17,’” she says. “I never want a young girl out there to feel like she can’t tell her story and that no one’s gonna believe her, because that’s the worst feeling in the world.” Mongeau knows what it’s like to feel alone.
She grew up in Las Vegas with parents who she says were unfit caretakers. “Every swear word you could think of I was called by the time I was 10 years old,” she says. At 12, Mongeau told her father she wanted to kill herself; she says he responded, “Do it, then.” (Her parents reportedly sued her in 2019 for slander; they have since settled.) YouTube became an escape, and she was especially comforted by creators like Shane Dawson who spoke about their own volatile childhoods. Tana dropped out of high school in her sophomore year and by 17 had started making her own YouTube content while working in retail. In one of her first hits, “HAIRDRESS FROM HELL?,” she uses different voices and wide-eyed facial expressions to dunk on a salon that left her with orange hair; she repeats “bleach and tone” so many times that other creators still use the catchphrase. At one point, her dog shits on the floor and she takes a break to clean it up. Another is called “I GOT BANGED WITH A TOOTHBRUSH: STORYTIME” (spoiler: She didn’t). After hitting 100,000 subscribers in a few months, Mongeau quit her job at PacSun to focus on YouTube. Jordan Worona, a talent manager for influencers, signed her not long after that. “Her videos were authentic back then,” he says. “Most people on social media are looking for things that are either aspirational, relatable, entertainment, or education. She could literally wrap all of it into those things in a way that was really funny.” She was soon getting a million views on each video and making roughly $12K a month — a fortune for anyone, but especially someone who used to count pennies to buy food off one-dollar menus at fast food chains. In 2017, she moved to L.A. to become a full-time influencer.
Mongeau blasted into a new stratosphere of fame when she started dating former Disney star Bella Thorne that same year. The couple went to Hollywood events and made content together — like the music video for “Hefner,” Mongeau’s cringe foray into rap music, in which she plays a female version of the playboy-in-chief — exposing the influencer to high-powered connections and a much bigger audience. Her income quadrupled, and she was partying. A lot. Every room she walked into, she was offered drugs. “Having young fame like that, everyone wants to be your friend,” she says. “I felt like the ratchet L.A. clout-driven Jay Gatsby.”
She quickly became known for controversy. After being arrested on charges of underage drinking at Coachella in 2017, she sold T-shirts with her mugshot that earned her $40,000. When racist tweets and videos of hers resurfaced during this time, Mongeau made an apology video explaining that she thought the N-word meant “homie” or “friend.” Next came one of her most infamous scandals: 2018’s TanaCon — a supposed alternative to VidCon, the annual convention for digital creators — which ended up being more like Fyre Festival (thousands of people waited in the hot sun before police eventually shut down the event for being unsafe and ticket holders chanted “Refund!”). But from a career perspective, Mongeau was thriving. A year later, she landed an MTV YouTube show, No Filter: Tana Turns 21, and married one of the internet’s biggest menaces, Jake Paul, in a Vegas wedding that both have since admitted was not legit. Mentally, though, she was at an all-time low, stuck in a cycle of chasing attention, taking Xanax, and feeling suicidal. “I was in a competition with myself,” she says. “Every day, I have to upstage yesterday’s Tana, and I didn’t care if it was negative or positive attention.”
Worona says working with her was like a “fever dream”: “The highs are higher and the lows are lower.” They had a siblinglike dynamic — he’s ten years older — and fought on the MTV show, mostly about how she was sleeping in and missing deadlines, which Mongeau later said was due to crippling depression and substance use. After the second and final season, Worona claims that she fired him without explanation (though they didn’t speak for a while, he says they now FaceTime weekly). Mongeau started working with a wellness guru, who famously helped Bieber, and signed with a new manager, David Weintraub, in 2020. She didn’t publicly explain her decision at the time, but she told me she needed to better separate her personal and professional life. She was relieved to be done with reality TV. “I wasn’t okay with succumbing to narratives that I didn’t feel were true,” she says. “I prefer being able to control my own content.” To do that, she started an OnlyFans account and a weekly show on the platform called Tana Gone Wild. “If I’m drunk and throwing a party and wearing a see-through shirt, I might as well monetize that,” she says. “So many men on the internet sexualized me for so long against my own will, and I got to a point where I finally was like, Damn, I might as well make a million dollars off of it.” When I ask about her income, Mongeau doesn’t want to divulge beyond calling her empire a “multi-million-dollar business.” “I don’t even know,” she says when I press for specifics. “I am very lucky to have a great team of financial advisers who tell me to put the Amex away.”
For someone who has made a career out of TMI, Mongeau is surprisingly withholding in person. When I ask for a tour of her house or to see the Cancelled studio upstairs, she claims that it’s all too messy and that she’s wary of potential stalkers knowing too much (she has had several already). She’s also saving the specifics of some of her darkest experiences for the book she’s been teasing for years, which many of her fans doubt will ever materialize. I ask her boyfriend Makoa if he’ll answer some questions about their relationship, but Mongeau quickly steps in: “He will not, but I will answer for the both of us, absolutely.” They met through a mutual friend almost a year ago while she was vacationing in Hawaii, and he helped her get around on a broken toe. “I think dating me is difficult,” she says. “This peaceful Maui surfer boy is now in my house with 30 people screaming before we’re boarding a 5 a.m. flight when we just landed the night before from something else.” She has rarely dated someone who doesn’t have their own following; Makoa’s Instagram, she notes, is private. “I’m learning to protect my peace a little more,” she says. “With most of my relationships, I was live-tweeting as I was fighting with a boyfriend. That’s insane.”
Yet that type of uncensored access is exactly what fans tune in for. Cancelled, which Mongeau launched in 2021, is full of candid, smutty stories about her personal life. Schofield says her co-host has a gift for picking up on details that can turn a coffee-shop run into “this elaborate, hilarious thing.” Each week, she and Schofield sit on a giant leather couch, often in sweat suits and baseball caps, gabbing about topics such as boob jobs, hookups, and frenemies. Mongeau says they are trying to capture the specific vibe of a morning-after debrief, the deranged stuff you say while eating McDonald’s in bed with your girls. “You’re talking shit about everyone you saw at the club the night before,” she says. “I will always want the podcast to evoke that exact feeling.”
At one point during our interview, Schofield walks into the house wearing an oversize gray sweatshirt and glossy makeup. The co-hosts need to prepare themes for the live show and record a new Cancelled episode before they leave on tour. Mongeau starts scrolling through notes on her phone. “I got into an altercation with a grown man in Vegas this past weekend,” she says. “And I was thinking that we could write some stories about some times that we’ve stood up for ourselves to some crazy men.”
“Okay, so does that mean I cannot tell the story about how I beat up a bouncer on the podcast today?” asks Schofield, leaning over the back of a big leather couch to face the kitchen.
“Oh, wow,” says Mongeau, with a guttural laugh.
“I know, I have lots of content for today,” Schofield says. “I think I’m gonna tell the special story, the big story.”
Paige, the assistant, gasps. “You’re not going to save that for tour?”
“I don’t think I can,” Schofield responds.
Their tendency to talk shit can sometimes backfire. When it’s just Mongeau and Schofield on the couch, “we don’t often think about millions of people that are gonna feel some type of way about what we’re saying,” Mongeau tells me. “As much as we hate to admit it, we are role models to a lot of young crazy girls.” She now doesn’t want to “be a part of lobbying unnecessary hate to women” after a particularly spicy episode over the summer about another influencer, Alissa Violet, raised concerns about online bullying. And along with the gossip, Mongeau wants to discuss abortion and climate change; she’s already endorsed Kamala Harris on social media and promoted Palestinian organizations on the pod that she says are fighting a “genocide” in which “so many innocent people are dying.” It’s common for influencers to pivot toward meatier content once they get enough name recognition. Alex Cooper, host of the Call Her Daddy podcast, was originally known for describing a blowjob technique called the Gluck Gluck 9000; now that her show is one of the most popular in America, she interviews A-list celebrities.
While Mongeau has assured listeners that Cancelled will never become some “woke podcast” or the “new CNN,” some commenters have made their desires clear: “Tana, nobody listens to this podcast for a ‘deep convo’!!!!” wrote one. “We want to just listen and giggle. We all want more episodes like the past few drama eps.”
In August, just as some of Mongeau’s peers were starting to see her in a more charitable light following the Ko allegations, more scandal erupted: Tweets Schofield made as a teenager resurfaced online, including gay slurs and a defense of George Zimmerman, who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Mongeau was criticized for how she handled the situation — first for defending Schofield, who apologized for the tweets, and then for co-hosting an episode of the podcast without her. Around the same time, a handful of YouTubers, including Violet, accused Mongeau of pressuring women to join OnlyFans through her company, Tana’s Angels Agency (TAA), only to take a cut of their profits. (“Is Tana Mongeau a pimp?” asks one YouTuber in a recent video.) Mongeau says TAA is now defunct, since she doesn’t have time to run it, but that she never tried to recruit anyone who hadn’t already shown interest in the platform. Mongeau tells me she’s referred all former TAA clients to the Unruly Agency, a company she’s also signed with and whose CEO, Tara Electra, she calls “a very good friend.” But another YouTuber pointed out that Unruly has been sued by multiple women for allegedly sending and posting illicit messages, photos, and videos without their consent. (At least one woman won her suit, another is ongoing, and a third was dismissed.)
When I ask about the lawsuits, Mongeau pleads ignorance, saying she barely posts on OnlyFans anymore. “I am so abundantly clear about making sure that women are empowered and only doing what they want to do,” she adds. “If any of that comes out, I always want to believe women, and that would break my heart.” I let her know her the complaints are public, and that one woman told The Daily Beast she signed with Unruly specifically because of its connection to Mongeau and other big influencers. Mongeau tells me she never wants another woman to work with a company “just because she’s done it.” “I’ll definitely have to read up on that,” she says of the lawsuits, her voice lowering to a whisper. She pauses to take a sip of her iced coffee. “That’s shitty.”
Fans seem willing to give Mongeau an infinite number of chances at redemption. In 2020, YouTube creators Kahlen Barry and Vanessa Martinez (known as Simply Nessa) made videos accusing her of racial microaggressions, such as painting them as stereotypically angry Black people to her fans and other creators. Mongeau released an apology video that was widely derided for being robotic, yet her audience didn’t wane. She thinks it’s because they’ve watched her grow up online and have seen her take accountability for her mistakes. But Barry views her apologies around race as nothing more than virtue signaling and is skeptical about her ability to genuinely shed her mean-girl behavior. “Even four years later, she has never issued a private apology to me,” he says. “She didn’t care about how that affected us and moved on as if nothing happened.”
The influencer insists on being in her more responsible era. When she found a new manager, Seth Jacobs, in 2022, “his very first words to me were ‘I would have never signed you three years ago,’” she says. “I understand where he was coming from. I was a wild child. He and I have talked a lot about seeing this era of my life as the maturation of Tana Mongeau.”
While I believe that part of Mongeau has a real desire to change, she also strikes me as a savvy code-switcher, the kind of person who can earnestly talk about her “growth” in front of a journalist and an hour later stir up drama on her podcast or jump on a last-minute plane to Vegas because she’s bored (both of which actually happened post-interview). She’s most convincing when she ditches the saccharine sound bites about maturing and speaks about evolution as a messy, contradictory road. She still occasionally gets wasted and gambles until 8 a.m., but she intersperses those benders with cleanses and healthy eating. At first, she worried her stories would get dull without the constant binge drinking. But she quickly discovered that even sober Mongeau keeps things NSFW, like the time she and Makoa had sex to Avatar-themed porn in a Miami hotel. “In the same podcast episode, I will talk about my journey with sobriety, drinking green juice, and going to bed before 10 p.m.,” she says. “But then I will also talk about sucking dick upside down. That’s the duality of an honest woman.”