‘Pay me a liveable wage’: B.C. teaching assistant’s OnlyFans still under investigation

A B.C. teaching assistant who is in trouble with her school district over her OnlyFans account believes she could soon be fired.

Kristin MacDonald posts adult videos and images on the paid subscription service under the name Ava James.

Earlier this month she received a cease and desist order from the Coquitlam School District, saying her posts violated the collective agreement she signed.

An investigation by the district was then launched.

“I had three meetings with the district as part of their investigation,” MacDonald told Global News.

“They’ve had a lot of questions.”

However, MacDonald said she has received more than two dozen discipline letters for breaching confidentiality.

MacDonald previously told Global News that as a single mother, the income from the account, which is subscriber-based, supplements her income as a teaching assistant, which she said is not enough to support her and her child.

She said the union has been very supportive and several coworkers have reached out to express their support as well.

“I’m very lucky to have the union backing me. So if they come back with a decision of termination, we will be grieving that.”

MacDonald explained OnlyFans is a consent-based platform and everyone has to have their identity verified to use it. She said a user also has to have a verified credit card and she never used her real name in her only profile.

“The narrative from the beginning of the meeting was that I had done something wrong and they were there to basically discipline me,” she added. “I definitely felt discriminated against in those meetings.”

MacDonald said she fears the district will terminate her.

In a previous statement, the school district said, “As a matter of course, the district will not provide information regarding any individual.”

MacDonald said she knows that speaking out about her case is breaking confidentiality but she would like to see the stigma around sex work be broken down and her case could be an opportunity moving forward.

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“People gotta live, they got to make money,” she said. “So I would say to the school district, you know, you don’t want me doing OnlyFans, then pay me a liveable wage.”

Susanna Quail, an employment lawyer, told Global News previously this is a complicated case.

“There are many factors that are considered when determining whether an employer has any basis to discipline or otherwise control off-duty conduct,” she said.

“Some of the factors that matter, for example, are is it impacting the employer’s reputation? And that’s likely what they’ll say in this case is that they have a legitimate interest in ensuring that there’s not a sense in the public that this school district is a place where there may be some questionable behaviour by staff.”

However, Quail said as MacDonald’s OnlyFans account is private, she is entitled to some privacy of what she does during her off-duty hours.

She added it does depend on what MacDonald’s collective agreement states.

“I think one thing that’s going to be difficult for the employer, in this case, is education assistants like this worker are not very well paid at all,” Quail said.

“They generally make about $25 an hour and they only get 25 to 30 hours a week. So it’s not a sustainable income that someone can raise a family on. And so they have to have second jobs. And if you’re only offering someone a job at 25 to 30 hours a week, about $25 an hour, and only 10 months of the year, you could lose some of the kind of moral higher ground to say, ‘I’m going to dictate what you do with the rest of your time’.”