They Paid to Watch Camgirls. Then Tried to Rescue Them.

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It was February 2025, and Layla and Estee were sitting next to each other in a sparsely decorated bedroom, doing what they did every day: streaming live on the webcam site Chaturbate.

The young women, both 18 years old and dressed in bikinis, chatted with men in the comments section, flirting with them to rustle up tips. Then Estee reached for the dildo Layla was holding. Layla bristled. She needed it for her own stream, she said.

“You’ve been so annoying all day,” Estee said. “You’re fucking hogging the fucking dildo.” She stormed out of the room.

What happened next could have, in another universe, become a famous Bravo spat. “I’m actually not being crazy,” Layla announced to her audience of invisible viewers. “It makes sense for me to use it first. She literally would have to wash it again and then I would have to wash it too.”

“She’s being crazy,” Layla continued. “I’ll be crazy back.” She grabbed a marker and a blank piece of paper, wrote down Estee’s phone number, and held it up for her viewers to see. “It’s literally not that deep. Like, she can just get a new number.”

Estee barged back in. “My phone is blowing up from people saying that you fucking leaked my number,” she said. “Why are you laughing?”

“You could just get a new number!” said Layla.

“Okay,” Estee said. “You could have just gotten a new dildo!”

She grabbed her own piece of paper and wrote Layla’s number on it, holding it up to the camera. Then she put the dildo in her mouth and sucked on it, announcing, “Because she can’t fucking deep-throat, I fucking will for you guys.”

Could you really blame Layla for hitting Estee with the dildo? The pair started wrestling. “You’re acting crazy,” Estee yelled as Layla mounted her and pinned her arms to the bed. “You fucking hit me with a dildo!”

Chaturbate attracts a particularly obsessive kind of porn watcher, someone not just interested in seeing women nude but in talking to them directly. These are the simps, men who get off on slavishly following, praising, and paying the women of the attention economy for slivers of time and intimacy. The most devoted among them congregate on a private Reddit-esque message board called SimpCity, where they discuss their favorite streamers. The incident became an extensive topic of conversation on the forum, an unusual moment of verve and personality in a landscape dominated by women streaming alone in their rooms. And there was more where it came from. The men who flocked to watch Estee and Layla after their clip went viral noticed that they seemed to be living in a sorority house. Other young models wandered in and out of the frame; they argued on-camera, chatted about boys, and streamed individually and together.

The simps didn’t know who was behind the operation, but whoever it was had accidentally created “a reality show,” as one simp, who posted under the name Anyaismsis, told me. “It was an incredible window through which to gain insight into the minds of Gen-Z females.”

There was nothing else on Chaturbate “at the same level, so consistent, with so many girls streaming simultaneously in a big house,” he explained. “They became greater than the sum of their parts, as a group, with an internal culture, constant cross-associating of viewers across rooms, and social lore.”

Eventually, there were hundreds of pages of comments discussing the operation on SimpCity. Much of it was garden-variety simping. The men fawned over the models, traded clips from streams, discussed their group dynamics, and questioned their professed backstory: a group of innocent young friends had met in high school and started streaming together for fun. “The likelihood is pretty close to 0% that any of them are virgins,” one poster griped.

But some men in SimpCity perceived a darker undercurrent. They noticed signs of tension, models with bruises, and men who seemed to lurk just offscreen, running the show. Sometimes, these men yelled at the models or threw things at them. “We wondered, What the hell’s going on there?” Anyaismsis said.

On the morning of June 4, 2026, a SWAT team burst through the gate of a lavish house in Bellevue, a wealthy Seattle suburb otherwise occupied by Microsoft executives and families, and arrested a man named Nikita Tyukalo, the 21-year-old who, as it turned out, was behind the whole thing. Prosecutors charged him with four counts of human trafficking, one count of money laundering, and one count of leading an organized-crime group, describing a sprawling operation with numerous employees, dozens of models, and millions of dollars in profit. In only a few years, it seemed, Tyukalo had managed to build a working replica of his hero Andrew Tate’s webcam enterprise hidden in luxury apartments and suburban mansions across the Seattle area.

None of this came as any surprise to the simps. Over the course of 2025, a group of them had formed a sort of DIY investigative unit, obtaining police records, pooling information, contacting the models’ parents, and eventually even talking to Tyukalo himself. They leveraged their considerable free time and deep wells of focus drawn from lifetimes of longing in an effort to rescue the young women they’d grown obsessed with. They called themselves the White Knights.

Nikita Tyukalo was born in Bellevue to two Russian immigrants, Valentina and Vitaly. His mother runs a day care, and his father is a truck driver and mechanic. His parents divorced when Nikita was in elementary school. “It was pretty peaceful, but for sure for Nikita it was a drama,” Vitaly told me on the phone in early June. From a young age, he said, Nikita displayed an extraordinary ability to master new skills: “He’s really concentrated; if he got some idea, some interest in his life, he could do it perfectly.” At age 10, he could solve a Rubik’s Cube in five seconds. On vacation in Hawaii, he quickly picked up surfing. Above all else, he was fixated on basketball. “Any time of the day, any time of the night, he was ready to go and play basketball and practice,” Vitaly said. He’d set up chairs in front of the basketball hoop in the family’s cul-de-sac and practice dribbling around them. Vitaly recalled his son telling him, “Papa, it’s what I can do in my life. It’s basketball, it’s everything.” His parents supported his enthusiasm. His mother spent $30,000 building him a private court in her backyard; they sent him to camps and drove him to play on club teams after school, where he outshone his teammates.

Even in middle school, Nikita couldn’t seem to avoid getting in trouble. According to court records, he got into fights, brought a knife to school, and, in eighth grade, distributed a sex tape involving a classmate to friends without her knowledge. Things didn’t improve in high school. One of his basketball teammates said Nikita would often antagonize other players; he seemed to have an irrepressible mean streak. “He would just call them a ‘bitch,’ get under their skin, just get really personal,” the teammate said. He watched as Nikita egged houses, parked in handicap spots, and, once, got in a high-speed chase with the cops. Nikita called his mom a “bitch” in front of his friends and claimed to have hit his dad with a baseball bat. “I think there is something wrong with him in the head,” the teammate said.

With his height and confidence, Nikita had no problem attracting girls’ attention. He surprised even other jocks with how badly he treated them. According to his teammate, he’d say things like “Are you gonna suck it? Like, what are you doing? Usually when I hang out with girls, I expect something.” Or “Bitch, shut the fuck up, you’re nothing but pussy. That’s your only purpose.” He idolized red-pill influencers like Tate, aping his catchphrases and calling people “betas.” He often reposted Tate’s motivational X posts about dating and business. When Tate tweeted that a woman leaving a man was proof the man was a loser — “Level up or perish” — he replied, “Deadass 😂.”

At the end of his senior year, Nikita was scouted by Division I basketball programs and eventually accepted an offer from the University at Buffalo. He was forced to defer when the school realized his transcript lacked credits. To make them up, he decided to spend a semester at Garden City Community College in Kansas. Vitaly drove Nikita’s car down for him and sent him a few hundred dollars a month for food. As far as he knew, Nikita still hoped to go pro. But after watching a few of his son’s basketball games on livestreams, he could tell something had shifted. Nikita was clearly disengaged. “He wasn’t really him,” Vitaly said. “He pretty much lost the interest to play.”

That fall, Tyukalo called an old teammate from his dorm room at Garden City. “Fuck basketball,” he said. “I’m gonna give this OnlyFans shit a shot, and I’ll make way more money.” He wanted help recruiting models. The teammate had no interest. “OnlyFans management,” or OFM, has become a popular Gen-Z hustle in which men recruit women to start accounts, then run them on their behalf, creating their content, promoting them across social media, and communicating with their customers — a legal form of digital pimping. The industry’s rise was fueled by a post-pandemic influx of users to the platform and by influencers such as Tate, whose Pimping Hoes Degree video series specifically instructs men how to groom women into webcamming, then take half of their profits. Tyukalo called his company Luxe Allure, and that summer, he began staffing up, looking for people to help him manage the accounts. In September, he posted a series of pictures of young women in bikinis on Telegram, boasting of his “talent acquisition services.”

One of his earliest recruits was his own girlfriend, a pretty, outgoing 17-year-old we’ll call Gabby. (Individuals referred to by first name have been anonymized to protect their privacy.) Leading up to her 18th birthday in July, he began suggesting that she start an account. He gave her the pitch: The women he worked with had been poor in high school, and now they were rich. She told him she wasn’t interested, but he kept bringing it up. That fall, she left for school in Arizona. They stayed together and talked on the phone often. She was stressed about paying for school, she told him. Sensing an opportunity, he pressed her again about OnlyFans; eventually she agreed. He made the account for her. Afterward, according to the indictment, he changed the password so she couldn’t get in. In a move seemingly taken directly from Tate’s Pimping Hoes Degree series, he told her he’d run it on her behalf because she was inexperienced with money. “You verify the account on your phone, and you control the account,” Tate says in one of the videos, sitting in his Romanian compound’s cigar lounge. “She can’t do nothing. All she can do is do as you say.”

By Thanksgiving break, Tyukalo had decided to quit junior college. He rented a new-build gray-floor apartment in Kirkland, Washington, where he and a few friends spent their days glued to their laptops, living the Spartan lifestyle of Gen-Z hustle mode. One picture he posted on X shows a dining-room table covered entirely in steaks — “If your life doesn’t look like this you’re not living an optimal one,” he wrote. To grow the operation, he’d brought on several young men he’d played basketball with. Kamal Muhammad, who had gone to Lakeside School in Seattle, the private school where Bill Gates sent his children, before playing basketball at Eastern Oregon University, became his trusted lieutenant. Like Tyukalo, Muhammad idolized red-pill influencers: He told a college girlfriend his “dream blunt rotation” consisted of Kanye West and Tate. That September, Tyukalo posted a video on X of the two of them driving around talking about OFM. Muhammad sat in the passenger seat, holding three iPhones. “N - - - - s wanna trap,” he says, beaming. “They wanna do illegal shit, but I make more money than them legally, I scam more than them legally, and that’s why it’s so fun.”

Tyukalo and his team blasted young women throughout the Seattle area with messages. He had certain preferences. “He’d say, ‘Make sure they’re white,’” said one young man who watched him recruit. “And they gotta look young.” A woman was recruited by Tyukalo and several of his employees when she was only 16. “I still had baby face, like, I had my high school in my bio. I was obviously underage,” she said. A woman recalled a night watching one of Tyukalo’s recruiters as he DM’d young women to ask if they wanted to model and guys to ask if they could recruit more models, offering “1k each girl you send my way.” The men of Luxe Allure tended to obscure the nature of the job in their pitch, saying something vague about a modeling agency and thousands of dollars a month in easy money. Once the women signed up, Muhammad would give them new emails, bank accounts, and OnlyFans accounts. The moment they submitted their ID-verification photos, he changed the passwords.

Tyukalo soon posted that he’d earned $50,000 in a single month. His social media became a nonstop reel of sports cars, guns, and wads of cash, threaded with motivational aphorisms. “I’m always gonna win, no matter what I do,” he posted. “People coming into OFM everyday thinking it’s easy, I love it. I take all of their models making 5–10k a month to 50k minimum.” Another post showed an image of his hand grabbing the butt of a woman bent over before him, captioned, “More women, more money, more gym.” He made the young men who worked for him watch Tate videos to learn the tricks of the trade.

The goal of an OnlyFans manager is straightforward: Extract as much value from the female body as possible. Filming a few short video clips per week for OnlyFans leaves that body with plenty of monetizable hours in the day. Which is perhaps why Tyukalo eventually began pressuring Gabby to stream on Chaturbate. Unlike OnlyFans, which consists primarily of prerecorded videos, Chaturbate allows for livestreaming; viewers tip women directly for performing soft-core porn. Gabby was skeptical. She didn’t want to spend hours “half-naked on a platform with a bunch of creeps.” But her boyfriend wasn’t having it. A “switch flipped,” she later told police. As “Nikita’s girl,” he said, she was meant to serve as an example to the others in his stable. “What are they going to think when you’re my girlfriend and you’re not going to do it?” So in another move lifted directly from the Tate playbook, he began applying force, shoving her and dragging her by the hair. In December, she relented and started appearing on Chaturbate, often along with a young woman named Haley. They performed under the names Estee and Layla, respectively. Between Chaturbate and OnlyFans, Gabby was soon earning Tyukalo tens of thousands of dollars a month, all of which he was keeping for himself. He persuaded her to drop out of college before her spring semester started. On Telegram, Tyukalo posted a photo of her head in his lap as he watched a Tate video on YouTube.

In early 2025, two of Tyukalo’s employees, Bijan Namavar and Jack Mehl, abruptly quit the agency. They felt they hadn’t been getting paid what they were owed. “He seemed like he knew what he was doing and was running a real digital-media company. But as soon as I saw the way he was, I left for good and never looked back,” Namavar said. Soon after, Haley quit too and reclaimed access to a Snapchat account Tyukalo had made for her. Furious, he threatened to release her nude photos unless she handed back the account. He also told Mehl that he owed him $5,000 for quitting.

A few weeks later, early in the morning, a man named Sean Royce Tucker showed up on Haley’s mother’s doorstep and told her that her daughter owed Tyukalo money. Tucker was big and intimidating; on Instagram, he posted pictures of himself carrying weapons. Tyukalo regularly used him as muscle; according to a police report, he would send him to the supermarket to steal steaks. About an hour later, Tucker appeared at Namavar’s father’s house. He’d been sent by the “boss,” he informed the 67-year-old man, to tell him that he “had a video of his son having intercourse with an underage female.” The father was baffled, but his son knew exactly who the boss was and what all of this was about.

Later that day, Namavar, Haley, and Mehl went to the Kirkland police station and told officers about both Tyukalo’s efforts at intimidation and his larger operation. The police agreed to look into it, but it didn’t take long for the case to stall. Soon after the trio visited the station, Tyukalo managed to obtain footage of their interview, which he posted on his Snapchat. He captioned it, “Go to the feds over bitches and wake up and still look at themselves in the mirror 😂.” When a detective called Namavar and Mehl to ask why they hadn’t sent in any evidence, they explained that Tyukalo had threatened them.

Haley returned to the police station two weeks later with Tyukalo. She was his girlfriend, she said, and she was where she wanted to be. “I asked Haley if she was okay and under any duress and she laughed and said no,” the officer wrote. The investigation was closed shortly after.

The case file included a report from a cop who recognized Tyukalo from a traffic stop the month before. She said that after he was pulled over, Tyukalo had asked if she liked her job. If not, he’d said, she could make a lot more money working for him.

His brush with the law behind him, Tyukalo kept expanding. During the summer of 2025, he reconnected with Cory Connor, another former Seattle-area basketball prospect. The two had met in high school; Connor had worked with Tyukalo in the early days of Luxe Allure, before splitting off to form his own agency. In July, they merged operations, calling the new company Nova Talent Management. To house all the young women he and Connor were bringing in, Tyukalo rented a series of properties in Bellevue, including a luxurious downtown penthouse and a sprawling house on the shore of Lake Washington, where he and his friends would ride Jet Skis. He wrote in his Instagram bio that he was worth $20 million and started driving a McLaren.

Each property became a sort of hectic porn sorority, according to Lexi, who moved into the lake house during the summer of 2025. Six young women shared two bedrooms and a few couches, alongside Tyukalo, Muhammad, Connor, and a rotation of younger recruiters: 18- and 19-year-olds the models referred to as the minions. Every day, the women were expected to “get on stream as soon as we wake up,” Lexi said, and spend the next eight hours on Chaturbate. Viewers were invited into a house full of 18-year-olds projecting the fantasy of a nonstop slumber party. On stream, they would twerk, masturbate, make out with each other, and take showers together, but mostly they would just chat aimlessly with the men watching. It was an exhausting performance. “You get really tired, really sweaty,” said Madison, an 18-year-old model who spent three months in the house.

Their minute-by-minute behavior was dictated by coaches hired by Nova to oversee the streams with the goal of maximizing tips and viewership. Based in Southeast Asia, they texted the models constant instructions over Signal — “Wear this outfit today, and do this, this, and this on stream, and play this game,” Lexi said, so that “we weren’t just sitting there doing nothing.” The Nova managers and foreign coaches insisted they take no breaks. “We all vaped, so we’d get off and hit our vape but then they would yell at us to get back on stream,” Lexi said. “If I was taking a bathroom break for too long, I’d get in trouble,” said Madison. If she ate on stream without “sexualizing the food,” she got in trouble for that, too. “How are you gonna expect me to stream at least eight hours and not eat?” Even water breaks brought reprimands.

Off-camera, the models bickered constantly over everything from boys to “lights and tripods and frickin’ computer chargers,” Madison said. The men in the house were alternately horny and imperious. Lexi was sleeping with a young recruiter; he’d call her a “bitch” and make her sleep on the couch if her daily streams dipped below 400 concurrent viewers. Tyukalo was a difficult live-in boss. “If we were off stream and we saw him, it was kind of like hide-and-seek,” Lexi said. “He’d be like, ‘What the fuck are you doing? You’re stupid; get back on stream.’” Telling him “no” about anything infuriated him. “Even if he was joking and you’d tell him ‘no’ back in a joking way, he’d get mad,” said Lexi. One day, Tyukalo pushed Lexi into a room where one of the minions was watching a movie and told her to suck his dick. She said “no.”“He grabbed me by my hair and threw me back in the room, and he was like, ‘It’s not a joke anymore. Do it.’” Connor, she said, intervened before things went too far. Tyukalo’s control extended to what the models ate; he would often tell them they looked fat, leading one to develop an eating disorder. Adderall was given out “like candy” to keep them streaming longer without distraction.

In theory, the models were supposed to be paid $35 to $40 an hour for streaming; the bosses would keep the lucrative tips the viewers sent along with a cut of the OnlyFans money. But “we never actually got that,” Lexi said. Tyukalo would make up excuses. He would say their accounts were underperforming so he couldn’t pay them because he was already responsible for their food and lodging. He’d tell them leaving the house would earn them a “pay dock.” After Madison broke the phone Tyukalo gave her to make content, he told her she was in debt to him. She was ordered to stream for 12 hours straight, unpaid, as a “consequence.”

Exploitative contracts propped up the enterprise. Madison recalled being woken up at 4 a.m. and told she had to sign something on Muhammad’s phone. Half-asleep, she did it. Only later did she learn she’d signed a contract with Nova with a five-year term and a claim on future earnings even after she left. “You signed away your soul for five years,” Tyukalo told her mockingly. “So you’re stuck here.” Some models were on what Tyukalo called a “bitch contract” — no pay at all, just access to his card to buy necessities. “They pretty much just said that the girls didn’t need money themselves,” Lexi said.

Another young woman, Sarah, moved into the lake house a week after her 18th birthday. She’d found the job through a Snapchat ad, which had promised $8,000 a month for bikini photos. She was pressured by Muhammad to quickly sign a contract. After a month streaming naked on Chaturbate, working 11-hour shifts, she had earned only $1,000; Connor told her the shortfall was her fault. One day, a fan sent $32,000 directly to her PayPal. She didn’t tell her bosses, only her boyfriend, Kaiden Kingsley, a recruiter who lived in the house. But word got back to Tyukalo, who ordered Muhammad to take her phone. When she got it back the next morning, her bank account was drained and the contacts for her family and friends had been blocked.

Tate’s courses emphasize the importance of exploiting romantic relationships to push women past their limits: “You have to fuck them, and they have to love you,” he says in the Pimping Hoes Degree videos. “It’s essential to the business.” Tyukalo effectively employed this strategy, doling out sex and affection unpredictably. “The girls liked that he chose them,” Lexi said. Just as easily, he could turn, calling them “dirty whores and sluts” and insulting them for doing the online sex work that paid for his lifestyle.

During the fall of 2025, Tyukalo began dating an 18-year-old named Zara, whom he plied with money and attention. She soon became one of his biggest earners; later, he’d tell people she made him $260,000 in just one month on Chaturbate. Tyukalo wanted to turn her into a mainstream influencer. He helped her run a YouTube channel where she posted vanilla “Get ready with me” videos and shopping hauls, and he often flew her out to his vacation house in Puerto Rico. On TikTok, she joked about her boyfriend’s abusive tendencies, posting a seductive selfie with the caption, “When I see a tall, 6’7, tall Russian with a McLaren that’s an asshole to everyone put me thru emotional hell and make me miserable 24/7 and everyone tells me to run.”

The relationship was especially upsetting to Ella, another 18-year-old model who lived in the lake house and to whom Tyukalo had promised the largest room, which she assumed they’d share. She would often come into Lexi’s room crying, seeking advice. “Why does he do that?” she’d ask. Lexi urged her not to think of Tyukalo as a real boyfriend with the capacity for love. One evening that fall, he came to spend the night with Ella. But when he arrived, he grew angry almost immediately: He’d looked through her phone, he said, and found texts to other men. He threatened to leave to go stay with Zara. “Get on your hands and knees and crawl around, and I’ll think about staying,” he told her. Ella got on the ground and began crawling, begging him to stay. Tyukalo laughed, cocked a gun, and pointed it at her while the other models watched. Sarah was scared for Ella. Tyukalo’s face was twisted into a creepy grin, a “psychotic look” she’d seen before. “He laughs when people are sad, like, he finds joy in their pain,” she’d later tell police. When she tried to intervene, Tyukalo rounded on her, furious. “Bitch, get the fuck away from her,” he screamed. “You’re going to be the next one crawling on the ground.” Sarah stepped back, terrified.

That November, Gabby moved out of the house. She sent an email to the police after she left. “I was a victim of theft and what I now understand was a sex-trafficking situation,” she wrote. Over the course of the time she had lived with him, Tyukalo had beaten her, dragged her down flights of stairs, and strangled her at least 15 times, once causing her to black out.

The thing about online sex work is that, like the stock market, there is someone on both sides of every transaction. And the girlfriend experience, even the lo-fi version for sale on Chaturbate, is a powerful emotional catalyst. The longer Tyukalo’s models streamed, the more their audience began to scrutinize the architecture of their confinement. The simps’ fantasy princesses were locked away in a real-life castle. Something had to be done.

The SimpCity thread continued discussing Tyukalo’s operation, and their concern for the models, throughout 2025. By December, Anyaismsis was, by his own description, “balls deep” in the investigation. He and another simp who used the handle Hoesmasher3000 decided to launch a public channel on Telegram focused specifically on sharing their findings. Members also continued to simp. The group maintained updated rankings of the models based on looks, personality, and “morals.” These “might compel the girls to excel in all aspects of their appearance and performance,” Anyaismsis wrote in the channel. “Feedback and competition is what makes a market rich.”

The simps messaged at all hours, postulating theories and accumulating information about the models and their handlers. They wondered if the women were running things themselves or if, as they suspected, a shadowy OFM agency was pulling the strings. “Breh, you telling me these girls aint on agency? Believing that would be delulu,” Hoesmasher3000 wrote on December 9, 2025. “How the hell they got two houses at 18/19 years old? They leasing that shit? Aint no way they streaming every damn day for all day on their own discipline.”

“Something interesting just happened that lends credence to what you say,” Anyaismsis responded to Hoesmasher3000 the next morning. “Stella silenced her audio while streaming and became very attentive to whoever came through that door. She doesn’t interact this way with the other girls and she would not silence it. I know what a girl looks like when in the presence of authority.”

The evidence of malign surveillance and control piled up. The simps noted that the models often checked the clock and talked about how long they “had to” stay on stream. “I encourage vigilance,” wrote Anyaismsis in December. “Sometimes we may tease or challenge the girls to improve their performance, but at the end of the day i think its true to say we care about the girls most of all. So if the agency isn’t doing right by them (I mean that in multiple ways) then it will be known eventually. I can assure you of that.”

The first time Tyukalo’s name appeared in the chat was on December 12, courtesy of a post from a user named Yo Yo. He’d managed to figure out that Tyukalo was the same man who had briefly showed up onscreen during Dildo-gate, stepping into the background and seeming to alarm the models with his presence. It was no surprise to the other members in the chat that Yo Yo tracked down this information. He was an infamous Chaturbate gadfly, known to simp and streamer alike. An anonymous poster on a long-running, self-styled “moral jihad” against barely legal women streaming nude, he had a reputation for figuring out the identities of camgirls and then posting their real names and phone numbers in their Chaturbate chats and contacting their families. “He has this philosophy that if he scares them enough, they’ll stop camming,” Anyaismsis told me. Some speculated that he was an off-duty Baptist preacher. In one clip, a Nova model using the name Stella Pearl rolls her eyes at the camera and shows her Chaturbate viewers texts from Yo Yo telling her to put some clothes on, then sending her the name of her aunt.

Yo Yo’s approach raised hackles. “Yo Yo, as good intentions as he has, has actually helped in many ways to sever the ties between girls and their families,” Anyaismsis told me. “I don’t condone the doxxing,” wrote a user who went by Hal the Bark Knight, “and have told yoyo what a short-sighted sack of donkey shit that sick power-tripping fuckstick is.” But Yo Yo seemed at the mercy of his impulses: “possessed to do the lord’s work maybe,” he wrote. The models in turn berated and mocked Yo Yo, accusing him of secretly being the biggest simp of them all. Yo Yo “calls me mommy,” one wrote. Zara even recorded a diss track: “Yo Yo I know I called you a fat fuck / that was before you got us that pizza that was good as fuck / you know sometimes i think youre a little bit of a cuck / but you might just be a little out of luck.” Regardless, the simps couldn’t deny that Yo Yo got results. He found ways to get the models, and even Nova employees, to confide in him. He traded “tea/gossip like a currency,” Anyaismsis told me.

The revelation that Tyukalo might be behind the operation did not sit well with the Telegram group. A simp posted a picture of Tyukalo carrying a weapon and another of guns laid out on his floor. “fuckign run for your life girls,” he wrote. The unsettling information continued trickling in. On Christmas, Hal the Bark Knight, who claimed to be a 44-year-old former investigative reporter, provided the group with a contract he’d obtained from a model, which showed Nova was entitled to all of the money she generated from Chaturbate. He also gave them the recording of an interview he’d conducted with another ex-model, who described physical abuse, “intimidation with guns, and pressure to have sex with guys who worked in Nova.”

The simps got resourceful, “looking into police reports and tracking down all the case numbers to get behind-the-scenes insight,” Anyaismsis said. They assembled a list of more than a hundred models who they believed had streamed for Nova. They developed working theories of Tyukalo’s psychology. Anyaismsis believed he might be what’s known as a “dark tetrad personality type,” a person displaying a combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. He pointed to the fact that Tyukalo followed a number of gore and violence accounts on Instagram. “This is how he gets his dopamine,” he told me — “just mayhem.” When one of the men traveled to Bellevue on a work trip, he drove by the mansion and the penthouse.

Everyone had a part to play in the White Knights. Yo Yo’s ability to connect with the models proved useful; Hal, the retired journalist, helped the group obtain court records and body-camera footage from Tyukalo’s cases. By the end of 2025, the Knights were convinced the models were being trafficked. On December 23, one of them placed a call to the Bellevue police. A half-hour later, he got a callback from a veteran sex-crimes detective named Alex Slusser. Slusser informed them an investigation into Tyukalo was already underway. “There was Gabby’s first contact in early December,” Anyaismsis said. “And he told us he’d gotten a few warnings from parents who had called to ask police what their daughters had gotten into. Most of them were caused by Yo Yo contacting them.” The simps gave Slusser a full rundown of everything they’d heard. “He was interested in Gabby, the identifying info of the involved girls, the locations, claims of prostitution, Nik’s dad, Zara’s whereabouts,” Anyaismsis said. They began forwarding information to Slusser. They also began speaking with several of the girls’ parents.

On the night of January 28, simps watching one of the Nova streams saw something unnerving. A phone camera was pointed into an empty room; elsewhere in the house, there was a scream. Moments later, Zara walked into the room holding her head and crying. A few minutes later, one of Tyukalo’s employees came in and put the phone face down. But another camera was still running in a different room, and in the background, viewers could hear doors slamming and more screaming: “No, please!” The simps were buzzing. “It raises some questions doesn’t it?” wrote Anyaismsis. “We’re told that it’s not what it seems and that it’s something mundane, nothing to be worried about.” Several of the simps told Slusser about what they’d seen.

The next day, Tyukalo logged on to the Knights’ Telegram channel.

“the man shows his face,” wrote user DankAssCoffee.

“I better break out the fine china and good silverware,” added Hal.

“Make sense of the Ava stream for us,” Anyaismsis wrote, referring to Zara’s streaming name. “The one where someone screamed like they were getting murdered in the woods.” He posted an AI-generated picture of the models as angels in a prison surrounded by watchtowers, labeled nova headquarters.

“The research u guys do is so far off its crazy,” Tyukalo wrote. “You guys think there’s just 70 girls in houses just getting beat and they choose to stay?”

The back-and-forth continued all night — the simps calling Tyukalo an abuser; Tyukalo mocking the simps as broke, misguided losers and bragging about his McLarens.

“Cars aren’t status in the real world. Just to little kids showing off overpriced Hot Wheels,” wrote Hal.

“Brother,” Tyukalo responded. “Your in a Chaturbate chat.”

When the knights first started their investigation, they were “skeptical and conscientious of conspiracy theory,” Anyaismsis said. “But as we dug deeper, it kept getting worse.” After Zara’s stream, they realized how serious the situation was. Their concern deepened in early February when they saw Tyukalo had been charged with domestic violence against Zara, who’d been found in his penthouse with an injured ankle after another girl called 911. (Zara did not cooperate with the police, and the case was later dismissed.) How had this slow-rolling disaster not yet been stopped? For months, Tyukalo had been operating in plain sight, posting about his exploits on Instagram and earning attention from law enforcement. He told his dad the cops repeatedly showed up at the houses, confiscating streaming equipment before returning it. Nothing seemed to stick. He boasted, “Papa, I’m doing fucking legal business; they can do nothing about this,” Vitaly recalled. “He told me, ‘The police checked my business, my taxes, everything. It’s clean. It’s a white business — no gray, no black.’” It seemed to make him feel invincible.

Over the next few months, he periodically reappeared in the chat to taunt the simps.

“N - - - - im the one with unlimited hoes and money and ur the one beating to them,” he said on March 25.

The simps tried to draw him out with provocative questions they hoped might lead to incriminating statements. User Fishy92 asked if he recruited minors for his agency, listing two models who he said had been 17 when Tyukalo approached them.

“Mmmmm my favorite,” he responded. “To old tbh tho.”

“Why you trying to hire cops at traffic stops?” Anyaismsis wrote, referring to the police report from his attempt to extort his former employees.

“Had to give the wage cuck a job,” Tyukalo responded. “Ok since I’ve done so many things why am I not locked?”

“Because it takes time, but you will go down,” Fishy92 responded.

“I’ll be waiting for the day!!!” Tyukalo wrote. “I already beat the feds 2x what do u think this will end up as?”

Later, he posted a picture of himself strapped to a hospital bed wearing a neck brace, covered in electrodes, with blood on his face — proof, he claimed, he could survive anything.

“Ava finally hit back,” wrote BuggsyBaggins. Tyukalo responded with a devil-horns emoji, along with a closed fist and a boxing glove.

“A man that hits a woman is not a man,” wrote Fishy92. “You sir are a coward.”

“No that just makes me a strong man!” Tyukalo wrote. “I’m worse than Andrew Tate. U guys think Andrew Tate is a bad person tho fr. He’s a savior. All u n - - - - s need to listen to him.”

Tyukalo’s final appearance in the chat came on May 30. He posted a picture of himself with a gun in hand and Zara by his side: “2 likes on this message I’ll beat tf out of ava rn,” he wrote. “I’ll choke her out and put her to infinite sleep.” Then, to his audience of increasingly stunned simps: “Every young dumb desperate girl in this world will be enslaved by me 😈.” And finally: “Women are on this earth to slave to n - - - - s like me. I’m the n - - - - that rides into the village kills the men and babies and rapes all the hoes.”

Five days later, at 4:30 a.m., Bellevue swat burst through the door of the mansion, taking Tyukalo into custody. In the months leading up to the raid, Slusser had been talking to victims, observing the simps’ chats, building a case, and waiting for an opportunity to strike as Tyukalo traveled to Puerto Rico and elsewhere. “He’s very mobile,” Slusser told me. In the basement, officers found a whiteboard titled “Content Plan,” laying out streaming instructions, prices, and content types, including the phrase “dildo video.” On June 8, prosecutors indicted Tyukalo, naming Cory Connor and Kamal Muhammad as unindicted co-conspirators. He pleaded not guilty, and bail was set at $5 million. When asked for comment, Tyukalo’s lawyer said “we will address the charges in court.” Connor and Muhammad did not respond to detailed questions.

The chat was ecstatic. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” wrote Fishy92. Later, as the celebration subsided, Anyaismsis waxed philosophical, reflecting on how the simps’ desires fueled the industry to which they were ostensibly opposed. “I’ve descended into the gutter to do this work. I am human, and a man, and some of these girls are fucking hot :D haaaaa, which puts me face to face with confronting the inner struggle of not becoming the very thing that I despise,” he wrote. The experience has reinforced his belief that Tyukalo’s behavior is symptomatic of a deeper societal decay: “It’s ideologically driven. Wildfires start because of droughts and or when there is a lot of dry rot in the forest. Nik is just one flame of the wildfire burning through culture currently, a culture deep into dry rot where these things become possible at scale. Masculinity and femininity and gender roles both in crisis. So people like Andrew Tate emerge as false voices of reason.” He believes America has entered a “state of decadence,” becoming “a swamp of scams and lies and shallow meaningless indulgence” that offers fertile ground for the sleaze merchants of OFM.

He’s not wrong. “It’s becoming this whole craze in Washington,” a high-school senior in the Seattle area who spent time around Tyukalo and his operation told me. “Nikita was, like, the first guy to do it and then just everyone kind of started following. It just multiplied.” Now, he said, “there are guys that are 16 years old that have models that are 18 working for them.” When he logs on to Snapchat, he says, he sees a nonstop stream of OFM recruitment. “On a typical Friday, I would see, like, 20 different guys posting on their Stories: ‘If you’re a girl and you want to model and make 15, 20 thousand dollars a month, DM me, we’ll get you right.’ Every day, just the same shit.” He knows middle-school boys who talk of starting their own agencies. “It’s kind of crazy,” he said, “how Andrew Tate in 2020 on your ‘For You’ page leads to trafficking high-school girls.”

Tyukalo remains in King County jail awaiting trial. At a hearing in late June, his lawyer asked for bail to be lowered to $100,000 and produced a statement from Zara. Tyukalo, she wrote, is a “very positive and caring person, I am with him all the time and have never seen him be violent towards anyone, and if anything, I would say he has always been very protective over women.” She described him as “the type of guy I would want to be the father to my kids one day and plan on being with forever,” adding that while “he is also very young and still has things to learn, he is one of the best and most wholesome people that I know.”

At the hearing, Gabby addressed the court, standing up in front of her ex-boyfriend. She read a long prepared statement, speaking quickly but clearly: “I have spent days trying to find words big enough to explain what two years of my life felt like. The truth is there are none.” Since participating in the prosecution, she said, she’d moved and installed security cameras in her home. She described how Tyukalo had “repeatedly said that the only thing women were good for was making money for men and that women are disposable.” He would threaten models with exposing their nudes and harming their loved ones. Violence, she said, “was never something Nikita spoke about with hesitation. He talked about hurting people as if it was the ordinary solution. He talked about killing people more times than I can count.”

She described the moment when he threatened her life: “I will never forget looking at someone I loved and hearing him tell me that if I ever spoke about what I’ve been through, if I ever opened my mouth, he would kill me because I knew too much.” He told her that when he killed her, everyone she loved would believe “I’d simply been in an accident.” Even though he was in jail, she said, she couldn’t stop thinking about the way the other men in the house had learned from him. “I watched manipulation become normal,” she said. “I watched violence become normal. I watched controlling women become normal. I watched him teach other people that exploiting and trafficking women was encouraged and accepted. That is what frightens me the most.”

Meanwhile, the triumphant simps have acquired a taste for blood. They’re continuing to try to extricate some of the models, some of whom are now streaming for Connor’s new agency in Arizona. They’re thinking bigger, too. “Maybe we’ll start a long-term counteragency kind of thing where we try to gather information in some other way to expose the next agency, and the next agency, and the next agency,” Anyaismsis told me. He believes there is “plenty of intelligence among the beta and incel strata of the male population” that could be harnessed to productive efforts. In late June, Yo Yo posted a screenshot in the Knights’ Telegram channel of an Instagram account called Bophousewestcoast. “I have another agency to go after,” he wrote. “The agency owner is in his late 20’s and actively follows and likes high schoolers posts on ig. And not just seniors.”