A content creator was fired from her day job when her higher ups found her OnlyFans, the court said “not cool.”

For many single parents, one job isn’t enough to make ends meet. For single mothers, OnlyFans is an accessible way to fill in the financial gaps left by their day jobs, but the risks they face if their side hustle is exposed can come with some pretty unjust consequences. For one state employee in Baja, it was enough for her to be fired—even though her former employer insisted that wasn’t the reason she was let go.

Jovanna Isabel Ortega Gómez is a single mother, a former state employee, and a medical professional in Baja California. She worked at Issstecali, a public agency that handles healthcare and pensions for state employees. Her role was temporary, but she was on track for a more permanent position until 2023, when her OnlyFans photos were leaked. Shortly after her content was leaked from the adults-only platform, she was dismissed from her position. She pursued a court case against her former employer, claiming that the firing was unjust and directly linked to the leaked adult content.

Ortega Gómez’s former employer claimed that her dismissal wasn’t at all about OnlyFans. Issstecali insisted that her role was always intended to end after a short period of time, but the timing was more than a little suspicious. The sudden dismissal with a total lack of warning felt fishy to Ortega Gómez, and it turns out that the courts agreed with her. She filed a labor lawsuit and won, resulting in Issstecali being ordered to pay her over 800,000 pesos—$40,000 USD—in compensation for what the court deemed to be an unjust firing. Despite insisting that they’d done nothing wrong, the agency agreed to pay up. For something they claim wasn’t a factor in her firing, that is a large sum of money to agree to pay without complaint.

This was a big win for Ortega Gómez, but it’s an even bigger win in the battle against punishing adult content creators for the work that they do. Ortega Gómez’s case is just another example of employers using their own personal moral judgment to police the personal lives of their employees. Creating adult content is legal work, there is a widespread demand for quality adult content, and consenting adults who show up to fulfill that demand and be compensated for doing so shouldn’t lose their livelihoods over it. Issstecali easily complying with the court’s order suggests that they were aware the optics of their decision to fire Ortega Gómez—never mind the legality of their actions—were not a good look.

In 2025, we should be beyond the point of pretending that OnlyFans is something scandalous instead of just another job that digital creators can pursue on their own terms. For creators who maintain forms of employment outside of OnlyFans, their employers have an opportunity to lead with integrity rather than shame—if they choose to protect their employees in the event that their content is leaked, rather than punishing them for expanding their financial opportunities. Hopefully more companies will do what Issstecali did not, and will choose to respect their employees’ autonomy—and privacy—rather than further stigmatizing adult content creators.