One more reason to be glad I’m an Old, because thank goddess there was no internet to record all the stupid stuff we did when we were young and very, very stupid:
… On a bright afternoon in her sparse Miami Beach apartment, [Jessi] Smiles thumbs through some recent videos on her iPhone. She’s 20, tall, curvy, pretty and blond, dressed in black leggings and a blue blouse. She just finished applying makeup, and positioning a stool by a camera, so the light is just right. Her older brother Joey is collecting money for a beer-and-pizza run before she shoots a new video, which she’ll shortly post to her 3 million followers. It’s one of the three or four she films each week. “When people say I’m a ‘celebrity’ or anything like that, I hate that,” she tells me, in her slight Cuban-American accent. “I just think I’m well-known on the Internet.”
Smiles is famous on Vine, the latest “It” app in the constantly changing landscape of social media. Launched in January 2013 after being purchased by Twitter for a reported $30 million, Vine lets people record and share microsize video loops, six seconds or shorter. “Your grandmother’s on YouTube – it’s not cool,” says Marcus Johns, a precocious, good-looking 20-year-old with more than 4 million followers on the app. “Vine is the thing now. Kids in our ADD generation want to express an idea and move on to the next thing.”…
Less than a year ago, she was a cashier at a day spa, going by her real name, Jessica Vazquez. Now she’s topping her old annual salary each month (though she doesn’t disclose the figure, her many sponsors, such as Wendy’s, pay around $3,000 for a mention in a single clip). “My whole life has done, like, 20 somersaults,” she says. “It happened very fast. When you’re on Vine, you become a brand. Everyone is a brand. I’m a brand, and there’s nothing you can do about that.”
She sounds jaded for a reason, as is clear when her ever-present mom and manager, or “momager,” as Cristina Ferrero calls herself, shows Smiles a couple of newly posted Vines….
The guy in the photo is Curtis Lepore, a top 10 Viner, and Smiles’ ex-boyfriend. Last summer, they became Vine’s first reality stars, courting each other so publicly it was hard to believe it wasn’t staged. As their online romance unfolded in daily updates, it became the biggest story Vine had ever seen, spawning countless hashtags, video tributes and talk of a reality show. When the couple Vined their plans to meet in New York, some 2,000 screaming fans mobbed Washington Square Park to watch their first kiss. But the fairy-tale romance quickly became a nightmare. A few weeks after their high-profile meet-up, Smiles pressed charges against Lepore for allegedly raping her…
“I am not a rapist,” Curtis Lepore tells me over pizza in North Hollywood, two weeks after I visited Smiles. Dressed in jeans and a black hoodie with the words POPULAR DEMAND across his chest, and tattoos poking out from under his sleeves, the 30-year-old barely makes eye contact as he says these words. Compared to the chipper, blue-eyed pop-punk persona he projects online, he seems bitter and depressed. Even his trusty sidekick Buster Beans, the Roomba-riding Boston terrier and most popular dog on Vine, seems to notice, as he yaps for his master’s attention. “OK,” Lepore says as he relents and picks Buster up. “I’ll hold you in my lap like a baby.”…