A Sex Tape Won’t Make You Famous Anymore

“She gonna be bigger than Kim K.!” the twenty-four-year-old Julian Newman said of his sister, Jaden, in a recent YouTube video. He sat behind the wheel of his car, suppressing a grin. Julian and Jaden, who is about two years his junior, are both former child basketball prodigies. Julian first went viral when he was a four-foot-something fifth grader performing acrobatic feats of ballhandling against high-school-age opponents. Some of his highlight compilations and training videos received tens of millions of views. The Times profiled him; both siblings appeared on “Good Morning America.” Julian told the show’s hosts that he would be the best player ever to compete in the N.B.A., and Jaden said that she’d be the first female. Their father, Jamie, always seemed to be around, smiling and shouting and stomping his feet. “They are the next Cheryl and Reggie Miller,” he told the Times.

As my colleague Jay Caspian Kang wrote in a piece last year detailing the hyper-professionalization of youth basketball, the Newmans have become the canonical cautionary tale for young athletes hoping to build and monetize their brands before they hit puberty, let alone become adults. Julian never grew taller than five feet seven and reportedly didn’t receive any Division I college scholarships; Jaden averaged less than one point per game across three seasons for California State University, Los Angeles, a Division II program. Having developed a taste for the limelight, however, the Newman family has tried to remain relevant by participating in any number of attention-grabbing stunts, with Julian as the eager face of the endeavors: a family-wide podcast, a boxing exhibition match, an ill-fated rap career. Jaden, meanwhile, has attempted to refashion herself as an influencer and a model; she opened an account on Fanfix, an OnlyFans competitor, where she says she posts modestly suggestive content aligned with the platform’s “safe-for-work” policy. Last month, however, her Snapchat account was allegedly hacked, and an explicit video of Jaden, which the Newmans have referred to as a sex tape, began circulating online.

If the leak was, in fact, malicious—an act of revenge porn, which is a federal crime—then the Newman family’s reaction hasn’t quite matched the gravity of the situation. Jaden and her brother went on the “No Jumper” podcast, hosted by the adult-film performer and media personality Adam22, where she explained that, when she first learned of the leak, she was “fucked up in the head.” But then she described coming to a realization: “It’s already out—there’s nothing you can do about it, so at this point you just got to capitalize off of it.” In the same interview, Julian framed his sister’s exposure as almost inevitable; he revealed that he’d been encouraging her to launch an OnlyFans account since she’d turned eighteen. On “Pillow Talk,” a podcast that frequently features porn performers and social-media stars, the siblings, along with their father, dismissed the leak as overblown, insignificant. “If you’re not having sex as an adult, then I don’t know what you got going on in life,” Jamie said, wearing aviator sunglasses and a dark-green jumpsuit. In one of their most notable media appearances, the Newman family joined a live stream hosted by the popular streamer N3on, in which Jamie joked about the streamer having a threesome with his daughter and asked his son if he’d watched his sister’s sex tape.

Despite her brother’s overtures, Jaden Newman is unlikely to become the next Kim Kardashian—and her father is certainly no Kris Jenner. There’s no mainstream crossover appeal for incest-baiting former child stars hungry to recapture the haloed attention that they once so innocently absorbed. The Newmans must instead enter the hellscape of clip-farming interview shows and boundary-pushing live streams, hoping to drum up whatever virality they can from this particular incident before pivoting to the next stunt, then the next. Attempting to capitalize on a sex tape might seem like a bridge too far, but for the Newmans, the move is arguably low-risk and high-reward; as pornographic and adult content have become more seamlessly integrated into the fame-making infrastructure of social media, it’s no longer life-ending to have your intimate moments leaked to the masses.