NikkieTutorials, real name Nikkie de Jage. (Screen capture via YouTube)
YouTuber NikkieTutorials has opened up about her experience of 2020 which saw her blackmailed into coming out publicly as trans as well as being robbed.
The makeup guru, known off-screen as Nikkie de Jager, revealed she was trans in a YouTube video published in January last year. She did so to thwart a blackmail attempt, she later said, an experience which left her diagnosed with PTSD.
De Jager reflected on it in a fan Q&A uploaded to YouTube, saying: “I came out under pressure and at the time, I’ve said this a couple times, I felt like I was going to lose it all.
“Thank god I didn’t. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this but to the one who tried to blackmail me, honey, look at me now.”
She added that she was initially hesitant to share she was trans due to how people may amplify that one part of her.
“The one thing that I feared, in the beginning, was that everything that I accomplished or achieved in life, it would no longer be, ‘Oh Nikkie won this’ or ‘Nikkie did that’,” she explained.
“I was scared that it would become, ‘Oh Nikkie, the transgender, won this and achieved that’.
“That has happened, which, if you’re part of the media, you need to stop that, okay? It doesn’t matter what I am, I’m Nikkie, okay? So if I win an award, I win an award!”
NikkieTutorials ‘repeats’ the experience of being robbed in her head
But NikkieTutorial’s life slipped into disarray in August when armed robbers broke into her Netherlands home with while she was with her fiancé.
“The robbery was worse,” she mused.
“In that moment, I feared for my life. With the blackmailing, I feared for my career.”
She added: “Now I have to keep talking about it. It gets brought up so many times now.
“I think if you’re not in the public eye, you can forget about it faster. Now people are like: ‘How are you after the robbery?’
“People always come from a good place, but it’s a lot. For me, the entire experience happens again. It repeats and repeats in my head.”