After a successful year, the OnlyFans creator Bryce Adams wanted to treat her employees and family members to a classic year-end corporate team-building event.
Then, on Tuesday, Adams got a call from the Marlins: Their event was canceled. Someone in the team president’s office, she was told, had gotten uncomfortable with her line of work selling explicit videos. Their big festive gathering, booked in August, was only a day away.
The party’s planning offered a sign of how established the industry of online content creation has become. Many influencers in the American creator economy run like small businesses, hiring workers, offering benefits packages and planning holiday parties.
But the sudden cancellation at Miami’s LoanDepot Park also showed how some creators, especially on OnlyFans, still struggle with social stigma and to be taken seriously as financial enterprises.
“I told them this is a legitimate business and a very traditional business exchange, let’s find some way to de-risk it,” Adams said. “It was supposed to be a really memorable day, so it’s just disappointing … after all the effort that went into it.”
Marlins officials did not respond to requests for comment. On Wednesday afternoon, after The Washington Post asked the team for answers, a Marlins event booking manager sent an email to Adams’ team saying they’d decided to cancel the event “after discovering that the scope of the event would be in conflict with our Ballpark policies and procedures.”
Adams, 30, and her longtime boyfriend run a company out of their home-office complex in central Florida that has earned more than $16 million in sales and secured more than a million paying subscribers since 2021.
The company employs two dozen video editors, social media managers, technical and advertising staff as part of a payroll that exceeds $1 million a year. (Adams, who uses a stage name, asked to conceal her name and location to reduce the risk of harassment.)
In August, before the company was profiled by The Post, Adams’s company began planning for the team-building event to celebrate the year’s accomplishments.
They paid to book the stadium from 1 to 6 p.m. and rented a private plane that could shuttle everyone to Miami and back. Adams invited her family for the festivities and paid to fly in longtime friends from Chicago, London and Seattle.
“It’s a family event. I told them my parents were coming,” Adams said. “We just wanted to play baseball and celebrate with our friends.”
Adams said her team gave the Marlins “full disclosure of who we are from the get-go,” including links to their social media accounts where their OnlyFans connections are prominently posted.
Adams asked her editors to prepare a 20-minute, safe-for-work highlight video of the team’s office work and group trips over the year, which the company provided in advance for the stadium’s approval.
Lawyers for her company and the Marlins held meetings to confirm the terms of the deal, Adams said, and her team exchanged weeks of calls and emails to give the stadium staff confidence that they were not intending to do anything inappropriate.
But Adams said she didn’t hear anything was wrong until Tuesday, when a Marlins staff member called to apologize and say that a company executive had nixed the event.
Adams said she offered to pay a $100,000 security deposit the team could keep if her company broke their end of the deal, or to cover the costs of additional staff to supervise the event. Adams said both proposals were denied.
Adams said the Marlins offered to refund her company’s $38,000 fee, but that she has yet to receive the money. The cancellation also came too late for them to get a refund on the private jet.
So on Wednesday, Adams, her parents and the rest of her company flew to Miami anyway, where they rented a 120-foot yacht for about $15,000. The highlight video they’d intended for the jumbo screen, she said, would instead be played on a laptop.
