Alright, I think I’ve done enough artistic self-indulgence. I’ll go ahead make an effortpost for my A&R man at VIACOM who has been harassing me for a single. OK, fine. Here's a slow jam for the ladies.
So today, we are going to go over Kelly’s pre-cult lore. You could consider this an origin story. This is as much pre-cult lore that I know which is admittedly incomplete. I didn’t know Kelly for that long and I don’t think I ever sat her down and said “Tell me you life story”. What I know about her life before she met me is based on a few dozen scraps of information, much of which was said in passing and only once. There are huge gaps in my knowledge of her backstory.
I have been loath to talk about this earlier because I feared it may cause some people to feel a degree of pity or perhaps even sympathy for her when she deserves neither. But the fact is that once upon a time, she may very well have been a messed up kid with social anxiety and self-esteem issues who was. Maybe. Or she may have just been a less destructive version of what she did now.
But seeing that tere are people reading this whose lives have been affected by Kelly (and in almost all cases, for the worse), it might help those people make sense of their pain to know where this bitch came from and why she is the way that she is.
There are three things that you must know About Kelly Simmers to have any hope of understanding her.
- She is an only child and has Only Child Syndrome in spades.
- She is a girl with mom issues larping as a girl with dad issues. She actually had issues with both of her parents but IMO, her mom issues are more explanatory for how she is.
- She was a very late bloomer.
Usually when you think o a girl who was a late bloomer, you think “Oh, so she didn’t get hot until college”. In Kelly’s case, she did not get hot until her mid-20s.
Part of it was that she didn’t get her look right until around then. I’ve seen older pictures of her with bad haircuts and it’s nothing to write home about. But then there was something else…
The question has often crossed my mind of what would have happened if I had met Kelly earlier, say before she entered prostitution or before she joined the cult. Could I have “saved” her? Would her sitcom now be in its 8th season?
I have no idea because apparently, she used to be a VERY different person than the girl I knew, never mind the person she is today. I shall explain.
I knew Kelly in 2011. She told me that when she moved to New York in 2007, she didn’t date anyone for the first year. I found that incredibly hard to believe because every comic in the NYC scene wanted to bang her and she’s telling me that 4 years before, she couldn’t get ANY guy? Sometimes attractive women will say things to downplay their hotness (“I was a nerd in high school”) to make themselves more relatable and less intimidating. I thought maybe it was something like that.
But then some time later, I talked to someone who knew Kelly during that year…
I actually have talked to a couple people who worked with Kelly at MTV. One was this girl named
Caity Quinn. Like Kelly, Caity spent some time dabbling in standup in the early 2010s. I became somewhat friendly acquaintances with her but she started at MTV shortly before Kelly quit and never got to know her that well.
But then there was one time I was at a party where Caity Quinn showed up with another friend from MTV and this one worked with her the entire time. I talked to her about Kelly for about 15 minutes. This girl told me that the people at MTV thought Kelly was “weird” and that they “felt sorry for her”.
Now, this girl knew Kelly a mere three years before I did and in the intervening years, apparently a pretty radical change in her personality occurred. She went from being the weird girl at work who couldn’t get a date to being the hottest chick in the New York comedy scene that everyone wanted to bang.
(I dearly wish I could have that conversation again because in hindsight, I now know that aside from Kelly’s mother, that is the only person that I have ever talked to who knew Kelly well before she joined the cult. At the time, I was like “Finally! Someone who knows who Kelly is that I can vent to” but if I could have conversation again knowing what I know now, I would do a lot less venting and more probing as to what Kelly was like. “Weird how?”
Alas, I don’t remember the girl’s name. I’ve been through Caity Quinn’s friend list and I have it narrowed down to two people but I don’t wanna say because I’m not 100% sure).
So how different was Kelly before joining the cult? First, I will go over how she was the same.
-The beginnings of her alcoholism started in college. She once told me a story of how she got drunk at a party and when she woke up the next morning, took a drink to kill the hangover and friend commented that was alcoholic behavior.
Kelly told me that her alcoholism really exploded after getting involved in prostitution/the cult as she used alcohol to get through her “dates”. People spiraling into addiction after falling into the clutches of the cult is a reoccurring theme (see Godwinson, Ethan Ralph). Kelly was a 24/7 drinker for the entirety of our relationship. It was
Leaving Las Vegas levels. I’ve known meth and heroin addicts who had more control over their addictions than Kelly had with alcohol.
-Kelly has always been “crazy”. She told me that when she was in college, she got arrested for public intoxication and when she was taken before the judge, she told him to go fuck himself. Soshe was already showing signs of unstable behavior.
-What about the pathological lying? One thing.
As I said, Caity Quinn did not work with Kelly Simmers for very long. She said the one prominent memory of Kelly is that one day she came into work and said that she had been mugged. Caity then asked me if the story was true in a way that suggested that people doubted her story.
That in turn suggested that
maybe she had a history of lying or making things up. If someone came into work and said they had been mugged, I would given them the benefit of the doubt because why would you lie about that? The only reason I would not is if they had a history of lying.
For the record, Kelly did tell me a story about someone hitting the back of her head and then stealing her phone although I’m not sure that was the same incident she was referencing.
-Kelly’s involvement in sex work while she was living in Los Angeles is a mystery. I don’t know if her porn was a one-off fluke or if it was in addition to other sex work. A any rate, she was at least already sex work curious when she moved to New York and it may very well be the case that it was an itch the she was inevitably going to scratch.
Los Angeles
I know very little about Kelly’s time in elementary school or high school other than that she did have friends, some of whom she was still in contact with in 2011. Kelly said that in high school she was shy and bookish,.
She studied English in college and initially aspired to be a writer. After college, she moved to Los Angeles and was there for about a year or so. This would have been from around late 2005 to early 2007 I think.
What the fuck happened in Los Angeles is something of a mystery.
The story she told me was that she followed her college boyfriend out to Los Angeles. I know almost nothing about the guy. Don’t know his name. Don’t know how long they date. Don’t know why they broke up. Kelly never told me about her porn so I don’t know if she did that with the guy’s knowledge, behind his back, or after they broke up.
All I know is that the guy was a hardcore Christian (I know, right?) and he was moving to L.A. for a job that was impressive but painfully normie. It wasn’t something cool like he was moving there to become an actor or get a record deal. It was like an engineering job or something like that.
So Kelly moves to Los Angeles for this hardcore Christian guy and by the end of her stay, she’s doing porn. What the fuck happened there? I have three and a half different theories.
Theory #1: It’s exactly what it looks like.
Case for: Kelly being a hardcore Christian until her mid-20s would explain a lot. An evangelical Christian would be seen as weird in New York and would have trouble getting a date no matter how attractive she was.
At least one person claimed that Kelly being a hardcore Christian was their most enduring memory of her.
It’s also notable that in her porno movie that she only masturbates. She does not have sex. It could be that this was the furthest that a porn groomer could go with a girl who believed that hell was a real place.
I actually can not confirm Kelly being in a sexual relationship before the age of 25. Her college boyfriend was a hardcore Christian, she didn’t have sex in her porno, and then she didn’t date anyone for the first year in New York. For all I know, she lost her virginity at age 25 via prostitution.
(This is why I think she is more of a "mom issues" girl than a "dad issues" girls. Girls with dad issues become promiscuous at a young age. Kelly's social anxiety and other quirks are more stereotypically "mom issues")
I will also say that I am from the Bible Belt who tried to be good girls and save themselves for Mr. Right. When they get into their 20s and give up waiting, they tend to become very promiscuous because they feel they need to make up for lost time and all those years spent as a wallflower.
Case against: Kelly herself personally denies this. She told me that she was a lifelong atheist and that while she would go to church with her mom, she never
truly believed. She was also a heavy drinker and swore so she was not exactly a goodie two-shoes.
The above could be a retcon. I mean it’s weird that a non-Christian girl would date a “hardcore Christian” guy. That brings me to my next theory…
Theory #2: Kelly stalked this guy out to L.A.
Knowing what I know now, I have to consider the possibility that this guy was never her boyfriend and she just followed out to L.A. because she is insane.
Kelly sold her parents her parents on the idea of moving to Los Angeles by telling them that there was a script writing class she wanted to take so apparently “Me and this guy are in love with each other” was not a convincing enough argument on its own.
In this theory, the “hardcore Christian” bit was a lie to explain why they weren’t living together. I don’t know if they were or were not. As I said before, she was roommates with the actress
Frankie Ingrassia while she was out there. Were all three of them living together? If he had such a fancy job, why would he need roommates?
(As an aside, there is a movie called
Ingrid Goes West about a girl who moves to L.A. to stalk her favorite Instagram influencer. That movie and
Shattered Glass starring Hayden Christiansen are the most accurate representations of sociopathy I have ever seen in a movie. It was hard to watch because it hit close to home. Highly recommended).
Kelly once told me that the appeal of prostitution was that in that world the guys chased after her whereas before, she was usually the one perusing the guys. This would suggest that this guy was someone she persued. Whether or not they were actually bf/gf, I think the dude was prepared to move L.A. with or without her.
Theory #3: Kelly was looking for any excuse to get out of Virginia
Theory #3.5: Kelly was looking for any excuse to move to Los Angeles
In this theory, Kelly started dating a guy that she knew was going to be moving to Los Angeles after college so that she could have an excuse to go with him. In the scenario, the fact that the guy is a hardcore Christian would help Kelly’s mother feel better about her going. “Don’t worry. I won’t do anything crazy out there. I’ll be there with a hardcore Christian!”
Is Kelly that femme fatale? Yes.
You might wonder how I ever ended up with Kelly in the first place. Another question to ask would be “Why would a $400-an-hour prostitute need a ‘normie boyfriend’ in the first place?”
The answer is that Kelly needed someone who could interact with her mother and reassure her that everything was going OK in New York. “Kelly’s doing fine. I’m watching her. Everything’s alright.” Because by 2011, I’m sure trust had broken down so significantly that Kelly’s mother no longer believed a word that came out of Kelly’s mouth and so she needed to hear those words from someone else.
It could be that Kelly destroyed her reputation in Virginia by being a psycho and need to get out. She destroyed her reputation at MTV and then ran away. She destroyed her reputation in the standup scene and then ran away. It’s also worth noting that Kelly said that her primary reason for getting into prostitution was that after quitting her job at MTV, she was afraid that her parents would make her move back to Virginia. Apparently not being in Virginia was very important to her.
(In Kelly’s defense, when she DID finally move back to Virginia, she caught a felony for strangling her mother in a Howard Johnsons so perhaps she was right for wanting to stay away)
Or it could be that Kelly, having gone to school to be a writer, needed an excuse to get to L.A.
While she was in Los Angeles, she set up a modelling profile which was still active as of a few years ago but I can’t find it anymore. I
think she told me that she took some kind of acting class while out there. So it appears to have done stuff that you kinda have to be in L.A. to do and while her main ambition was to write, she was open to entering the entertainment business through other means.
Her time in L.A. ended when her dad pulled some strings and got her a job at MTV working on the show Made.
MTV
Kelly’s time at MTV is as mysterious as her time L.A. but instead of the mystery being why she went there, it’s why she left.
She was there for a yearish (from 2007-2008), won an Daytime Emmy and then quit her job there without notice. As of 2011, quitting MTV was the biggest regret of Kelly’s life and yet I never got a straight answer as to why she did it. But I have a couple theories that are not mutually exclusive.
After we broke up, I spent some time asking myself “What are some red flags that I overlooked?” The one that stood out the most was that after 4 years in New York, Kelly did not appear to have any friends. There was incident in particular.
One time me and Kelly went to an open mic. Caity Quinn was on the mic and she had brought a bunch of friends from MTV to come see her. Kelly leaned over to me said “I used to work with all these girls.”
I said “Where?”
She said “At MTV.”
She then pointed towards one specific girl and said “I got in a feud with that girl over a guy.”
I asked her “Who won?”
“Won what?”
“Won the feud? Who got the guy.”
She smiled and said “I did”. She later said that the guy turned out to be an asshole which coming from Kelly could mean anything.
What was particularly noteworthy was that after the mic ended, none of Kelly’s coworkers wanted to talk to her. No “Hey, where ya been? What have you been up to?” She worked with all of those girls for a year and did not appear to be missed by anyone
The only person who did talk to Kelly was Caity Quinn who, as I said, did not work with Kelly very long and did not know her well as the rest. For her, I think it was mostly a matter of “Oh, there’s someone else I know who is also doing standup.”
So one theory for why Kelly quit was that it had something to do with that feud. If the other girl had a stronger claim on the guy and Kelly stole the dude away from her, that could have made her unpopular at the office.
The other theory is that someone found her porn and she quit her job out of embarrassment. It would have been a new release while she was at MTV. There are porn shops all over New York at it is entirely possible that someone saw her DVD cover and said “Hey, that’s that girl from work!”
Escorting
Kellys initial motive for getting into prostitution was to hide the fact that she quit her job at MTV. She told me that she worked for an escort service for four months. Her alcoholism exploded during this period and she told me that there were a few occasions when she was raped while passed out.
During this period, she started a relationship with Universal Music Group CEO Michael Tunnicliffe. Apparently it got serious enough that Tunnicliffe offered to leave his wife for Kelly but Kelly declined. Michael Tunnicliffe set Kelly up with her secret apartment which Kelly would then use for sex trafficking for the next 15 years.
The most enigmatic thing that Kelly ever said to me was “I would do anything to take those four months back. I could have asked my parents for the money and they would have given it to me but I was too stubborn”.
At first I thought “OK, she acquired emotional scars doing prostitution that time that still have not healed.”
But then I found out that she never stopped prostituting. She just stopped working for an escort service. Then I figured out she got recruited into the cult during that period and I thought “OK, during those four months, she got herself involved in something which she now couldn’t get out of”.
And yet to this day, I have not seen any evidence to suggest that she was ever anything other than an enthusiastic participant.
