Elena Maraga is a sweet infant room teacher at a Catholic nursery, spending her days rocking infants and supervising tummy time—but at night? She’s an OnlyFans content creator making bank by selling access to saucy images of herself. Unfortunately for her, a few of the parents at the school she teaches at happened upon her OnlyFans page, and the pearl-clutching soon began. Elena Maraga’s side hustle may have caused quite the scandal in small-town Italy, but is it really all that scandalous?
First of all, one doesn’t simply fall sideways into a creator’s OnlyFans page. In order to access a creator’s page, you have to have their direct link. Whether you’ve hunted it down on another social media platform or done some deep internet digging, you have to want to find an OnlyFans page in order to see it. And even then, finding out that the page exists isn’t enough. To actually see the content, you have to subscribe. So those parents at the Catholic school may have filed complaints against Maraga for her OnlyFans page, but did no one think to ask them what they were doing there in the first place?
To access the content they raised such a fuss about, parents had to subscribe to Maraga’s page—meaning they had to pay to access the materials she shared there, participating in the exact activity they were angry with Maraga for. That’s more than a little bit of a double standard. Even if they only subscribed to have their big “gotcha!” moment at the nursery teacher’s expense, by forking over their credit card, they were still financially supporting a system they claim is immoral. Moral outrage hidden behind a paywall is still hypocritical—so who’s really in the wrong here?
Here’s the deal: Elena Maraga loves her day job. Being a teacher and caretaker of infants is something she’s passionate about and finds personally fulfilling. She understands the importance of early childhood development and knows what an honor it is to be part of a child’s learning journey from the very beginning—but her teacher’s salary isn’t enough for her to live on. She turned to OnlyFans for financial stability so she could continue teaching the age group she loves, not because she was seeking fame or easy cash. If Catholic schools really want to keep their teachers on staff—and off adults-only platforms if it’s really such a big deal to them—they should maybe try paying their teachers a living wage. Just as an experiment. See what happens when you pay educators according to the value they provide—they might just be more willing to adhere to outdated moral norms. Society in general undervalues educators—women especially—so Elena is far from the first teacher to turn to OnlyFans when she realized she needed to make more money to cover her expenses.
While Elena Maraga is now suspended from the school she works for, the priest connected to the school took a surprisingly long time to make the decision to do so—which is weirdly chill for the Catholic Church. Maybe, just maybe, those running the school see the hypocrisy in parental complaints against a teacher doing what she had to in order to make ends meet? We can dream—and continue to hope that a door has been left open for progress to be made.
The takeaway here? If your kid has a teacher they love who’s serving them well, maybe don’t hunt down their OnlyFans and tattle on them to the archdiocese. It takes infants a while to acclimate to a new caregiver, and now an entire room of tiny humans has lost a teacher who loved them—because Italian Karen was ticked that Elena Maraga looks good in lingerie. It’s long past time to start paying teachers of all age groups what they’re worth—or at the very least, stop blaming women for finding creative ways to pay the bills.
