The 10 biggest takeaways from The Age of Influence
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ABC News Studios' new six-part documentary The Age of Influence on Hulu tells the unfortunate stories of six influencers who, separate from one another, managed to exploit those close to them for huge sums of money.
The series examines the high-profile cases of scammers such as Danielle Miller, an identity fraudster who shared a cell with Anna Sorokin (of Inventing Anna fame); Tracii Hutsona, who emptied the college funds of her employer's children to support her own lavish, sub-Kardashian lifestyle; and Jay Mazini, a pseudo-Robin Hood who scammed the Muslim American community out of nearly $10 million before he kidnapped one of his close friends.
Across its six hours, The Age of Influence explores the lengths some people will go to achieve and maintain wealth, fame, or relevance. Whether they thought they'd get away with it — or that negative attention is just better than no attention at all — this docuseries deftly articulates how the internet can bring out the absolute worst in people.
Here are 10 major takeaways from The Age of Influence.
10. The Arizona Department of Child Safety ignored reports about abusive "momfluencer" Machelle Hobson
Self-proclaimed "Momfluencer" Machelle Hobson ran the "Fantastic Adventures" page on YouTube, a highly popular kids channel starring Hobson's seven foster children and produced by her two adult, biological children. Despite the Arizona Department of Child Safety being alerted 11 different times about abuse and neglect allegations against Hobson, no action was taken to remove the children from her custody.
"If this could happen on their watch, they need to ask themselves: 'What else have we missed and why have we missed this?'" says journalist Zach Crenshaw in The Age of Influence. "Because we don't know how many Machelle Hobsons are out there."
Hobson committed a number of stomach-churning acts of abuse to force the children to perform before she was finally arrested in 2019 and charged with 30 counts of child abuse and kidnapping. She was immediately remanded to prison out of fear that she would influence the children to believe that the allegations were false, which would then jeopardize her prosecution. "I have a whammy [that] the state of Arizona is going to be shocked at, when it comes to it," Hobson boasted to her father in a recorded jailhouse conversation.
Hobson, however, never made it to trial. She died while in custody at Honorhealth Shea Medical Center in Arizona. Hobson's foster children were all sadly relocated to separate homes. Despite the state's best efforts, they couldn't rehouse the siblings together.
9. A pregnancy announcement gave Camryn Turner a huge pay bump
"Motherhood is already… a competitive space. So when you add vlogging to that and numbers and comments, it is intense. Way more intense than anyone could imagine," says Camryn Turner, a "momfluencer" who runs the Cam&Fam YouTube channel. "When I announced the pregnancy of my second daughter, for a few weeks straight every video I posted had at least a million views. I was making around $30,000 a month. It became addictive."
While Turner isn't personally tied to any scandal, her insights on family channels and the influencer industry offer valuable context to what makes the money wheels turn. In her case, pregnancy astonishingly became her cash cow, and she's not alone. "There was definitely a lot of incentive to follow the trends, to keep up with what other people were doing," she says.
Unlike Hobson's house of horrors, Turner has managed to maintain her channel while adhering to her children's mental health. As opposed to the more scripted approach taken on Hobson's now-defunct "Fantastic Adventures" channel, Turner favors a more naturalistic style of content, which emphasizes her family's wholesome normality. Even so, the fact that her pregnancy led to a significant spike in online revenue is a revelation in and of itself.
8. Chris Vizo had his restaurant idea stolen out from under him, word for dirty word
Restaurateur Chris Vizo opened his Miami brunch hotspot Bacon Bitch in 2017 with a plan: "My goal was to make the word bitch okay. And I gotta tell ya, I think I did." Vizo's buzzy concept, in which staff and patrons alike were encouraged to greet each other with the five-letter word, immediately took hold in South Beach. That is, until a contact at Yelp notified Vizo that a San Diego woman named Tracii Hutsona had attempted to open a page for a restaurant called Breakfast Bitch.
Most appallingly, Hutsona did all of this after she applied for two franchise options. Vizo was incredulous. "I was like, how is she gonna deny this now?"
"She copied everything. I'm talking about the menu, the merchandise, the clothing. She started saying, 'Hey, Bitch,' to the customers which was a big point for me, because that was what made us who we were at the beginning."
However, Vizo was far from Hutsona's only target…
7. Tracii Hutsona emptied the college funds of Joumana Kidd's children
The former wife of Dallas Mavericks head coach Jason Kidd, Joumana Kidd employed Tracii Hutsona as her personal assistant from 2015-2019. The position gave Hutsona unprecedented access to the television personality's bank accounts, and even provided a document of security questions and answers should she need to access Kidd's accounts in a hurry.
After using her boss' information to open a credit card in Kidd's name, Hutsona racked up nearly $100,000 in fraudulent purchases. When the ruse was uncovered, Hutsona tearfully promised to pay back Joumana for everything she stole.
At first, this was true. The funds which Tracii used to pay back Kidd were originally the profits of Hutsona's newly opened breakfast restaurant, which shamelessly ripped off Chris Vizo's. But the rest of the cash was also Kidd's own, and that of her underage children's college funds. By the end of her string of scams, Hutsona had relieved Kidd of over $1 million.
Hutsona managed to pull off her scam by slipping a power of attorney form into a stack of documents that Kidd signed at some point during Hutsona's tenure as her assistant. When Kidd discovered this, she says: "That's when I completely removed [Tracii] from the 'human' category. I mean, what kind of person does that?"
Hutsona pleaded guilty to wire fraud last summer. In February, she was sentenced to four years in prison. Yet, there is still another victim who suffered from Hutsona's manupulation…
6. Hutsona also used actress Loriann Hart Flaherty's glamorous Hollywood past against her… and then tried to steal her husband
After meeting Hutsona in 2002, when their respective sons shared a first grade class, actress Loriann Flaherty gravitated toward the con artist as she felt Tracii could restore her lagging social standing in Los Angeles.
"My life had changed so radically since the time that I was young and single, hanging out with O.J. [Simpson] and Nicole [Brown] and Stephen Stills and Ringo Starr and all those people," says Flaherty in The Age of Influence. "I missed it! I saw in Tracii a glamor… She was cool, and makes you feel cool to be with her."
She was so enamored with Hutsona that, even after seven years of not speaking, Flaherty offered the recently paroled con her palatial guest house to stay in whilst rehabilitating herself. As Flaherty explains, once she took up residence, Hutsona began dressing provocatively around Flaherty's husband and her son — the very same son who went to school with (and was the same age as) Hutsona's own child. "She went from living in a prison cell for seven years, to moving into a 12,000-square-foot mansion in like one day," Flaherty marvels.
Yet despite being in a beautiful house and supported by a friend, Tracii could not help but exploit her situation. "[My husband] Vince and I had a really rocky relationship [at the time]. When Tracii came here she recognized that right away. And she would agree I was being disrespected," Flaherty admits. "Tracii would tell me Vince was a narcissistic piece of crap, and what a terrible person he was, and how I needed to get rid of him. And she wouldn't tell me exactly why she felt that way."
She continues, "And at the same time she told me how wonderful I was, and what a special person I am. For nine months I was being built up, loved, and respected, but I'm not really sure what she was doing behind my back."
The truth was even darker than Flaherty would have dared to imagine. Turns out, Tracii and Vince had been spending time together on the sly, leading Flaherty to believe her friend was trying to seize her husband, house, and life for herself. "I'm very angry and very hurt, to this day," she admits. "I still cry about it. It's that painful."
5. Anna Sorokin mentored Danielle Miller while they were cellmates at Rikers Island
One of the most tantalizing details revealed in Age of Influence is also one of the most fleeting. Upon arriving on New York's infamous holding prison Rikers Island, Danielle Miller was met by someone with an implacable accent beckoning her from across the room. It was Miller's much more famous (and, some would say, much more successful) counterpart Anna Delvey, née Sorokin, better known as the SoHo Grifter who posed as a wealthy heiress to access New York's high society and inspired the Netflix series Inventing Anna. Sorokin had an extra bed next to hers, and offered it to Miller so that the two kindred spirits could weather the storm at Rikers together.
Sorokin's act of kindness led to a bond between the two scammers during their shared time behind bars. Sorokin taught Miller how to survive the notoriously harsh holding center: Always take a bed on the back wall, never one exposed in the center of the room; braid your hair into cornrows, because prison will do a number on your hair (and the soap is subpar, anyway).
On the outside, Miller used her relationship with Sorokin and the jail survival tips to increase her street cred. Though Miller thought they would be friends for life, Sorokin was ready to move on once she got out of Rikers. After The Age of Influence runs a montage of Miller's social media posts, which feature screenshots of her and Sorokin on FaceTimes and references to their time in prison, Sorokin drops the hammer: "I wouldn't call us best friends," she coolly rebukes.
4. Danielle Miller was recovering from a BBL when she was arrested
One of the most satisfying revelations of the entire series lies in the first episode, which details the exhausting shenanigans of self-described con artist Danielle Miller. Miller ran a variety of scams, including the identity theft that landed her in Rikers, but the charges for which she is currently serving a five-year sentence in a Florida prison involves her bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in PPP loans. Miller spent this money on a luxury apartment in Miami, rented Rolls-Royces, and bought expensive handbags.
When federal agents finally moved to arrest Miller, she was recovering in said luxury apartment from Brazilian butt lift surgery with the help of two private nurses. They lured her downstairs with a call from the front desk saying they had a package for her.
When she exited her apartment, federal agents swarmed her home and arrested her for fraud while they searched the premises. "Because of the nature of the surgery, when they transferred her to prison, she was unable to sit down directly," recalls Gabrielle Bluestone, who wrote a New York Magazine profile on Miller. "So, the way she described it to me was: She had to be transported in a 'starfish' position."
For those who have managed to stay out of federal custody, a "starfish" position is when the arrested party is shackled standing, with their hands locked to the ceiling and their feet on opposite walls, letting them appear for all intents and purposes as… a starfish. It was the final flourish in the particularly tawdry case of Danielle Miller, who is currently serving five years in a Florida prison (and facing a laundry list of additional charges, for which she could serve up to another 30 years) for her crimes.
3. Jay Mazini turned to kidnapping when his fraudulent schemes were brought to light
Jebara Igbara, better known to his followers as Jay Mazini, ran a popular Instagram account where he posted videos featuring random and extravagant acts of kindness. Usually, these involved the no-questions-asked gifting of cash to bewildered fast food and retail workers. Mazini's page became so popular that rapper 50 Cent even joined him for one giveaway video.
After establishing himself as a modern-day Robin Hood, Mazini turned his attention towards defrauding members of New York's Muslim American community with false promises of a halal investment. (Halal means something permissible under Islamic teaching.) Mazini claimed to be using the nearly $8 million he acquired to purchase electronic items and hand sanitizer in bulk, which he would then resell for a profit. In reality, Mazini used this money mostly for the purposes of his own gambling.
Mazini then cooked up another scam to pay back his duped investors, this time claiming to buy cryptocurrency for below market value, doctoring wire transfer images to imply that he had sent the payments when in fact no money was ever sent.
But things soon took a dark turn. When Mazini's associate Amjad Mashal threatened to blow the whistle on this scam, Mazini arranged to have Mashal kidnapped. After a harrowing ordeal which saw Mashal stripped naked, whipped with an electrical cord, and threatened with a machete, Mazini and his co-conspirators abandoned Mashal in Passaic, N.J. Mazini and his co-conspirator, Ishimeer Allen, plead guilty in 2022.
In a twist fit for the movies, Mashal himself was indicted when he was charged in 2021 for attempting to accept a bribe of $100,000 to recant his own statement for the purposes of freeing one of his attackers from prison.
2. A little-known eating disorder may have driven Tyler Bauman to a life of crime
Operating as "musclehead320," bodybuilder Tyler Bauman created a colorful online persona as he took his followers through his journey to bulk up to 320 pounds. Much of Bauman's weight progress came as a result of using "gear," or steroids, with Bauman eventually selling the stuff himself. Well, sort of… it turns out Tyler was pushing counterfeit testosterone and laundering the money through his tanning salon.
There are several arguments made in Age of Influence to explain Tyler's descent into a life of crime: His hardscrabble upbringing in Worcester, Mass., his pursuit to support his family at any cost, and so on. Yet the most compelling supposition is that Tyler fell victim to a lesser-known eating disorder colloquially known as Bigorexia (a.k.a. muscle dysmorphia).
"Bigorexia is a body dysmorphic condition. It's reverse anorexia," explains fitness instructor Ryan Schmidle. "It's essentially men that suffer with obsessive compulsive thoughts [that] they're too small. Despite getting bigger, stronger, you have this insatiable feeling that you're just weak and feckless and small and useless. Body dysmorphia is… just as big for young men, young boys, growing up as it is for young women. Because social media doesn't discriminate, it pushes content like that to both sides of the equation. Everybody who has a social media account is going to be shown somebody that they think they should look like."
1. There are no workers' rights protections for child influencers working online
"If you want to be an influencer, social media allows families to bypass production studios, professionals of all sorts, and take matters into their own hands," says Leah Plunkett, author of Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online.
While there are child labor laws to protect children in Hollywood and on Broadway, Plunkett points out that there are very few protections for child influencers on the internet. "The commercial sharenting sector is largely unregulated. Child internet performers are really at the mercy of their parents in ways that are ripe for exploitation…You do not have an 8-year-old, no matter how talented they might be, on camera without a parent somewhere in the background.
"There are many sharenting parents who are not exploitative in the least; they are doing right by their kids. But there are bad actors out there that may be criminal and dangerous," Plunkett cautions.
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