Who Is Piper Rockelle? 14-Year-Old Pink Accused of Being ‘Exploited’

Piper Rockelle is a YouTuber with over 8 million subscribers.

Piper Rockelle is a 14-year-old social media star, musician, and content creator with over 8 million subscribers on YouTube. Recently, the singer Pink tweeted about photos posted on Rockelle’s official Instagram account that showed the teenager in a bikini, alleging that she was being “exploited” by her parents. 

Rockelle’s life has been documented online since 2011, when photos of her when she was around 4 years old were posted on Instagram. Now, she’s the center of a full-fledged YouTube channel in which she appears alongside family and friends, posting pranks, challenges, and vlogs to millions.

From early YouTube videos showing how to make slime to starring roles in web series, here’s how Rockelle became one of the most famous teenagers online.  

Piper Rockelle began making content on YouTube in 2016.

The first publicly available video on Rockelle’s YouTube channel was posted on November 29, 2016, and shows her — then approximately 10 years old — making fluffy slime from scratch. The video has amassed over 4.6 million views. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb10s-L3GuA

Her subsequent early videos are focused on dance, crafts, and toys. Around the same time in 2016 and 2017, it appears that Rockelle posted on Musical.ly, the music-focused video app that eventually merged with and became TikTok in 2018. Rockelle’s current TikTok account appears to have been created in April 2020. 

Posts on Rockelle’s official Instagram account, which has 4.8 million followers, date back to her early childhood beginning in 2011. The account’s description says that it is managed by family.

Rockelle has also released several pop singles.

In addition to appearing in web series, Rockelle has also released several singles, beginning with “Treat Myself,” which came out in November 2019. 

Since then, she’s released other tracks including “Sidewalk,” “Bby i….,” and “Yesterday.“

Rockelle’s YouTube content is now primarily based on social media challenges.

Rockelle’s YouTube channel has 8.29 million subscribers. Many of her videos over the past several years have been vlogs and social media challenges, particularly ones she does with her friends (referred to as “The Squad”) and boyfriend Lev Cameron. 

“Shalom guys, I hope your day’s been good but better watching this video,” Rockelle says at the top of many of her videos before launching into the main event. 

Her channel, per its about page, shows Rockelle and her family and friends doing “crazy challenges, boyfriend challenges, crush challenges, 24 hour challenges, last to challenges” and others, in addition to DIY, make-up, and tutorial content. 

Rockelle denied that she had been “exploited” by her parents after Pink tweeted about photos of Rockelle in a bikini.

On Sunday, the singer Pink, whose real name is Alecia Beth Moore, tweeted about photos of Rockelle in a bikini that were posted onto her official Instagram account.

“How many kids like Piper Rockelle are being exploited by their parents?” the singer tweeted. “And at what point do the rest of us say … ‘this isn’t okay for a 13 yr old to be posing in a bikini whilst her MOTHER takes the photo?!?!'”

—P!nk (@Pink) August 29, 2021

In an interview with TODAY Parents, Rockelle said that “pictures of teenagers in bikinis having fun are not sexual,” but only are “if you view us that way.” 

She and her mother also pushed back against the tweet in a statement to Insider. Rockelle’s mother Tiffany told Insider in an emailed statement that she wanted to support her daughter’s passions and “protect” her. 

Rockelle also told TODAY Parents that she didn’t believe Pink had watched her YouTube videos, because “if she did, she’d see it’s just my friends and me having fun and acting like ourselves.”

Courtney Stodden appeared to support Pink’s criticisms.

Courtney Stodden, a former model who said that they were groomed as a child, also weighed in on Pink’s tweet concerning Rockelle.

“It’s hard for children to separate attention they receive online from predatory behavior from adults,” Stodden wrote in the caption of an Instagram post on Tuesday. “It’s our responsibility as a society to step up and protect our kids as much as we can from falling victim to this cycle of digital grooming. As adults, we can see what they can’t.”

A post shared by Courtney Stodden (@courtneyastodden)

Stodden married actor Doug Hutchinson when they were 16 years old. Hutchinson was 51 at the time. In March 2020, Stodden announced that they had divorced.

In an interview with The Daily Beast earlier this year, they referred to Hutchinson as a “groomer” and “predator.” In the interview, they said that it took a “really, really long time to understand what happened to [them]” and that they were “still going through the repercussions of being groomed.”

Read more stories from Insider’s Digital Culture desk.