Rebecca Bernardo, a Brazilian teenager is getting worldwide recognition after posting a video online.
Shopkeepers and school children in her remote Brazilian farming town giggle and point when Bernardo pedals by on her rusty red bicycle, but that’s only because they have seen (or heard about) a video that she posted online.
Wearing a sleeveless pink top and standing next to a mirror showing her profile as she speaks, Bernardo announces to the camera, “Hi, my name is Rebecca. I’m here to auction off my virginity.”
While many felt that Rebecca’s video was a spoof, apparently she’s DEAD “A”Zz serious!
Bernardo told CNN she posted the video because she desperately wants to help her ailing mother. Having heard tales of Catarina Migliorini, a Brazilian woman who reportedly sold her virginity for $780,000 on an Australian website seeking virgins, Bernardo felt it was a way to make some easy cash.
[FLASHBACK: WTF?!? Pregnancy From Oral Sex? It Can (And Did) Happen! ]
But wait… while Migliorini has never actually received the dough (she reportedly has yet to finalize the deal, and Brazil is investigating whether the website she sold her “virginity” on should be charged with human trafficking), what she HAS received is widespread publicity and modeling contracts, including a spread in Brazil’s version of Playboy magazine.
Clearly Rebecca Bernardo is seeking to follow in her footsteps, some way… some how…
Additional details + video below…
VIDEO: Girl Offers To Sell Virginity on YouTube!
A stroke left Bernardo’s mother bed-ridden, unable to feed herself or go to the bathroom alone
“I made up my mind right after my 18th birthday,” Bernardo said in an interview with CNN last month in her small, one-bedroom house.
Bernardo said she looked for jobs and tried selling cosmetics and working as a waitress, but without a high school degree, the pay was minimal.
“I would get 150 reais ($75) for working all day, which would just pay the salary of someone to stay with my mother,” she said, after patiently feeding her mother a plate of reheated spaghetti.
“There comes a time when you have to make decisions to get what you want. You have to be strong.”
About a month ago, she said she used a friend’s YouTube account to post the video of her offer, which she said got 3,000 hits on the first day.
YouTube has taken the post down and the account associated with it “due to multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement,” although it has been widely reposted on the video sharing site.
There are questions surrounding the authenticity of Bernardo’s altruism.
A Brazilian TV network offered to pay for her mother’s medical expenses if Bernardo called off the auction. While she initially accepted the offer during a television interview, she later rejected it because the network would not pay for a house in a different town where she could “start a new life.”
There are also questions about whether her offer to auction off her virginity is just a ploy to attract media attention that could lead to lucrative deals.
Bernardo said she has received several bids for her virginity — the highest one for 70,000 reais, or $35,000. [Sidebar: Prostitution is legal in Brazil.]
“When she started the auction, people in the street threw coins at her when she went by,” said a local mechanic. “But I never looked at her differently.”
Today, attitudes in Sapeacu are shifting, thanks in part to the national attention her story is getting.
Her neighbors seemed largely sympathetic, noting that Bernardo’s only sister died young and that she never knew her father.
“She had no one to go to, no one to help, so this is the only solution she found,” said one neighbor.
“Everyone has the right to decide what to do with their own body, even if that’s not the choice I would make,” said another.
But her mother, speaking with difficulty from her bed with her daughter sitting beside her, said she is devastated.
“It’s wrong, it’s wrong!” she said. “She should look for work, she shouldn’t prostitute herself.”
Yet, as her mother’s sole caregiver, Bernardo insists she has few options.
Are you surprised that this teen feels that “selling sex” is the only option?
Via: CNN