Cara Cunningham

Early life Cunningham was born Christopher Cunningham in East Tennessee to a teenage couple and was raised by her grandparents. Cunningham continued to live in Tennessee throughout her youth, and was homeschooled in response to constant "death threats, bullying and glares at her clothes and makeup" Cunningham lived with her fundamentalist Pentecostal grandparents who continued raising her when her teenage parents were not able. While her grandfather reportedly knows little about her Internet fame, her grandmother has reluctantly appeared in some of her videos.

Internet career Cunningham is best known for her Britney Spears video, uploaded to YouTube on September 10, 2007. The first part of the infamous work was posted September 9, 2007, called "Leave Britney Alone pt.1" to her MySpace page, while the better-known "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!" (part 2) was posted to both Myspace and YouTube. In "Leave Britney Alone pt.1", an emotional Cunningham stated that she did not want fellow Southerner to spiral out of control like Anna Nicole Smith, who had died in February 2007. , the video had been viewed over 35 million times and had accumulated a total of over 500,000 comments. It is just a few seconds shorter than the second part, and Cunningham, although emotional, remains relatively calm and composed, becoming teary only at the very end.

In the videos, Cunningham condemns gossip columnists such as Perez Hilton and reality TV star Simon Cowell who criticized Britney Spears' onstage music performance at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas. Within the first 24 hours of its posting, the video had accumulated over 2 million views. "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!" was one of YouTube's fastest "climbing" videos, reaching the minimum seven million views needed to be included in the "Top 100". The video was nominated in the Commentary category in the 2007 YouTube Awards. The video received worldwide attention and earned Cunningham interviews on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, The Today Show, Maury, The Howard Stern Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Ryan Seacrest's KIIS-FM morning show. Cunningham and her video were also commented upon in the mainstream media by shows like The View and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. YouTube said "the melodramatic two-minute clip made [Cunningham] an instant YouTube star" and named it one of the top videos of 2007. Wired magazine named it the top video of 2007. Cunningham indicated that she hoped to develop her acting career; she agreed to develop ideas for a TV show with Los Angeles producer Glenn Meehan and met with representatives from MTV's gay-themed channel LOGO. Rasha Drachkovitch, the production company's co-founder, stated, "It's going to pretty much be the Chris Crocker experience. We consider [her] a rebel character that people will find interesting. [She's] going to be a TV star."

Although sometimes shown in conjunction with news footage of Spears' performance, the "pure performance art" video became its own story, with the news media and the gossip industry offering opinions on the phenomenon, joking that Cunningham could be "an insidious satiric mastermind" and comparing her to Andy Kaufman. In the video, Cunningham proclaims, "All you people care about is readers and making money off of her. She's a human! Leave Britney alone!" Cunningham stated that although she is often acting in her videos, her emotions were genuine and "straight from the heart"; although she described the clip as a "second take" in one interview, she clarified on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that she meant that it was the second part of a longer video, the first part being "Leave Britney Alone pt. 1".

The "Leave Britney Alone!" video became a satire target, with parody videos, references in mainstream television spoofs, and films. Some video responses characterized Cunningham as a drama queen, and Wired magazine stated that the video "sent world Schadenfreude levels zooming to heights unseen since the Fatty Arbuckle scandal." The January 2008 parody film Meet the Spartans used pop culture references and met with generally poor reviews; the Electronic Urban Report called Cunningham's cameo the "film's funniest moment". Both Cunningham and the video were also parodied in the South Park episode "Canada on Strike", with a cartoon Cunningham running around in a fight between various Internet memes, telling them to "leave the others alone". In March 2008, a trance remix dance single "Leave Britney Alone" was released on iTunes and other sites by "Double J" featuring quotes from Cunningham's video.

While numerous news and media outlets reported on the viral video, Fox News Channel's morning program Fox & Friends commentators questioned Cunningham's gender and compared the fabric backdrop in the video to Osama bin Laden's videos. Cunningham produced two response videos – Poor FOX "News".. and Rosie O'Donnell was right about FOX "News" (originally posted as "Dear Fox 'News'") – addressing what she characterized as biased treatment while she called Fox News the "Republican, conservative, homophobic channel". Cunningham's stated concerns were the commentators calling her a "she/he" and what she felt was needless questioning of her gender instead of commenting on the content of the video.

In February 2021, Cunningham created an OnlyFans account.

Other ventures

Cunningham has been involved in various projects. In a June 2007 autobiographical comic strip, where she discusses future plans, she states, "I'm going to make the leap from living with my Pentecostal grandparents to living with drag queen roommates. I'm going to star in my own TV show. I'm going to make the leap from outhouses to bathhouses...to my very own house." In October 2007, Cunningham opened Fox Reality channel's "Reality Remix Really Awards". Cunningham was one of Lily Allen's Internet correspondents on the February 2008 premiere episode of BBC's Lily Allen and Friends where she posed questions for the guest celebrities, in this case David Mitchell and later, Cuba Gooding, Jr. On May 23, 2008, rock band Weezer released a viral music video for their song "Pork and Beans" – "a natural anthem for the self-expression that's been taking shape on YouTube" – which featured various mash-ups of viral videos and YouTube celebrities, including Cunningham, all playing themselves. On May 22, 2009, Cunningham made a video showing a Grammy plaque that she received for her contribution to the band's video. On July 9, 2009, Cunningham appeared on the Comedy Central show Tosh.0.

Cunningham released her first single, "Mind in the Gutter", in 2008. She released her first EP titled The First Bite digitally on iTunes March 19, 2011. "I Want Your Bite" was then released as the second single. Later that year, Cunningham released the songs "Second to None", "Tug of War", and "Taking My Life Back". In 2012, Cunningham released the songs "Locked Up Lovers" and "Lucky Tonight". Cunningham's second EP, Walls Down, was released on March 14, 2013, under her new stage name Chris Cunningham-Crocker. The EP is a departure of her previous dance style, mainly consisting of ballads and features a duet with her mother. The first single from the EP, "Breaking Up", was released on January 24, 2013. Cunningham announced in August 2011 that a film documenting her life over the past few years would be released, titled Me at the Zoo. The film also explores how video sharing and social media have shaped the way people share her stories and go about her lives. On January 17, 2012, HBO Documentary Films secured the US broadcasting rights to the film. and on HBO on June 25, 2012.

In July 2011, it was announced that Cunningham had been signed by Chi Chi LaRue to appear in a pornographic film. She made her adult film debut in October 2012 for Maverick Men. In 2014, Lucas Entertainment digitally released Chris Crocker's Raw Love, which features Cunningham in a scene with her then-boyfriend Justin Dean. Cunningham stated that acting in porn was going to be more than a single event; "it was going to be the porn and then a website, with the same companies." She said she was focused on setting up a future with her then-boyfriend and getting a house and a mortgage. "I said, 'Well if I'm going to do it, then let's make it worth it.' So, then we broke up a week before the porn came out. So then, yeah, it kind of ended." She added, "You have to contractually, and things, promote a porn. So I regret doing it with my ex more than I regret doing it in general." She said she could do porn again, but wondered how she would extend that into a viable career. "here is the reality show? And where are the people that have seen how interesting my life is? Not that many people were, like, the first of their kind to be an Internet celebrity—what happens after that?" she said. "What happens after you extend your 15 minutes of fame to 30 minutes of fame, and it's six, seven years later, and you're still living at home in Tennessee? I think that's an interesting story, a little more than Honey Boo Boo." She said that while living as an "everyday guy", she wanted to see if she liked the experience, but that she was unhappy living that way and it did not work because that is not who she is.

Onch promotional deal and lawsuit In October 2007, TMZ reported that Cunningham was being sued by Onch Movement Jewelry for $1 million for fraud and breach of contract, and provided a copy of the civil complaint filed in Los Angeles. Jewelry designer Nelson Chung, professionally known as Onch and a fan of Cunningham, hired her as a celebrity spokesmodel for more than two days' worth of publicity work as well as appearance at World of Wonder's Just Britney art show in exchange for airfare. It was speculated by DMW Media that Cunningham had no legal representative as the agreement seemed unbalanced. Cunningham did make appearances including at gay club Rage and the art show where she was interviewed by MTV showing artwork of her in homage to Spears. Onch's YouTube channel also posted videos of appearances which were later removed.

Relationships Cunningham announced her engagement in January 2025, but later called it off.

Politics Although she was previously against President Donald Trump, Cunningham announced support for him in 2024, citing his anti-establishment views, political correctness, and culture wars, among other factors.

Image and style Cunningham's uncensored vlogging has been attributed to her isolation as an "effeminate, Southern, flamboyantly gay" adolescent in a "small-minded town" in the Bible Belt." She added, "We don't have pride and rainbows here. We have MySpace. We don't have bathhouses, we have outhouses."

Cunningham's earliest experience with online networking was as an editor of an e-zine, where she met her first boyfriend, with whom she was only able to interact online and by phone. Cunningham later found another online forum, where her acting skills helped her blend in on a free phone party line run out of Los Angeles "filled with flaming black men, black drag queens, and [transgender people] from Compton", where she was outed as white and dubbed "cracker".

Cunningham believes that the Leave Britney Alone! video and performing in porn have hurt her chances of pursuing an acting career. "A lot of people think the Britney video is what got me famous and what gave me all these opportunities, but if I were to have gone to L.A. as an unknown actor—I probably could have gotten a lot more work." She said, "I don't regret it necessarily; I think it just gives me more hurdles to overcome... Which, you know... and obviously doing the porn thing didn't necessarily help me." Cunningham described the porn aspect as having tarnished things, but said that it is up to her "to make those little calculated moves". "It kind of created a whole other box that I have to overcome," she stated. "But when you're known as the Britney-boy, or you're in a '15 minutes of fame' box, it's very interesting, because the offers start coming at you really quick. And when they dwindle, you don't know what to do."