With her spine and ribs broken, 22-year-old Ukrainian influencer and OnlyFans model Maria Kovalchuk lies unconscious in a pool of blood. The young woman had been missing for 10 days, ever since she went to Dubai to participate, as sources report, in a sex party. As the 22-year-old fights for her life, the emirate’s police determine that she “entered a construction site and fell from a great height” and her parents claim that she was “trying to escape from some people”.

Somehow, “porta potty” parties, sex slaves, torture and other things that often result in serious injuries in Dubai have become the number one conversation around the world.

This sick world is not unknown in Greece, of course. “On Fridays,” an airline executive observes in “THEMA,” “the planes for flights from Athens to Dubai are full of influencers and models who are paid handsomely to satisfy the perversions of those who…order them.” But how sick, really, is this world? What could these perversions involve and why are the influencers who participate paid so dearly?

Kardashian-style vacations

Portable toilet. This is the term “porta potty” used to describe the parties that have been taking place in recent years in Dubai and beyond. The weekends of sick parties alternate between dream vacations in Dubai, the luxurious life in a country with almost zero crime during the day, and the absolute degradation of human existence at night.

Turning girls into human toilets, forcing them to have sex with animals, beatings, imprisonment, hair cutting with a razor, and mutilations are just some of the things that are on the menu of these parties organized and attended by wealthy locals and powerful foreign businessmen. These parties look like something out of a sick snuff film.

And yet, everything starts very innocently and ends very “sweetly” in this “experience,” which, as the girls who have lived it describe, changes them, marking them for life. The young -often underage- beautiful girl opens an account on TikTok or Instagram. There she finds that she can quickly gather followers who admire her beauty.

She tries to make money by advertising company products from her account, but finds that it is too difficult to make it a permanent profession. So, she moves to Only Fans, expecting that by exposing herself naked she will be able to earn hundreds of thousands of euros easily and quickly. What she does not know, however, is that, according to the platform’s data, 80% of the girls who have an account do not earn more than 200 dollars a month.

When a person is immersed in disappointment, it is not difficult to fall victim to the glamour. Usually, the people who take on the responsibility of communicating with influencers and models generously offer what their future victims are looking for: Kardashian-level vacations, accommodation in some of the most luxurious hotels in Dubai, transportation in ultra-luxury limousines and – prepaid of course – shopping at the heaviest and most expensive fashion names there. And all this with the advantage of the hotels and shops tolerating the videotaping, so that the influencer can convince her audience that she was paid by the businesses to advertise them.

Previously, of course, the details of what will happen at the party and the remuneration have been agreed upon, with the participants signing very well-documented NDAs (non-disclosure agreements). They are also informed by lawyers that Dubai law (although recently changed to allow premarital relationships) can send them to prison if it is proven that they are adulterous or that they have sexual intercourse with a married man. The latter in itself is a disincentive for any complaint to the Authorities, along, of course, with the contracts that have been signed. There is also the unwritten rule that what happens in Dubai stays in Dubai.

The rates

After the tour (i.e. the tour of Dubai and the shopping, usually worth 10,000 dollars and more), it’s time for the “work”. The rate starts at 10,000 euros and goes up to over 100,000, depending on the beauty of the model, the influencer’s recognition, the services she will offer and the identity of the client. The average fee for participating in a porta potty party, however, ranges between 30,000-50,000 euros (depending on the negotiation, but also on the… trend of the time, as, for example, a few months ago the party organizers were frantically looking for girls from Lagos, Nigeria).

The clients, usually millionaire Arabs or businessmen of other nationalities, pay well to make their wildest fantasies come true either with girls they admire on social media or -mainly- with girls next door of all nationalities.

This is also the reason why the girls who will participate in the parties are recruited primarily on social media and secondarily on OnlyFans. And this -as well as the fetishes that the influencers are asked to satisfy- also justifies the very high rates compared to professional escorts who are paid from 1,000 dirhams (about 250 euros) per hour. “It’s a common secret,” a Greek man who lives between the Emirates and Athens tells “THEMA,” “that on weekends all luxury escort agencies in Athens are almost completely closed, as they try to meet the demand from Dubai.”

On the other hand, it is no coincidence that professional luxury escorts usually do not participate in such parties, which are rarely organized in villas and more often on huge yachts or in tents in the middle of the desert. In any case, all measures are taken to ensure that there is not even a shred of evidence of what happens at these parties for the police and judicial authorities of Dubai.

At the largest porta potty parties, the organizers create “worlds”. That is, they recruit influencers from all over the world who stand – or hang – all night until the guests decide which ones will be chosen for… use. Then, the horrific torture begins, in front of which the beatings seem very innocent… According to what well-known influencers have described, with additional amounts ranging from 10,000-20,000 euros per act, the most common is to turn them into human toilets.

And if consuming human feces doesn’t seem like enough, these parties describe humiliating acts and torture such as head shaving, tooth extractions with pliers, teeth breaking from beatings, cigarette burns and hanging from metal hooks, suffocation with straps, nooses and bags, but also gang rapes, forced swallowing of feces, treating people like rugs (!) or as objects that are (literally) thrown into the garbage or into the sea, from where they are later collected.

The masters

Other influencers have reported being paid up to $50,000 a day for a two-week stay in a mansion where they would accept…daily torture. These include sexual acts with animals, from dogs to horses and camels and much more. In any case, each girl – and more rarely boys, since they are not selected for this…job – is assigned, as it is called, a “sponsor”.

This is essentially the “master”, who also chooses the daily torture to which the victim will be subjected and is responsible for the reward. A participant in a porta potty party reports that her sponsor chose the animal with which she would have to come into contact daily.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” say those who know about these dark parties, emphasizing that in some of the…best case scenarios, the girls were forced to perform sexual acts with underage relatives of their sponsors and ended up with their physical and mental health damaged.

Some of the complaints about these parties are even branded. For example, London tiktoker Saint Mullan published the messages she exchanged with a person who introduced herself as a representative of a powerful Dubai figure and offered her a trip to the city to participate in a party on a yacht, where she would satisfy the figure’s strange sexual tastes (which she mentioned).

Injuries

The big issue, however, is not so much the consensual acts between minors as the allegations of trafficking, serious injuries, and even deaths of women who were lured into this dark game. “All that is being discussed today about porta potty parties in Dubai has been happening all over the world for decades. Of course, in Greece too, usually on yachts in the open,” says a worker at a luxury escort agency. And he explains that the real danger is that many influencers trust complete strangers who promise them unrealistic fees for a trip to Dubai and ultimately end up falling victim to trafficking.

Whether it turns out that 20-year-old Ukrainian Maria Kovalchuk was the victim of a party gone wrong, or something else (Dubai Police has a video showing her climbing onto the construction site alone), rumors abound of serious injuries to women who participated in such parties or who refused to proceed and were even abused to the point of death.

In other cases, there are many complaints about scammers who send messages to unsuspecting women, posing as representatives of modeling agencies or associates of powerful businessmen, even sheikhs. Their aim is to make potential victims believe that they will be paid handsomely if they consent to acts such as porta potty parties, in order to lure them, kidnap them and turn them into victims of trafficking. And this is the beginning of a nightmare that usually has a tragic ending.