To put this very plainly at the start: We believe our company has been discriminated against by Cam4 because our models are black.
I sent the below email to Cam4, (only removing personally identifiable information), and I'm pasting it here for context:
Our business and none of our models have ever done business with Cam4, so there is no track record with us. We provided a ton of company documents (we're a US based company) - everything from formation documents, to operating agreements, US drivers licenses and many other docs to prove we are a legitimate company with a proven track record.
Then our studio account was Approved and began onboarding models! Yahh! ... or so I thought.
Cam4 then send us this email:
We work with models all over the world, and the first group that we began onboarding accounts for were black models, and only after the first model began to stream that within 30 minutes did everything change, and our accounts change from a studio account, to a normal user account.
The account had been approved and we were operating- I was creating models underneath our studio account, and then the only change was that our first model began streaming, and we were submitting docs for the onboarding the others.
It's a real shame that in this day and age this racism (let's call this what it is) is still as pervasive as it is.
After this me and several of our models began looking through their website and realized that the representation of black models is severely underrepresented. We realized in that moment that we aren't the only ones that they have discriminated against - they've obviously been doing this for a long time, and this broke our hearts.
We don't need Cam4 to operate, and we'll be just fine with the many other sites that we stream on, but we had hoped our industry was more progressive than this and that company's were better.
At this point, we feel like if this is how Cam4 operates; that we dodged a bullet by it happening this early in our partnership.
They didn't leave us any option for recourse, but we wanted to end this on a positive note for ourselves. Our company is predominantly strong black women, and even though we aren't enough for Cam4, we are enough.
I hope this message reaches others so they can know our story, and hopefully allows someone else who goes through the same thing to know you aren't alone, we are with you, and we will prevail. We must vote with our dollars, and I for one will drive as much traffic to their competitors as I can, and I encourage you all to as well.
If you stuck around this long, thanks for hearing us out and our hope is that maybe this gets seen somewhere within the Cam4 ranks, and maybe we can change the tide for future people of color.
I sent the below email to Cam4, (only removing personally identifiable information), and I'm pasting it here for context:
Our business and none of our models have ever done business with Cam4, so there is no track record with us. We provided a ton of company documents (we're a US based company) - everything from formation documents, to operating agreements, US drivers licenses and many other docs to prove we are a legitimate company with a proven track record.
Then our studio account was Approved and began onboarding models! Yahh! ... or so I thought.
Cam4 then send us this email:
We work with models all over the world, and the first group that we began onboarding accounts for were black models, and only after the first model began to stream that within 30 minutes did everything change, and our accounts change from a studio account, to a normal user account.
The account had been approved and we were operating- I was creating models underneath our studio account, and then the only change was that our first model began streaming, and we were submitting docs for the onboarding the others.
It's a real shame that in this day and age this racism (let's call this what it is) is still as pervasive as it is.
After this me and several of our models began looking through their website and realized that the representation of black models is severely underrepresented. We realized in that moment that we aren't the only ones that they have discriminated against - they've obviously been doing this for a long time, and this broke our hearts.
We don't need Cam4 to operate, and we'll be just fine with the many other sites that we stream on, but we had hoped our industry was more progressive than this and that company's were better.
At this point, we feel like if this is how Cam4 operates; that we dodged a bullet by it happening this early in our partnership.
They didn't leave us any option for recourse, but we wanted to end this on a positive note for ourselves. Our company is predominantly strong black women, and even though we aren't enough for Cam4, we are enough.
I hope this message reaches others so they can know our story, and hopefully allows someone else who goes through the same thing to know you aren't alone, we are with you, and we will prevail. We must vote with our dollars, and I for one will drive as much traffic to their competitors as I can, and I encourage you all to as well.
If you stuck around this long, thanks for hearing us out and our hope is that maybe this gets seen somewhere within the Cam4 ranks, and maybe we can change the tide for future people of color.
