Charli D‘Amelio — the reigning queen of TikTok — loves to dance. Whenever a new song comes on at this photography studio in L.A., Charli is shimmying her shoulders, shaking her hips. Now she stamps and turns like a flamenco dancer, swishing the skirt of her ruffly black gown. “So pretty, stunning,” says Emman Montalvan, the photographer snapping her. “Gorg!”
With her glossy black hair and sparkly smile, Charli is gorg. She’s the girl next door drawn by Disney; she’s the bright and shiny face of social media, making it all seem benign. “This is her before she becomes jaded,” Montalvan observes. “Nothing calculated. Natural. She reminds me of when Britney Spears was young.”
Rihanna’s “Breakin’ Dishes” begins to play. Charli mouths the words: “I don’t know who you think I am —”
“Are you having fun?” I ask, finding myself smiling. Because when Charli is happy, you feel happy — which is no doubt part of her appeal. You want to believe that a life spent dancing around in fabulous clothes and opening yourself up to a dizzying 160 million-plus followers (the second most on TikTok) really is as wonderful as it looks.
But a flicker of annoyance crosses Charli’s brow, as if the question touches a nerve. Maybe that’s because of how the algorithms are always demanding she offer up the semblance of a perfect life, the performance of joy, no matter the reality.
“Are you having fun?” she asks, flashing her diamond bracelet smile. Then she’s running gleefully down the hallway of the studio, followed by her social media manager, Alexa Davis, who films her nearly constantly with a DJI Osmo Pocket. When Charli’s having fun, there’s someone there to capture it.
***
Coming off a 10-month run in Broadway’s & Juliet — in which she sang and danced in the ensemble cast, earning some good reviews — Charli moved into a house in Valley Village, California, all by herself, earlier this year. The place represents something more than just a first home: At 22, Charli has separated herself professionally and financially from the family with whom she built her extraordinary career.
“I’m figuring out who I want to be,” she tells me, “and that’s what I’m really excited for.”
For years, Charli and her parents, Marc and Heidi D’Amelio, and her older sister, Dixie, seemed inseparable. They moved to L.A. together, signed with the same talent agency, started businesses, starred in a Hulu reality show. Charli was always the main attraction, the engine of an empire — consisting of brand partnerships, media ventures, a clothing line and more — all built on the image of a close-knit family. Now, amid public speculation that her parents mismanaged her money — which her father has denied — she’s trying to find out who she is apart from them. (None of the D’Amelios responded to requests for comment.)
The new place is her first house of her own. It doesn’t quite look like what you’d expect of a young woman who earns an estimated $18 million a year annually, according to Forbes. It’s a modest, almost nondescript two-story house on a tree-lined street, with a gate and security door, but nothing that screams “TikTok star.”
But then you get to the secluded backyard with its shimmering pool, immaculate lawn and big stone grill, and you see the dance studio with the neon sign: RED BULL DANCE YOUR STYLE. Red Bull, one of Charli’s sponsors, built it for her. She grew up promoting brands; now even her backyard comes with one.
“This is a very much a home,” Charli says, her voice soft and gentle as ASMR. She’s sitting cross-legged on the oversized wraparound couch in her big, open living room — her “safe space,” she tells me. She’s wearing Levi’s and a long-sleeved black Prada top (she’s an official friend of the house, so there’s Prada, Prada everywhere around her). Seventeen silver studs and hoops glint at her ears.
“Sometimes I just fall asleep here,” she says sleepily. “It’s so comfy, it’s a slippery slope.” She spends a lot of time alone, just being on her phone or watching her giant, wall-mounted TV. On the couch, there’s a pillow that says: JUST A GIRL WHO LOVES ORCAS. Charli says she likes the way they always win in a fight with sharks.
“Lame of a life as it may be sometimes, I love just to be at home and do nothing,” she says. “I’m surrounded by a lot of peace, which is something it took me a long time to realize I need to be comfortable.”
She’s been a bit of a “hermit” over the past year, she says, retreating from a life in which almost everything she did was potentially something to be shared. “I took my first break off of social media” between October and February, “which was a really tough decision — I was always told, ‘If you take a break, you can never come back’ — but I think mentally I was just in a place where I needed to stop working and figure out who I was.
“I started working full-time when I was 15,” she continues, “and once I started, it was, ‘OK, this is my life now.’ But the other side of it was, ‘This is all I’ve ever known.’ And I think it took me, really for the first time, taking a step back and being like, ‘Who am I? What am I? Do I have a favorite color? Do I have a favorite anything?’ I realized I didn’t really know anything about myself, and so I had to sit with the hard truth of like, ‘Who am I at night when everyone leaves and no one cares that I’m Charli D’Amelio,’ you know?”
Her dog, Rebel, a 12-year-old chocolate lab, stares up at her worshipfully.
The bloodshot eyes of the internet noticed, of course, when Charli took a break — not just from social media but seemingly from the family that had been so central to her identity. She hasn’t appeared publicly with her parents or her sister for about a year, adding to speculation of a rift.
In May, the gossip website Deuxmoi published allegations that Marc and Heidi had mismanaged Charli’s money. In June, Marc took to TikTok to deny these claims. “So a website said … we took money and put it offshore,” said Marc, sounding frustrated. “I wouldn’t even know how to do that. Come on, dude. This was never about money, it was about having this crazy, awesome experience with my family.”
And then in September, appearing on creator Quenlin Blackwell’s YouTube cooking show, Feeding Starving Celebrities, Charli was asked how much money she had made from a certain item of merch. “Mmm, ain’t that the question,” she responded, deadpan. “Wouldn’t I like to know.” The moment went viral, becoming a GIF. “Charli D’Amelio family drama” trended on TikTok.
***
Charli was just your average upper-middle-class girl, growing up in Norwalk, Connecticut, when TikTok made her famous overnight. She’d been dancing competitively for nearly a decade when, in May 2019, at age 15, she began posting videos of herself doing popular routines, “just like everybody else was doing.”
“My dream in life was to be a backup dancer,” she says. “I was like, ‘I want to go to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and join their dance team,’ because they’d won nationals. I’m a very type A person. I had a vision board — I had a whole plan. But then the plan went sideways.”
Five months after she started posting on TikTok, she had a million followers. By November 2020, she’d become the first TikTok creator to reach 100 million. Why her? Even Charli can’t explain it. “I think it was a mix of things,” she says. “Happy accident.” People watched her videos repeatedly to learn the choreography. “Also, when I started, I got just as much hate as I got love, so people were talking, arguing with each other.”
Enragement, as they say, drove engagement. People argued about Charli’s looks, her dancing, whether she deserved her fame. In 2019, she drew criticism for performing the viral “Renegade” dance to K Camp’s song “Lottery” without crediting its 14-year-old Black creator, Jalaiah Harmon. (Charli and pop star Addison Rae later performed the original choreography with Harmon, giving her proper credit.)
Then COVID-19 drove young people inside, where they were more often on their phones, and what better way to distract oneself from a pandemic than watching pretty Charli D’Amelio dance?
For a generation of girls, Charli represented the ultimate social media success story. You didn’t need a Hollywood agent — you could become famous in your bedroom, just by being yourself. The catch: Once being yourself became your job, you might never get to stop working.
Charli was about to become one of the most famous teenagers in the world while remaining remarkably powerless over her own life, she says: “I was a child, which I didn’t really get the significance of at the time, but I can see it very clearly now.”
In summer 2020, Charli moved with her family into a rented mansion in the Hollywood Hills. The relocation was her idea; she felt “there was a lot more I could be doing,” though she’d already appeared in a Super Bowl commercial and an ABC special. She and her family signed with UTA as a package.
Marc came from the apparel industry and had an unsuccessful run as a Republican candidate for the Connecticut State Senate in 2018; Heidi was a former model and personal trainer; and Dixie, three years older than Charli, was an aspiring singer. The family seemed to envision a Kardashian-esque enterprise, with Charli as its teenage Kim. Marc and Dixie launched their own TikTok accounts after Charli went viral. Everyone had a part to play in Charli’s newfound fame.
There’s a family story here that predates TikTok: A gifted child gets flooded with opportunities, and the adults around her see ways to capitalize on her appeal. Their involvement in her career, no matter how well-meaning, also gives them a say in her image and her decisions.
In the pilot episode of The D’Amelio Show (2021-2023), the family sits down to hear the business plan for the upcoming year. Greg Goodfried, a former UTA agent who became their manager, holds forth enthusiastically. On the floor are 23 binders — 23! — containing proposals for a slew of new business ventures.
Charli looks scared.
“Where is the binder where she gets to be a kid?” Heidi asks.
“I still have those binders,” Charli tells me wryly. “Twenty-three major projects in a year were agreed to. I had just turned 16.” (Goodfried did not respond to requests for comment.)
***
“I’m always grateful. I know I’m very lucky,” Charli says. “I don’t know what doing this without them would have looked like; I don’t know if I would have had this life.”
It’s a refrain she returns to, almost as if she fears that questioning what happened will be mistaken for ingratitude. One of the peculiar cruelties of fame for young women is that they must be grateful for it, no matter how much it hurts.
But lately she’s been reassessing what it meant to be a working child in the entertainment industry. “I was the youngest in every room I was in,” she says. “I was surrounded by people who were the best in the business, so you trust because that’s all you have — these people who are supposed to be guiding and helping you. But people are selfish, and that’s the sad reality.
“And people have bad intentions, too,” she adds. “You can’t be a trusting person. I’ve learned that the hard way.”
Rebel presses her nose against Charli’s knee. Charli pats it.
“There are not a lot of rules and regulations when it comes to people who do what I do,” says Charli. “I didn’t start learning about and getting involved in my financials until I was about 21. I’m very fortunate to be able to be living the life that I am, but I’ve also been working nonstop since I was 15, so I should have stuff to show for it.”
The laws protecting children in film and television evolved over decades in response to cases of exploitation. But the business of children making money on social media has grown faster than the rules protecting them. When parents are also business partners, who is looking out for the child?
Are the rumors true, I ask, about her parents mishandling her money?
“No, they’re not true,” Charli says. “I wouldn’t say that they stole my money.”
There’s a long pause.
“I think we did a lot of things as a family,” she says carefully.
***
Recently, Charli has been watching The D’Amelio Show for the first time. “It’s kind of like watching something I never lived,” she says. “It’s almost as if I’m figuring out what has happened in my life over these last few years. I was so disconnected in so many ways.”
I mention how flat and monotone she seems onscreen, nothing like the person talking to me now.
“I was like that. For years,” she says. “I kind of stopped talking. I stopped having a personality. I stopped doing much of anything because I had so much scrutiny from the outside world. It’s taken me to now to realize maybe I was dissociating through a lot of it.”
All 28 episodes of The D’Amelio Show come with mental health trigger warnings. Charli and Dixie are seen struggling with the unceasing abuse that comes with online fame. At one point, a viral post predicts Charli’s death. Grown men make vulgar, sexualized videos about her when she’s still a teenager. “It’s a scary world, and it was hard on me,” she says.
Her experience wasn’t so different from that of millions of girls negotiating a world of constant comparison and judgment — it was just on a much larger scale. Charli was the smiling face of a platform that amplified those pressures, twerking and twirling like the girl in The Red Shoes who couldn’t stop dancing.
To many of her fans, she represented the fantasy: beauty, popularity, incredible clothes, a seemingly perfect family, wealth that came from doing what she loved. Behind it was a girl overwhelmed by scrutiny. Adolescent girls had always been judged on their looks and popularity; what was new was the technology that could make the judgment relentless, public and profitable. Charli was both a victim of social media culture and one of its most effective advertisements.
“Have you ever seen The Matrix?” I ask.
“Is that the one where Keanu Reeves goes like this?” she says, doing the move where he dodges bullets in slow motion.
I tell her about the main character, Neo, who discovers his world is a simulation controlled by machines. “And then when he wakes up, he starts fighting back. You should watch it.”
“I love that, you’re giving me homework,” she says with a little laugh.
Charli had suffered from anxiety even before TikTok. “I was a kid when I started having severe anxiety,” she says. In third grade, bullies pulled her hair and shoved her into a bathroom stall, breaking two of her fingers. “That was the same age I started having anxiety, so maybe they are connected,” she says. “I never really thought about that before.”
On her reality show, her anxiety becomes a storyline. She describes having up to 15 panic attacks a day; viewers see her sob and break down in response to online hate. “But then I would get hate for showing my feelings,” she says. “You’re not allowed to be upset, you’re not allowed to cry, you’re not allowed to have any emotion, you can’t be angry.”
Part of the concept of the show was to expose the dark side of influencer fame — even as it made its underage star more famous. But while the show urged viewers who were struggling to seek treatment for their mental health, Charli feels she didn’t always get the help she needed.
“I went untreated for most of my life,” she says. “I had a life coach” from ages 16 to 19, “but I didn’t have a therapist. I probably should have had a therapist. I wasn’t medicated at all, even though I had ADHD, which I didn’t get diagnosed with until I was 18.” She was later also diagnosed with OCD and trichotillomania, a hair-pulling disorder associated with OCD and anxiety.
Her life was work. Due to her professional commitments, she dropped out of high school at 16, though friends back home in Connecticut made sure she went to prom. Meanwhile, she was having experiences some kids dream of, such as winning season 31 of Dancing With the Stars (along with her dance partner Mark Ballas) in 2022, when she was 18.
Her mother, Heidi, also competed that year. She came in eighth place.
***
Charli has been seeing a therapist lately. “I told my therapist,” she says, “one thing I don’t want to be is another statistic. I don’t want to be another kid who got thrown into Hollywood and let that ruin their life.”
The cautionary tales of child stardom, from Judy Garland to Britney Spears, have found a new breeding ground online. Charli’s generation doesn’t need studio executives to make them famous anymore, but the disappearance of the old gatekeepers hasn’t made children any less vulnerable to exploitation.
I ask what finally made her reconsider how she wanted to move forward?
“This is probably going to sound really crazy,” Charli says, “but I was doing Broadway” — & Juliet, a gig she’d chosen herself — “and it was the easiest thing I had ever done. And I did a good job. I showed up every day with a smile on my face, and I loved every second of it. And it reignited something in me, this love that I used to have” for dancing, performing.
She had moved to New York — without her family — and was living in Columbus Circle to be near the theater. After years of being the star, it felt like a “relief” to be part of an ensemble of dancers, some of whom became friends. For the first time in her life, she was on her own, and it felt good.
But then, when her run ended in September 2025, she says she became “the most depressed I’d ever been.” She rarely left her apartment and “didn’t see another human for a few months.” She went off social media and decided it was time to “take a look at myself.”
Her team continued pitching projects that felt uncomfortably familiar. She started saying no. In December, she parted ways with Goodfried, her former manager. She doesn’t have a replacement manager yet, “but I’m OK with that,” she says. “I like it. I’m in charge. Now I say what I’m doing and not doing.” She sits up a little as she says this, her drowsy voice suddenly more alive.
She also separated herself from the D’Amelio family business. Now, she oversees her own finances. For most 22-year-olds, independence means getting a job and supporting oneself; for Charli, it has meant taking command of an empire she helped build before she was old enough to vote.
The internet took note again when she and her parents unfollowed one another on Instagram. Marc said on TikTok that he now communicates with Charli “through her lawyer.” As for Dixie, Charli says, “I mean, that’s my sister. I’m going to love her till the day I die. But there are times where you’re figuring stuff out.”
Charli’s still making TikToks, still dancing around, smiling, in cool clothes; and she’s vlogging more on her YouTube channel, which has around 9 million followers. “Sometimes I want to record my entire day,” she says. “And sometimes I talk about whatever people are asking for. People like to feel included.” She’s still looking for ways to monetize her platform, still promoting Dunkin’, which has named two drinks after her: The Charli (2020) and The Charli Cold Foam (2021).
Charli isn’t trying to bring down TikTok or renounce the fortune that brought her here. She isn’t trying to escape the machine. She just wants to be the one at the controls.
“I’m taking the last few months of 2026 to work on getting to a place where I’m doing things I’m really proud of,” she says. She has a major project to announce in November, something that “I hold dear to my heart.”
She continues: “Because of being told so often I didn’t deserve where I was, I felt that way for a really long time. But I’m at the point now where I can see that, like, I’ve lived a pretty amazing life, and I’m getting what I feel is like my second chance to do this the way that I want to do it.
“I love what I do,” she says. “I love the person that I’m turning out to be.”
Charli’s publicist, Nicole Perez-Krueger, comes in the room and says it’s time to stop. Charli’s dinner guests are arriving — her social media manager, Davis; her day-to-day manager, Alison Scoon; her stylist, Carlee Barrow; her agent, Ali Berman, and Berman’s 7-year-old daughter, June.
They really are her friends, Charli says. They bring the sides. Charli’s going to grill them steak.
“How do you do your TikToks and stuff?” June asks.
“I just dance what I feel and say what I feel,” Charli says with a smile.
Her social media manager is filming again.
This story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.