She sold her bathwater — PayPal took her profits

Belle Delphine, the woman who went viral in 2019 for selling jars of her bathwater, revealed earlier this month that the stunt earned her $90K in profits. In a thread on X, the adult content creator and model also explained that because of PayPal, the payment processing system she used for the sale, she never saw a dime of that money.

“PayPal, without any warning closed my PayPal account and took the $90,000 that I earned from selling my bathwater,” Belle Delphine wrote.

Image: X / Belle Delphine

Now, according to a report from Business Insider, PayPal has reversed this decision, with the company returning to Belle Delphine all the proceeds from the bathwater bonanza five years later.

Mary-Belle Kirschner, known as Belle Delphine, is a content creator known for trolling her large fan base. In 2019, she announced that she would sell her bathwater to her “thirsty gamer boy fans” creating an instant viral sensation. The stunt spawned a flurry of articles, with some wondering who would buy such a thing and why, while others praised her business acumen by providing a product people were eager to pay for. But according to Kirschner, instead of earning $90,000 in profit, she took a loss.

“Not only did I not earn any money selling my bathwater, I in fact lost money doing it,” she wrote on X.

According to PayPal’s current terms of service, the payment processor allows “U.S.-only transactions for certain sexually oriented physical goods that are physically delivered to the customer” — which bathwater would ostensibly fall under. But Kirschner wrote that she apparently violated PayPal’s policies regardless and that each sale was counted as an individual violation worth a $2,500 fine. She also explained that the money wasn’t returned to her customers and that she shipped the product anyway, costing her $11 a jar to ship to the United States.

A spokesperson for PayPal said to Business Insider that it ended its $2,500 fine policy a year ago, but according to Kirschner, the money wasn’t returned until after she posted about it earlier this month.

“Which is so shitty because what are all the normal non-social media users meant to do in this situation?” she said to Business Insider. “I followed all the normal protocols and was roadblocked and gave up.”