Celebrities
Greg Evans
Aug 29, 2022
Anna Paul/TikTok
OnlyFans star Anna Paul is currently on tour in Australia but a fan meet-and-greet in Perth, had to be shut down by police after the situation grew out of control.
The 23-year-old Australian, who has 5.1 million followers on TikTok, was on the tour as part of a collaboration with the activewear brand STAX. However, a panned event at Perth’s Hay Street Mall on Sunday soon became chaotic after a huge swathe of teenage fans attempted to see the star.
The organisers had reportedly only expected 200-300 people to show up but the crowd that was there was significantly larger. People allegedly began to queue jump and tensions began to boil over which forced the police to get involved as some people were collapsing and in need of medical attention.
The New York Post reports that some people had queued from 8 am to meet Paul, while others had camped overnight.
A police spokesperson said: "Due to the size of the crowd and lack of appropriate security and other event planning in place to cope with the larger than expected crowd, and in consultation with the store management, the event was closed down and police commenced dispersing the crowd from the area."
Footage on TikTok claims that people waited for more than 5 hours and were getting squished and trampled upon.
@jamila__king Visit TikTok to discover videos!
Paul has since posted a video on her TikTok explaining why the event was forced to close down. "Yesterday, we did a meet and greet in Perth and we accidentally shut down the city," Paul says at the start of the video.
"The most important thing about this whole experience is that no one got seriously injured. That's all we care about and the fact that no one got seriously injured; we're so grateful for that."
She goes on to add that the tour consisted of three meet-and-greets in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth and on the first 200 people in line we going to meet her.
@anna..paull The Perth Meet and Greet 🖤 We love you
She admitted that after the Sydney event way more people than anticipated turned up so they ended up meeting around 700 people. Her team subsequently hired more security for Melbourne and even more people showed up to that one.
So in preparation for Perth they told the police that they would be there and that "extra, extra security" would be needed. However, Paul says that she thinks Stax hired too much security and that it was "overkill."
Paul says that the event was going well for the first 20 minutes but the police decided that they would have to shut it down for safety reasons because there were too many people. The Perth police said that they hadn't seen anything like this since a "Justin Bieber concert."
Paul adds: "The reason why we worked with the police to shut it down as soon as possible is because we didn't want anything bad happening because your safety is our number one priority. We were all so disappointed and we feel like we let you down but we wanted to make the event free but it should have been ticketed and we know that now. In the future we will be organising for a way bigger crowd."
Many of her fans have already responded to the video criticising the organization of the event. One wrote: "Sorry but stax had no security at all didn’t see anything no baracades or anything."
Another said: "Stax should’ve organised it better tbh."
A third wrote: "Please do another but have it ticketed so it’s not as crazy."
Stax had put out a statement on their Instagram account apologising and explaining why the event was shut down.
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