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In this article:
- Venus Angelic is a YouTuber and influencer who peaked in popularity around the mid to late 2000s before suddenly disappearing.
- The internet star was known for creating content about lolita fashion, a Japanese street style that focuses on kawaii (cuteness). While most lolitas love the style for its own sake, rumors around the time of Venus Angelic’s disappearance say her mother pushed her into becoming a lolita influencer.
- Venus Angelic resurfaced a few years ago in Japan where she is now married to a fan and is a sex worker.
- Fans suspect that there’s more to Venus Angelic than it seems as there are signs that point to her spiraling mental health, potential drug abuse, and alcoholism.
Venus Angelic isn’t as big of a name as other YouTube influencers we know of today, but for people interested in lolita fashion (or, at least, are familiar with Japanese pop culture), she was a giant in the scene during the height of her popularity.
At 13 years old, she started a YouTube channel that set her on the fast track to becoming the internet’s “living doll”. But the star’s quick rise to fame was cut abruptly when she disappeared from the public eye, making fans suspect that her mother/manager had something to do with it.
Who Is Venus Angelic?: Remembering the Early Stardom of the Internet’s Living Doll
Venus Angelic is a YouTuber whose real name is actually Venus Isabelle Palermo. Despite what her surname suggests, she’s actually a Swiss national who first entered the YouTube vlogging scene at 13 years old. Her youth, baby-like face, and wide doe eyes helped her sell her image as a lolita fashion influencer.
For those of you not familiar with Japanese fashion, lolita has nothing to do with the Nabokov book of the same name. It’s actually a Victorian-inspired fashion style that takes traditional 19th-century fashion elements (like corsets, stockings, and bonnets) and gives them a distinctively feminine and doll-like twist. So think Victorian but more fake flowers, rabbit head patterns, and lace.
The entire aesthetic makes grown women look like porcelain dolls and that’s exactly what Venus’ mother, Margaret Palermo, helped to advertise her as.
When Venus Angelic started to gain traction, sites like Yahoo news began to call her The Living Doll. Venus later went on to give interviews on television with her mother, telling people about the lolita “living doll” lifestyle and how girls can start on their path to becoming kawaii, the Japanese word for cute, and the philosophy behind the lolita aesthetic.
She’s also been featured in TLC’s My Strange Addiction where she talks about what it’s like to be a living doll.
In her interviews and videos, Venus Angelic always used a cutesy English accent that was meant to emphasize her child-like aesthetic. She would also often upload videos of her putting on make-up that suited the lolita aesthetic and trying on lolita dresses from famous Japanese lolita brands like BABY, THE STARS SHINE BRIGHT and millefleurs.
By the time she was 19 years old, she had over a million subscribers following her growth into a Japanese lolita fashion model and internet icon.
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Very little is known about Venus Angelic’s father. Not only has he opted to stay out of the limelight, but he seems to not want anything to do with either his daughter or Margaret Palermo.
In a video originally uploaded on April 7, 2018, Venus made a call to her father to ask how he is and to try reconnecting with him. The man, who is only known to us as Hans Peter, does not answer the call.
A woman we can only assume is his current wife, since Venus says she and her mother don’t get along, says that Hans Peter doesn’t want anyone coming to his house after Margaret took money out of his pantry. She then abruptly drops the call.
Venus Angelic’s lack of any solid familial connections may have played a role in why it was so difficult for her to escape Margaret Palermo and how she ended up in increasingly difficult situations.
Venus Isabelle Palermo’s Escape From Abuse
Venus Angelic dropped off the face of the internet in 2016 and news quickly broke out saying that she had eloped with an older fan who is only known by the name “Manaki Okado.” It’s not clear whether that’s actually his real name or not, but let’s assume, for now, that it is.
Manaki and Venus began seeing each other in 2014. The older man, who was six years her senior, lived in Japan, he established a relationship with her after finding her videos on YouTube.
Margaret Palermo did not approve of the relationship, likely because of the significant age difference between Venus Angelic and Manaki Okado. Around the time, there were rumors that Venus Angelic was being abused by her mother and that the entire living doll schtick was Margaret’s idea, not Venus’.
Though much of what the internet knows about the mother and daughter pair’s relationship is just speculation, it isn’t all that farfetched. After all, many female child stars later grow into adulthood and reveal that their parents, typically their mothers, had essentially been living vicariously through them and/or using them as a cash cow to support their lifestyles.
Jeanette McCurdy, best known for her role as Sam in Nickolodeon’s iCarly, recently released a hit biography titled “I’m Glad My Mom Died” for a reason.
One of the key reasons people believe Venus was abused: Her mother pulled her out of the school system and homeschooled her after her video “How to Look Like a Doll” went viral. Add Margaret’s looming presence in Venus’ interviews, to the point that Venus seemed to look to her for cues on what to say, and people easily became convinced that Margaret began controlling Venus to “help her become famous.”
Whether Venus was actually abused or not remains uncertain. Venus Angelic certainly believes her mother was abusive and even alludes to this in a video where she complains about her husband, specifically pointing out that he was similar to her mother.
It’s worth noting that Margaret and Manaki despise each other and have accused each other of being abusive towards Venus Angelic.
“Thanks to the physical abuse, I now have a BDSM kink. Thank you, mom!” Venus said in a deleted video. “My mom was a typical momager. I was socially isolated…I didn’t know the difference between platonic love and romantic love.”
As of the time this was written, Venus Angelic has divorced Manaki and currently resides in Japan.
Venus Angelic Says She’s Now Happy With Sex Work — But Fans Notice Signs That Say Otherwise
Venus Angelic’s videos have gotten increasingly strange since she left her mother, leading her fans to suspect that her mental health is deteriorating.
She posted a photo on her Instagram stories where she said “Ok guys, look, I relapsed and jumped in front of a bus. Now does any of you guys want to create a gaming group so I can do something other besides pure ethanol?”
Her erratic behavior as an adult has also changed how her fans view her. While many of them still feel sorry for Venus, a number of her current viewers and subscribers have been tuning in only to use her as an internet lolcow.
A lolcow is someone online, typically an influencer or personality of some kind, who is emotionally unstable and has a difficult personal life. As cruel as it sounds, people use them for laughs because the lolcow is so sad and pathetic that it’s funny for these people.
Despite what viewers think, though, Venus Angelic been continuing her online career without Margaret or Manaki’s help.
Venus Angelic created an OnlyFans account in 2020 where she now uploads provocative photos and pornographic videos of herself.
While she seems to be doing okay for herself, her subscribers claim to have heard Venus Angelic being slapped by her Only Fans manager during a live stream while the two conversed in Japanese. She also often drinks on her streams, but her deteriorating looks have led to suspicions that she’s abusing more than just alcohol.
Aside from her drinking, she now often has violent outbursts during her streams where she curses at fans, rants angrily about people in her life, and makes tense sexual jokes that fans claim sounded very forced compared to her old content.
She also admitted to having gastric bypass surgery back when she was still married to Manaki. Complications from the surgery caused Venus to drop to a dangerously low weight. We’re talking Eugenia Cooney levels here. The fact that she was only around 53 kilograms (116 pounds) when she had gastric bypass surgery has also led to suspicions that Venus Angelic suffers from an eating disorder.
Venus Angelic later came clean about her surgery, saying that she didn’t share it online because she wanted to seem naturally skinny to her fans.
Venus Angelic has since had the surgery reversed and continues to do Only Fans. Her recent Instagram updates suggest she’s been dating one or several Japanese male hosts.
Japanese hosts/hostesses are club employees paid to provide male/female company to clientele.
Margaret didn’t want Venus to have an internet channel, but Venus insisted. Then nasty people online were jealous of the close relationship with her mother, and encouraged her to run away, so she ran away with Margaret’s laptop with Manaki.