The first ever reality TV series showed 19-year-old student picking her spots and having sex – but you’ve probably never heard of it
TEN years before the Kardashians burst onto our TV screens, 19-year-old Jennifer Ringley nervously turned on a webcam in her college dorm room and became the world’s first reality star.
It was April 1996, and the student’s decision to live stream her entire life – including everything from having sex to doing the washing – 24 hours a day was a radical one.
But within weeks her candid live stream skyrocketed her to fame, attracting up to seven million viewers daily to her website Jennicam, and earning her the title of the ‘original reality star’.
But while TV stars today from shows such as Towie and Love Island build up huge business empires on the back of featuring in carefully-constructed ‘reality’ shows, Jennifer is the reality TV star most people have never even heard of – dropping out of the limelight and disappearing completely from the web in 2003.
Here, The Sun Online takes a closer look at the world’s first ever reality TV show, and what happened to its protagonist…
Sex on camera
Jenni’s vision first materialised when she bought a webcam at a bookstore, installed it in her dorm at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, and began broadcasting her uncensored life to the world.
The first version of Jennicam was basic – but a revolutionary idea.
Describing her reason for setting the camera, Jenni said: “It was basically a programming challenge to myself to see if I could set up the scripts to get the pictures to upload to the site.”
Fans would log in to watch Jenni eating, sleeping, getting ready to go out – and even having sex – on her life-casting website, which chronicled her life 24/7.
Initially it would reload every 15 minutes with a different image, which could be anything from Jenni, now 42, reading a book, watching TV, masturbating or even getting intimate with her boyfriend.
“The first time one boyfriend and I did start kissing, the site went down pretty much immediately from too much load,” Jenni recalls.
“Then we hear the computer beeping – he didn’t come back into my room again.
“Nobody wanted to be on it. Nobody wanted to come into my room.”
Cam-girl stripteases
After moving to Washington two years later Jenni set up webcams in her bedroom, kitchen and living room, and began charging for access to her site.
Even her bathroom had a webcam although it didn’t point at the toilet – which is where she says she “drew the line”.
Sometimes Jenni would perform stripteases for the camera too, and at its peak 7 million people a day would log in – many of them eager to capture a glimpse of Jenni’s more raunchy activities.
Jennicam became famous for its raunchier scenes – although she claims she never meant for the site to be about sex.
“I think I decided it was going to be more of a pain to have to turn the camera around when I was going to get changed, that it was going to be more of a pain to have to cover it up when something was going to be happening,” she said.
“And that if I really wanted to be able to ignore the cameras as much as I wanted to, that they just had to keep running.”
Film roles and chat show fame
Within just a few years, Jenni was catapulted to stardom, featuring in magazines and newspaper articles around the world.
She even appeared on the famous David Letterman chat show and bagged a cameo role in Diagnosis Murder.
It was on the Letterman show, she defended Jennicam’s fans saying: “The thing is that if you turn on the TV, you can see wild America and you can watch lions and badgers and antelope eating and sleeping and doing what they do, but for some reason, wanting to see people doing the same thing is considered sick and perverse.”
Sleeping with her pal’s fiance on camera
By 2000, many other girls became inspired by Jenni and set up their own versions of Jennicam and the term “cam girls” was invented.
However as other cam girls started to rise to fame, things began taking a downturn for Jenni after she moved from DC to Sacramento, California.
A fellow cam girl helped her find a place to live – and some months later she was caught on camera sleeping with that same cam girl’s fiance, Dex.
The scandal created a huge backlash for Jenni – and even though she ended up in a relationship with Des, fans were outraged.
Speaking about the incident, she said: “I thought we fell in love. I really, at that time I felt like I had just met my soul mate.
“How could you judge this? You don’t know because you’re not having these feelings.”
‘I was exhausted in the end’
Then, in 2003, Jenni disappeared from the Internet.
Seven years on from first switching on the webcam, fame – and the criticism that came with it – had taken its toll on Jenni.
“I was exhausted at the end,” she said in a very rare interview with podcast Reply All.
“I had to develop a pretty thick skin for both the good stuff and the bad stuff.”
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Interest in the site began to wane and eventually in December 2003, Jenni turned off her webcams for good, blaming PayPal’s new anti-nudity policy for forcing her out of business.
She is now a married computer programmer living in the Sacramento area – and has no social media or presence on the internet – which is just how she likes it.
And the thousands of hours of footage from Jennicam, which once entertained people across the world, are now stored in a box in her garage.