When a hard-working nurse offered to lend the wealthy, Beverly Hills based influencer Tara Lynn the perfect halterneck top for her New Year’s celebrations, little did she know that her kindness would descend into the biggest TikTok feud of the year so far.
The difference between the two women couldn’t be more striking. One a 22-year-old healthcare worker, known only as Person A on social media. The other an influencer and OnlyFans content creator who boasts more than five million followers and hundreds of millions of likes on social media.
The only thing to unite the pair was the top at the centre of this bizarre spat.
For years, Tara Lynn’s audience have watched her jet across the world, shop at designer stores and boast about her expensive lifestyle in TikTok videos.
Better know as @taraswrld, the 26-year-old has built a legion of followers based on her chaotic personal ‘story times’, lifestyle vlogs and a string of controversies surrounding previous ‘tone-deaf’ comments.
But this fallout with Person A may be her worst yet.
The drama kicked off in late December, just days before New Year’s Eve when Tara posted a video on TikTok asking her followers if anyone owned a specific top she wanted to wear for the occasion, explaining it was sold out online.
‘Girls, I need your help,’ she begged. ‘This is a really specific request, but if anyone that lives in the LA area has this halter top from For Love & Lemons [a luxury American clothing brand] in a size small or extra-small, can I please borrow it for New Year’s Eve?’
Tara Lynn appealed to her followers asking if anyone had a top that she could borrow for New Year’s Eve
She then showed a photo of the sheer halter-neck top in question – covered with pearls and featuring a black bow – which cost $239 (£177).
‘I need it. This is do or die for me,’ she pleaded. ‘I want to wear this shirt so bad, but it’s sold out everywhere. I looked everywhere. I scoured the internet.’
The TikToker claimed she had been in a similar situation ahead of music festival Coachella and had borrowed clothes from a fan.
‘For Coachella, I needed this specific tube top, and one of y’all came through and Uber packaged it to me, and it was really kind,’ she said. ‘So if anyone has this halter top, I would really appreciate it.’
According to subsequent videos from Tara, many fans responded claiming they could lend her the top – for a price. Afraid of being scammed, she declined.
Finally, however, one generous follower came forward offering to lend Tara the top for free. And this is where the saga took an ugly turn.
After New Year’s Eve, Tara posted another video on social media, alleging that the girl who agreed to lend her the For Love & Lemons top had ‘ghosted’ her – cutting off communication without an explanation.
In a now deleted video, the influencer framed the situation as intentional, calling the follower a ‘hater’ and implying it was an act of intentional sabotage.
The top from For Love & Lemons sheer halterneck top in question, covered with pearls and featuring a black bow, which cost $239 (£177)
‘One of my haters did something f***** up to me today,’ she told viewers.
‘She’s f***** me over real bad, she hasn’t answered me in like three hours.’
In the comments left on the video, a 22-year-old woman, who goes by ‘A’, identified herself as the ‘hater’ Tara was talking about.
She explained that she works as a nurse and was struggling through a period of severe short-staffing at the hospital – so didn’t have the time to send Tara the top.
‘I have apologised to Tara. There were many patients in the emergency room tonight,’ she wrote.
The influencer quickly issued a brutal reply to the comment: ‘If you knew you were going to be working you shouldn’t have offered OR you could have told me, respectfully gimme a break.’
For many viewers, this response felt jarring coming from an OnlyFans star who has previously claimed to make $350,000 a month and says she has ‘no bills or mortgage’.
What might have been a brief misunderstanding between the two women has quickly turned ugly. Tara’s comments prompted a barrage of hate towards the nurse, with some users accusing her of lying about her job altogether.
The follower, known as A, claimed she did not send Tara the top as she had been busy at work
Eventually, Person A deleted her comments and removed any pictures showing her face online. ‘I’m not showing my face because I have been harassed and bullied all day,’ she said.
She went on to explain that Tara had been her favourite TikTok star since 2022: ‘I was going to give her the shirt, but after the video and without her even letting me explain myself, I don’t support her any more. I’m not an influencer and barely use TikTok. Be kind to people.’
The video has drawn criticism from many of Tara’s other fans and fellow creators, who have accused her of lacking empathy.
‘This is Tara showing her true colours,’ one said. ‘We all knew she had this side to her, this is very sad to keep posting about it and going on about it.’
In the last two weeks the influencer has lost more than 100,000 followers.
Yet this might not be the end of this ugly tale. In an astonishing twist, insiders have told me that this may all be a ‘stunt’ planned by Tara in order to gain attention and increase the number of her followers. They claim that Tara could easily have created a fake account posing as Person A in order to spark a viral ‘feud’ which could boost clicks and spark conversation.
One insider told me: ‘There’s a chance Tara was always the nurse. She has been speaking about how she was becoming irrelevant, and now everyone is talking about it. ‘Her video views are up, and it’s worked. She could have manufactured it all.’
It wouldn’t be Tara’s first brush with scandal. In fact, Tara was dropped by her management in December, weeks before she posted the video about the top.
She had previously attracted criticism from followers after she dismissively described a lesbian woman who featured in an adult video on her OnlyFans page.
In another incident, she enraged fans by criticising people who lie ‘in bed’ during the day, saying ‘nobody wants to work any more’.
Whether this latest drama was a ‘stunt’ or not, Tara’s desperate attempts to try to stay relevant may have come at a cost of no longer being liked by her own followers.
But perhaps in this day and age, as long as you’re a topic of conversation – good or bad – clicks equal cash.
