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EXCLUSIVE: Oregon State webcam girl Kendra Sunderland opens up in first interview: ‘I’ve always been the type of girl who’s not afraid to show off’

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Kendra Sunderland’s mom started getting panicked texts from friends last week about her daughter.

Then her phone died, and for a few minutes, she could only imagine the worst. Maybe Kendra had been hurt or killed in an accident.

She charged her phone and learned the real news: Sunderland, a 19-year-old former student at Oregon State University, had been cited by state police after a video of her stripping in the school’s library went viral.

“When she turned her phone on, she was relieved a bit because she was thinking things way worse than that,” Sunderland told the Daily News in her first interview since her summons last week.

She said her mom told her, “This is just something you can learn a lesson from and move on.”

But for Sunderland, her ticket wasn’t just a lesson — it was the big break she needed

Sunderland told the Daily News she’s dreamed of posing for Playboy since she was a girl and wants to become a professional model. The X-rated show in Oregon State’s Valley Library was just one of many performances for MyFreeCams, a live webcam sex site with tens of thousands of models, that was recorded by a viewer.

But that video attracted way more heat than she ever imagined. After someone uploaded it to the video site Pornhub sometime in the past month, it got hundreds of thousands of views and suddenly turned Sunderland into one of America’s hottest amateur models.

It also got her slapped with a citation from state police on Jan. 27. She faces a fine of up to $6,250 and up to one year in jail.

But that might just be a small price to pay on her way to the top of the modeling world.

Weeks before leaving Oregon State University last year, Kendra Sunderland shot a webcam show in the school's library, which recently went viral.
Weeks before leaving Oregon State University last year, Kendra Sunderland shot a webcam show in the school’s library, which recently went viral.

“When I first started working for MyFreeCams, I was hoping that it would open to modeling and doing magazines and shoots like that,” she said. “I knew that eventually everyone would see everything about me and see me naked. I just didn’t think that would happen so fast and have my actual name on it.”

“I’m not like most other girls that are insecure with their bodies or don’t want to show off,” she said. “I’ve always been the type of girl who’s not afraid to show off, so I didn’t feel weird about it.

—–

Sunderland grew up in Salem, Ore. and graduated from West Salem High School two years ago. In the fall of 2013 she enrolled at Oregon State University in Corvallis, one of the state’s largest colleges. She said she first wanted to become a counselor, and took a few classes in human development

She lost interest in that and switched to business and economics classes, thinking she’d be an accountant.

Eventually, she decided the 9-to-5 world wasn’t for her.

“I didn’t want to work in an office all the time,” she said.

During her fall semester, she applied to about a dozen waitressing jobs around Corvallis and said she never got any calls back.

Kendra Sunderland said she's 'always been the type of girl who's not afraid to show off.'
Kendra Sunderland said she’s ‘always been the type of girl who’s not afraid to show off.’

Around the same time, she was lured to MyFreeCams, a site where girls strip and chat with users who pay them in real time

She said she did her first show in October and made about $150 for an hour’s work.

This was a calling.

“Working a minimum wage job, there’s people that are just mean to you when they’re having a crappy day,” she said. “On MyFreeCams, (users) had nothing but nice things to say. And I made way more than I would working any other job.”

She started regularly making MyFreeCams shows in her Corvallis home, when her roommates weren’t around, including one where she had sex with her boyfriend at the time. (She’s single now.)

Each video brought in big bucks. But one user suggested she’d get a lot more attention — and money — if she took her show to a public place.

One night in October, Sunderland shot the now-infamous library video, where she flashes her breasts and masturbates at a desk as oblivious classmates walk by in the background. Various versions of the video, ranging from five minutes to half an hour, are now circulating a plethora of porn sites, but Sunderland recalls the actual show lasting more than an hour.

And she says the user’s prediction about a public place was right: She earned about $700 that night.

Kendra Sunderland said she knew 'that eventually everyone would see everything about me and see me naked.'
Kendra Sunderland said she knew ‘that eventually everyone would see everything about me and see me naked.’

Weeks later, she dropped out of college and started doing MyFreeCams shows up to five times a week — presenting, by her estimate, about 100 shows by the end of January.

She loved the work, but decided once was enough for public shows.

“After that, I just thought about the consequences and what could’ve happened,” she said. “It definitely made me not want to go back.”

—–

One night last week, Sunderland says she was watching clips of the Comedy Central show “Key and Peele” on her phone when her Facebook app started blowing up with notifications.

It was friend requests — about a hundred, “all frat boys,” she said.

“So then I kind of knew something was going around.”

She checked the anonymous gossip app YikYak and saw that Oregon State students were now talking about the “library girl.”

By the end of that week, she was the webcam girl equivalent of a household name, with a criminal record to prove it.

Porn users started digging up and republishing other MyFreeCams shows, several people made fake social media accounts in her name and she says she’s now been bombarded with so many Facebook friend requests that she can’t receive any more.

She said she has “no clue” who recorded the video and put it on Pornhub.

Oregon State University is hardly happy to have its own Belle Knox now. After Sunderland’s citation, the school quickly released a statement saying her X-rated behavior “does not represent the values of the university,” which has more than 30,000 students.

Sunderland is now banned from the campus, school spokesman Steve Clark said.

She’s also been banned from MyFreeCams as of Monday for violating the site’s guidelines with the library clip, according to the website’s attorney.

And she says a few friends have cut ties with her since the video went viral.

Meanwhile, Sunderland, who turns 20 in June, is more popular than ever now. She says she’s already fulfilled one request for a professional photo shoot, which is coming out soon, and many more offers are flooding in. She’s hoping to earn enough to “move somewhere sunny.”

Her parents aren’t so supportive anymore — she says they didn’t punish her, but after their initial relief, they cut off the funding they gave her as a student.

“They’re kind of upset now,” she said.

Well, would she be okay if she had a daughter one day who did webcam shows?

“If it makes her happy, sure,” Sunderland said. “I could probably give her some pointers.”

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jsilverstein@nydailynews.com