Just weeks after NikkieTutorials came out as transgender, the beauty vlogger is opening up about why she decided to share her story with the world. It turns out, she was actually blackmailed into speaking her truth.

“A couple of weeks ago I got emails from a certain person. He was not OK with the fact that I was ‘lying’ and wanted to expose that,” she explained during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “He had a very pressuring tone of voice and he was like, ‘If we don’t get an answer by tomorrow, it’s out.’ I feel like his entire goal with this was to destroy my life. But plot twist, that didn’t happen.”

As fans know, the Dutch YouTuber, whose real name is Nikkie de Jager, posted a 17-minute video on January 13, 2020, where she opened up about her gender identity.

“I remember uploading the video and I started crying. My fiancé, Dylan [Drossaers], was right next to me, he was like, ‘You can do it.’ He really pushed me to post it. He was like, ‘We’re going to get through this. It’s going to be OK. You’re going to do this,'” she continued. “I always wanted to come out with it but it is such a delicate thing. How do you find the [right] timing? There’s never the perfect timing, so in a way, I’m not thankful for the person who did this, but I’m thankful that it happened now. Now I get to be free.”

Since she made the announcement, Nikkie has received a bunch of support from her fans and her fellow makeup artists.

“I was always so confused. I would be like, ‘Why do I have to wear that?’ Or, ‘Why don’t I have long hair?'” the social media star said, adding that she’s “really grateful” for her mom’s support “because I know that’s not the case for everybody out there.”

“I would come home and be like, ‘Mom I want to wear girl clothes.’ And she was like, ‘If you want to wear girl clothes, you’re going to wear them,'” Nikkie added.

The influencer gained popularity back in 2015 after her YouTube video, “The Power of Makeup,” went viral. The video inspired many other stars to show their faces with and without makeup.

“I want to take this opportunity to hopefully inspire a lot of transgender people out there,” she concluded. “As long as I get to be myself, and inspire little Nikkies to be theirselves, that’s all I can do.”

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