Tila Tequila is a personality of U.S. television and social media who is also known by other stage names like Miss Tila, Tila Nguyen, and Tornado Thien. She gained fame and popularity in 2007 when she was named the most popular person on a social media networking site – My Space. She later launched her own bisexual reality show called A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila – a dating show where both male and female contestants fight for affection.
These are definitely not the only things that have made Vietnamese-American women popular online; she has made headlines for good, bad, and ugly reasons. Below is everything you need to know about the Internet sensation, her biography, and five other facts.
Who Is Tila Tequila?
Tila’s full name is Thien Thanh Thi Nguyen and she was born on October 24, 1981, in Singapore. Her family was Vietnamese boat people who fled Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Her family moved to Houston, Texas when she was just one year old. Tequila is the last of her parents’ three children. She has two siblings, an older brother named Daniel and an older sister named Terri.
Because of her alcohol allergy, her friends gave her the nickname “Tila Tequila”. She attended Alief Hastings High School, which she graduated from in 2000. Life wasn’t quite as rosy for Tila because she had her own ups and downs as she grew up. As a sixteen-year-old living in Houston, she witnessed a drive-by shooting and also said that she became pregnant at that age but miscarried the next year. Tila later ran away from home to Queens, New York City, and stayed there for several months. She revealed that it was her violent teenage years in Texas that led her to model, and that this was also the reason she moved to California in 2001.
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Here Are 5 Facts You Need To Know About The Media Personality
1. Her Early Career
Tequila began modeling at the age of nineteen after being discovered by a Playboy scout in a shopping mall in Houston, Texas. The scout offered her to pose nude for the magazine, which she accepted. After a successful test shoot, she moved to Southern California and on April 22, 2002, Tila appeared in the magazine as Cyber-Girl of the Week and was soon to become the first Asian Cyber-Girl of the Month.
She did a few more shots for the magazine before she jumped into music the following year. Tila Tequila had always been interested in rock music. In California, she decided to give it a try, after all, it’s been said that it doesn’t hurt to try. The model began by looking for rock bands who were willing to have her in their group, and after a long search, she finally found one called Beyond Betty Jean. She joined the band where she sang and also wrote songs.
The group eventually broke up, and since she was still interested in making it as a singer, Nguyen started working in recording studios just to improve her skills as a singer and songwriter. Later she became the lead singer of a band called Jealousy. The band released a few songs online before finally disbanding. In 2003, she was a contestant on Surviving Nugent, a reality show that airs on VH1, where contestants must perform compromising tasks and stunts for rock star Ted Nugent.
2. How She Became an Internet Sensation
In the fall of 2003, the Singapore-born model joined Myspace after she was kicked out of Friendster – a social gaming site. Since she had thousands of fans and followers on Friendster, joining MySpace was a better nest egg for her to continue what she did on Friendster, namely uploading glamour photos of herself, recording and uploading her singing, and interacting with fans.
She also helped the site grow by inviting thousands of people to join the networking platform. The structure of MySpace also helped it grow in fame and more fans. In the early days of the site, Tila Tequila often automatically appeared in the “Top Friends” of random people as one of the most popular and oldest members of the site.
In 2016 she was the most viewed profile on MySpace. With 1.5 million friends on the platform, she was profiled as the star on MySpace by Time Magazine, The New York Times, and several other well-known news media.
3. Her Sexuality
Tila Tequila first came out as a lesbian, then as a bisexual and recently she said she was neither. In 2008, she started to broadcast her own dating show called A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, in which men and women alike compete for her attention and affection.
She met with Shawne Merriman (former NFL linebacker), against whom she would file a lawsuit for assault, battery, and wrongful imprisonment, claiming $1.5 million in damages, Merriman counterclaimed $2 million and won the case. She later became engaged to heiress Casey Johnson, who died of diabetes less than a month after her engagement after she forgot to take her medication.
Tequila, who now wants to be referred to as Tornado Thien, also briefly dated Thomas Paxton Whitaker in 2013. In March 2018 she announced that she was neither lesbian nor bisexual, but only pretended to be, in order to be on her reality show A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila.
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4. She is a Mother
In April 2014, Tila announced her pregnancy on her Facebook page, and seven months later, on November 16, she welcomed her first child, Isabella Monroe Nguyen. In March 2018, she announced that she would carry her second pregnancy.
Tila Tequila is Really Queer in Her Beliefs & Opinions
She said she believed the earth was flat and not spherical, as science had proven. If the earth is round, she asked why all the buildings in New York City are upright and not tilted.
In 2015, the ardent Donald Trump supporter was kicked out of the UK’s Celebrity Big Brother House when she posted a Facebook post in 2013 in which she sympathized with Adolf Hitler, calling him a special and sweet child.
In May 2017 she made a twenty-three-minute YouTube video in which she claimed that she had signed a contract with God to become “God”. She also claimed that she was one of God’s angels and was sent by Him to help the world, which has become half light and half dark.
