

With her now-pink claws freshly coated, she looks nothing like the woman who appeared on The Doctors early that morning. During a taping of the Oprah-approved daytime talk show, in which she was accused of taking advantage of the poor and mentally unstable, she wore a flowy, high collared pirate's top, reminiscent of Seinfeld's iconic "puffy shirt." Her face tats have been covered in stage makeup, but her signature glossy lips and flaming-red hair are a beacon of eccentricity in a sea of uniformity.

The segment begins with one of those nauseating quick-cut videos expertly exaggerating every aspect of Harley's work in an attempt to alert the audience that something sinister is just around the corner. Then it's time to go in for the kill. The panel of four health-care professionals will spend the better part of 10 minutes hurling accusations, pointed questions and mock compliments Harley's way. For the majority of the segment, she'll sit, surrounded by a studio audience that looks plucked from a J.C. Penney catalog, nodding her head with a defiant smirk. On the occasion that they let her speak, Harley will defend her work unemotionally -- a stark contrast to the dramatics of The Doctors' firing squad.

Mistress Harley is no stranger to this sort of hostility. She's built (and trademarked) a name for herself as the world's only Techdomme, engaging in a new breed of BDSM that takes place largely online and uses financial control and personal data as currency.

She can make up to $10,000 a day using basic IT tools and lightweight hacking to control men who get a thrill from being extorted, humiliated and, basically, ripped off. Financial domination is nothing new, but Harley has created a niche for herself, using skills she picked up working in software development in Silicon Valley. She cut her teeth working in QA at gaming startups before becoming a product manager, where she learned many of the skills she uses as a data dominatrix. When she realized she could apply those skills to her interest in BDSM, she left the tech industry and never looked back.

"I worked in an office with a kegerator, and I still had to be there fucking 15 hours a day sometimes," she said. "I still got paid less than I was worth, and I know that because now I'm getting paid exactly what I'm worth."

Harley spends her nights out at the bar or watching amateur wrestling matches. She spends her days lounging on the couch with her husband, watching Netflix. She has her groceries delivered from the grocery store around the corner. Her husband, who often matches his clothing with his own shock of bright pink hair, serves as her personal chef, bag handler and constant companion. On occasion her clients will splurge on a trip for the couple -- a point that had The Doctors frothing at the mouth.

This is the colorful, comfortable, even enviable life of a woman who claims to make obscene amounts of money without ever having to do anything. It's no wonder, then, that even in a post-50 Shades of Grey world Harley is a polarizing figure. This outsize personality who defies convention at just about every corner is exploiting her sexuality in what could be the ultimate lifehack.

She's written a veritable library of self-published e-books with titles like The Consensual Blackmail Manual, the Holy Harley Bible and Scam Book for Guys Who Like to Lose, which contains 22 pages of, well, nothing. Her catalog of more than 700 custom clips, which sell for $10 per minute, includes titles like "Cameltoe Panties Pussy Worship" and "Christmas Pervert." She sells one-on-one Skype sessions for the same price. She even has her own Android app, which she can use to track her clients' whereabouts and read and respond to their text messages at a cost of $100. She offers "feminization and sissy training" for up to $300 a session and in-person domination for up to $3,000.

For many of her customers, though, the real thrill comes from blackmail. Harley can demand anywhere from $50 to $10,000 by threatening to expose her submissives' secrets. She maintains a "Loser Hall of Shame" for "Exposed Sissies and Faggots" who send her unsolicited nudes or fail to deliver on scheduled payments. For those who don't have time for all the back and forth, subs can pay $50 to be featured on the page and another $100 to be removed.

Her most loyal customers sign legally binding debt contracts, agreeing to pay her a set amount over time -- usually in the tens of thousands of dollars. At least one man has even given her full control of his web cameras and intercom systems, which she uses to rouse him from sleep for impromptu worship sessions by blasting Wagner throughout his house.

The day before her TV premiere, she offered me a complimentary desktop takeover -- one of her most popular services -- to show just how easily she can ruin the life of a defiant client. The process starts by installing TeamViewer, a basic enterprise program that allows IT professionals to access a user's desktop and troubleshoot issues remotely. From there she resets permissions to make herself the administrator and turns on parental controls that make pornography -- save for her site -- off-limits. She'll install keyloggers to keep track of your every move and ransomware that will lock you out of your computer if you fail to pay her at agreed-upon intervals.

I gave Harley access to a relatively new work machine and let her get to the business of ruining my life. Unfortunately for her, I'm basically shameless. While she wasn't able to pull up anything incriminating in my Google searches or on my hard drive, she quickly gained entry to my work email and located my most sensitive professional contacts. Had she, for example, come across a stash of porn or a secret folder of dick pics, she very easily could have forwarded them to my boss. She also very quickly uncovered all of the passwords I'd saved in Chrome -- an embarrassingly large number -- and pointed out that she could easily access my PayPal account and wreak havoc on my personal expenses.

"Just as in all BDSM, there's that power exchange," Harley said. "There's somebody who wants to give power so that the other person can use that power. And so once somebody is inside your computer, inside your email, they know all your contacts, they know all your social media, they know who you work for, it's very easy to force someone to fulfill the fantasies that they've always had."



I didn't find anything thrilling or arousing about watching Harley's phantom cursor scroll across my screen. That said, I am, as Harley so kindly pointed out, "a hard man to blackmail," largely because I have so little to hide. That, and, despite having foolishly saved a couple of sensitive passwords to Chrome, the computer I was using was largely a blank slate.