From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Who’s that SuicideGirl?

Once a shy student from Boca, Chloe Rice is now a world-famous nude model on Suicidegirls.com, where the women are tough and the competition is fierce.

by Joanie Cox

March 1 2006

Chloe Rice is waiting in line at the Mizner Park Starbucks for her venti black iced tea when she catches the woman behind the espresso bar stealing glances at her. After several more furtive looks, the barista finally pops the question: "You're the girl from that Web site, right?"

Rice, clad in jeans, a hooded sweatshirt and a metal-studded belt, bashfully looks at the floor and nods.

"You're so beautiful," the barista says, handing over the tea. "I love your pictures."

Rice has been inside the Boca Raton coffee shop for only 10 minutes and has already been recognized twice. These people don't know her as Chloe Rice, a 2002 graduate of Boca Raton High School, but as Reagan, the blond (sometimes pink-haired) punk who poses nude on Suicidegirls.com.

Rice joined the popular alternative pinup site in 2003, only a month after her 18th birthday. Launched from Portland, Ore., in 2001 as an underground Web site featuring nude photographs of tattooed and pierced women, Suicidegirls.com is the brainchild of photographer Selena Mooney, a.k.a. Missy Suicide, and Web designer Sean Suhl, a.k.a. Spooky. Members pay $4 to $12 a month to read the models' blog entries, leave them messages and, of course, view their photos. The site started with 10 models and currently includes 953, and its membership has soared to more than 100,000 users worldwide.

Now based in Los Angeles, Suicidegirls.com has sponsored a touring burlesque show, hosted a Web-based radio show and released a DVD, calendars and a clothing line that includes yoga pants, tank tops, belt buckles and garters. And like its more-airbrushed forebear Playboy, Suicidegirls.com interviews big-name celebrities such as Maggie Gyllenhaal and Scarlett Johansson and hot bands such as Death Cab for Cutie.

As the site's popularity has grown, so has Rice's. "I'll be sitting in a restaurant, and people will come up to me and ask if I'm on the site," she explains. "I went to a Sevendust show a few weeks ago, and this guy wanted to take a picture with me. It happened, like, three more times that night. I thought it was so funny."

Before Rice transformed herself into Reagan, she was a bored Palm Beach Community College student. One day, she decided to photograph herself using the timer on her digital camera. She sent three or four shots to SuicideGirls.

Soon after, Mooney, who photographs all the models, invited Rice to pose for her site. "At first, I was really shy. But after a few times [on the site], you're like, 'Well, everybody's already seen me naked,' " Rice says. "Every time a new girl goes up, you know at least 20 of her friends want to see her naked."

Rice, who currently lives in New York, has since become one of the site's most popular models, appearing in a segment of HBO's Real Sex devoted to SuicideGirls and touring with the site-sponsored burlesque troupe. Fan comments on her SuicideGirls testimonials page are rapturous, to say the least. "Reagan has to be one of my favorite SuicideGirls," a member who identifies herself as Bella Silencia writes. "She exudes this aura of confidence while maintaining a supercuteness that puppies and kittens can only dream of achieving."

"We all remember the cute, shy girl from art class in high school," a user named William Miller adds, "the one who never did the actual assignments, the one who kind of went and did her own thing. … Well, [Reagan] is that girl -- grown-up, fully bloomed and still as creative and talented as she was back then."

Popularity aside, Rice is finding herself at odds with some former SuicideGirls. Last September, a group of models abruptly left the site, claiming they were being verbally abused by Suhl, poorly compensated and unfairly bound to contracts that prohibited their images from appearing on competing sites. Some, including Kelly Kleinert and Jennifer "Sicily" Caravella, defected to God's Girls, a new alternative-model site founded by Lara "Annaliese" Nielsen.

"I started God's Girls because I saw that many so-called alternative models were constantly being limited to very amateur-looking photography when I was browsing modeling portfolio sites such as Onemodelplace.com," Nielsen explains. "I found that as I began to get tattoos, it was harder and harder for me to get quality photographers to shoot me. I want to show the world that alternative doesn't necessarily mean amateur."

At press time, however, visitors to Godsgirls.com were greeted with the message "site coming soon" and directed to Myspace.com/godsgirls.

This past September, SuicideGirls filed a lawsuit against God's Girls, alleging Nielsen and her site have violated federal and state unfair-competition laws, poached models from SuicideGirls and interfered with its business relationships. Nielsen, who has financial backing from hardcore-porn tycoon Gavin Lloyd, says she never saw the members' area of Suicidegirls.com until months after she'd started God's Girls.

The controversy has caused a great deal of tension within the SuicideGirls community. Both Spin and Jane magazines recently devoted feature stories to the lawsuit and its fallout, and current and former models and their fans have been waging a war of words in the blogosphere and on Myspace.com.

New York-based graphic artist Zack Sporen has posted anti-SuicideGirls artwork on Myspace.com. One piece depicts a $20 bill with the slogan "Blood Money: The SuicideGirls Conspiracy."

"For a decent period of time, I did draw inspiration from the photography and artistry of SuicideGirls," Sporen says. "But after hearing that they were mistreating the models and photographers, I decided to educate myself."

Sporen says he has befriended some of the site's former models. "Just knowing that SuicideGirls sells their alternative porn counterculture as a feminist empowerment movement makes me sick," he admits.

For her part, Rice is standing by SuicideGirls. She dismisses as crybabies the models who left the site in anger.

"Some girls left because their friends left," she argues. "They have these bullshit stories about us being locked in a basement. Sometimes, we're in close quarters. Some of the girls are complainers."

Rice says she was present at one much-rumored-about incident in which she and a group of models were participating in a photo shoot in Suhl's house on a particularly cold day. According to Spin, allegations that Suhl trapped these girls in his unheated basement appeared on Gloomdolls.com and the LiveJournal blog Tales From the Dark Site but ultimately proved false.

"Some of the girls said we were trapped down there with no heat, but we had a heating unit," Rice says. "If I was treated bad, I would've already left."

Mooney will not answer questions about pending litigation but does maintain that her models are treated fairly. "I wanted to photograph the girls that I knew with the same sort of control and respect that classic pinups were given," Mooney says of why she founded the site. "The girls I knew were so proud of themselves and their bodies, yet they looked nothing like the girls featured in mainstream media. I think that even though we have grown a lot since then, we have remained true to the original ethos of the site."

But Nielsen wasn't the only person taken to court by SuicideGirls last year. In October, SuicideGirls sued its former burlesque troupe manager Erin Oliver, who created Gloomdolls.com, a site that posted SuicideGirls' complaints as well as confidential business documents and contracts.

Despite the controversy, women from around the world continue to sign up to be SuicideGirls. Danielle, a 21-year-old from Iowa who asked that her last name not be published, is in the process of becoming a SuicideGirl.

"SuicideGirls is a great site because it allows girls to be themselves and not conform to the idea that you need to be stick-thin with big boobs and no personality," she says. "It's powerful and beautiful. The site is all about the girls and showing the world just how kick-ass we are."

SuicideGirls has certainly brought Rice out of her shell. "It's made me a lot more outgoing," she admits. "I used to be really shy."

Rice's financial situation has also gotten sweeter since joining the site. She gets $300 per photo set and is due to receive royalties from SuicideGirls: The First Tour, a DVD documentary about the burlesque troupe. "When we go to Wendy's, my friends are like, 'You're not paying in change anymore,' " she jokes.

Rice has no plan to leave SuicideGirls. "I always want to be on the site," she says. "I have learned so much. I even worked in the SuicideGirls office at one point, which was good because it gave me a really good business sense.

"[Yet] if I started this now, reading all these crazy rumors about it, I probably wouldn't do it, and that would be bad because I love what I'm doing right now."