In the unreal world of social media I thought my alter-ego DEVIL BABY could do what she

Devil Baby is looking pretty angelic today, with her waist-length blonde hair and beguiling blue eyes. 

As an online model and influencer, she has long wanted to be famous, although not, perhaps, like this.

Orla Sloan, who gave herself the nickname Devil Baby, achieved a celebrity of sorts last week when she appeared in court and admitted harassing and stalking England football star Mason Mount, his Chelsea team-mate Ben Chilwell and Scotland international Billy Gilmour.

After a one-night stand with Mount, the 22-year-old bombarded the footballers with threatening messages from 21 phone numbers.

Devil Baby was her online alter ego. ‘Beware of the devil baby, Mason,’ she warned Mount, who has 36 England caps and is currently the subject of a possible £72 million transfer to Manchester United.

She warned: ‘I can morph at any second.’ Separately, she told Gilmour: ‘I will hunt you down.’

There was more: a claim she’d had an abortion after sleeping with Gilmour (with whom she has never had sex), a reference to ‘Gary Lineker’s list of closeted gay players’, and sinister collages of Mount and Chilwell with other women.

She would starve before she stopped her campaign of harassment, she told Mount: ‘I’m not buying food any more so I can get more [phone] numbers. I will be faster than you.’

Orla knows now, having escaped a custodial sentence by a whisker, that the whole Devil Baby thing sounds demented.

She is embarrassed, sorry and can’t believe she didn’t anticipate the real-world consequences of her digital ‘kiss and troll’ campaign.

She says: ‘The online world is so removed from the real world. You don’t have the same sense of perspective because you’re just in your bedroom, on your phone.

‘It doesn’t feel the same but, in reality, people are watching what you’re doing and it’s affecting their lives.

‘What I did was wrong. I regret sending all those messages, hurting those people [Mount, Chilwell and Gilmour] and their families.

‘No one deserves that. Nobody wants to feel unsafe, like they’re being threatened.

‘There’s a huge lack of control online. You wouldn’t walk down a street naked in real life. 

‘There are measures in place to stop you. But, online, you might. It’s very open. You feel you can do whatever you want.’

Orla’s humbling in court offers a fascinating insight into a generation of young people whose lives are dominated by their social media persona. She hopes that her own story – and wrongdoing – will be a salutary lesson to others.

She says: ‘I want everyone who is tempted to look at me and think twice before they act online. It’s so easy to press a button and create a fake account and then go that one step further.

‘There’s no magical barrier between social media and real life. If you do something that’s wrong on Instagram, it’s wrong in real life as well.

‘That collision between my online life and the real world, the law, was a shock. It’s all in your face, the court, the cameras, not like social media where you are in control and you can curate.

‘It’s only until it got to the point where I had to go to court, and potentially to prison, that I could see what I had done.’

Orla’s court appearance has put paid to her summer job working as a beach club hostess on the Greek party island of Mykonos, and has seen her return home to her mother’s modest semi in Exeter.

Friends have dropped her, the men who once queued for her attention have – unsurprisingly – run a mile and she accepts that prospective employers will look hard at her criminal record.

She still can’t explain coherently why she did what she did, but it was most likely a toxic combination of rejection and the ‘you go girl’ version of female empowerment that exists on the internet after Mount made it clear their sex had been a one-night-only performance.

Orla’s barrister, Michael Cogan, told the court: ‘Unfortunately she thought there was more to it. She is not only young but also naive.

‘She believed there was something in the circumstances when everyone else knew there was nothing. 

‘She has been sucked into a world where instant gratification is achieved only by being seen with rather more successful people. She has been extremely immature and naive and as a result of that, vulnerable.’

When challenged, Orla today says that her use of the name Devil Baby was ‘meant to be a joke’. But that was not how it was perceived by her victims – or the law.

Westminster magistrates were told Orla met the footballers when Chilwell invited her fellow model friend to a party at his home via an Instagram message.

Afterwards, she and Mount slept together once. The pair continued talking for six months until Mount decided the relationship ‘wasn’t going to progress to anything more’ and cut contact.

It was then that the footballer was subjected to a ‘bombardment of messages’ which led him to fear she would turn up at his home or the Chelsea training ground.

Her online harassment of Chilwell led him, too, to wonder if it would spiral into a face-to-face encounter. 

Gilmour, on the receiving end of her most obnoxious online behaviour, was left taking pills to sleep at night and cutting contact with female relatives and friends to protect them.

His performance on the pitch fell victim to his nerves and his club ramped up security for him.

Yet asked if she ever intended to do the men any physical harm, Orla is appalled and squeaks: ‘No, never, never…’

You could be forgiven for thinking that this story begins at that party in Chilwell’s Surrey home. But it doesn’t.

It starts when a girl from Exeter with 11 GCSEs drops out of sixth-form college instead of sticking at her A-levels and takes a minimum wage job as a pot-washer in a local restaurant, only to realise that she could earn up to £35,000 a month (she claims) on the subscription website OnlyFans.

‘I was in the kitchen, washing up, and I thought, ‘Imagine if only one single person subscribes for a tenner, that’s more than I’ve earned in the last hour’.’

Fake it until you make it, she reckoned, adding hair extensions which cost £1,000 every four months, a bee-sting pout, cheek and under-eye fillers, fake eyelashes and fake nails, and a fake tan bill of £60 a month. (Given that her cleavage doesn’t match a frame so small she can still fit into clothes labelled Age 12, I’m guessing her boobs are fake, too.) 

Had her one-night stand with Mount blossomed into a relationship, it goes without saying that the Cartier love bracelet (fake), Louis Vuitton handbag (fake) and Dior weekend tote (fake) would be real.

The revenue from OnlyFans enabled her to move to London while still only 19, and rent flats in arty Primrose Hill and riverside North Greenwich. 

She bought a cockapoo puppy called Jupiter and focused laser-like on her work which was, by her own admission, ‘fully explicit’.

She claims that she has never done porn or worked as an escort but did take jobs such as a champagne ‘bottle girl’ – delivering bottles to nightclub tables and dancing for punters.

So if she thought she had been invited to Chilwell’s party along with a fellow OnlyFans model for her conversational skills, she was being incredibly jejune.

She and Mount progressed from the private cinema room up the spiral staircase and into bed, where they spent the night together and parted without any awkwardness the next morning. ‘There were hugs and goodbyes,’ Orla says.

To his credit, Mount behaved politely, messaging her a few hours later to ask for her number.

But when she hadn’t heard from him a week later, she tried to provoke a response with a very unwise message of her own.

‘Not the right thing to do,’ she says now. ‘I should have just turned off my phone. Since when did chasing anyone work?’ 

Later, she began sending Mount long messages, saying that she felt anxious and lonely in London: ‘I think he felt threatened by them, overwhelmed, like he didn’t want the responsibility.’

Mount asked her to stop the texts and blocked her number, but she began messaging him from different numbers, using 21 in total. 

She says it pained her that he told her he was ‘busy’. ‘It hurt me because it wasn’t how it was in my head,’ she reveals.

‘I thought it was going somewhere – but no, it wasn’t going anywhere. So I did feel quite rejected.’

The scene was set for the creation of Devil Baby. She told Mount: ‘I really want to say sorry and if you could just talk to me and tell me how you feel I would really appreciate it because I’m finding it hard to move on from the situation.

‘You must accept my apology and say sorry to me or you will unlock a new character called ‘Devil Baby’, so let me apologise and make it right.’

Did she ever think it would end in court? ‘No way. It wasn’t meant to hurt them in a bad way, it was more trying to embarrass them in front of their friends.’

Her persistent trolling resulted in a police request to attend a voluntary interview at a police station. 

The allegations against her were taken so seriously that she was arrested and taken into custody as she got off the train.

‘They took everything, includ-ing my phone,’ she says. ‘I was panicking.’

It was the start of the proceedings which resulted in a 12-week jail sentence – suspended for 18 months – a 30-day rehabilitation order, 200 hours of unpaid work, £300 each to be paid to Mount and Chilwell and £500 to Gilmour, £85 costs and a £154 victim surcharge.

There is also a five-year restraining order preventing her from contacting the three men directly or indirectly. 

Orla is grateful not to be behind bars and thinks that she has grown up a lot in the past couple of years.

She is still trying to work as a model and influencer but has long since deleted her lucrative OnlyFans account.

She accepts the court verdict and the genuine fear and distress she caused the three footballers.

If she’s learned anything, it’s that in the nexus where men such as Premier League footballers meet girls like her, there’s only going to be one winner after a no-strings fling.

‘I didn’t see it coming. I was very stuck in my own world,’ she says. ‘I didn’t meet many people. I was quite lonely and being on OnlyFans just made me more lonely.

‘And sad, too, because of what I was doing. I was putting myself out there, but not having any real connection. It’s very superficial.

‘There are so many people online trying to do what I am doing. Influencing is a cut-throat world and there’s a whole hype around famous people. If you’re naive and young and doing social media, you want to impress them.

‘I guess I just felt like I wasn’t good enough for him [Mason Mount] and I didn’t like that feeling. I wanted to be good enough –but I just made it worse.’

And then she fixes that angelic hair, touches up her lipstick and interrogates her phone, to see how many views and ‘likes’ her accounts have had so far today.