Cara Cunningham

Cara Cunningham (formerly Chris Crocker; born December 7, 1987) is an American internet personality, songwriter, recording artist, YouTuber, and former pornographic film actress.

Cunningham gained fame in September 2007 from her viral video "Leave Britney Alone!", in which she tearfully defended pop singer Britney Spears' comeback performance at the MTV Video Music Awards; the video received over four million views in two days.

The video gained international media attention, hundreds of parodies, and criticism for Cunningham, which included accusations of narcissism, melodrama and histrionics, and using Spears' personal shortcomings to bolster her own fame.

Others have accused Cunningham of acting in the "Leave Britney Alone!"

video, although Cunningham insisted it was genuine on a September 2007 appearance on Maury Povich's Maury show.

Cunningham produces and acts in her own videos, and is a self-described edutainer.

In most of Cunningham's adolescent works, she presents herself as an openly gender non-conforming person and effeminate Southerner in a "small-minded town" in the Bible Belt.

During her teenage years, Cunningham used "Crocker" as a stage name in order to keep her identity and location secret, due to death threats she received.

Cunningham is best known for her Britney Spears video, uploaded to YouTube on September 10, 2007.

The first part of the infamous work was posted September 9, 2007, called "Leave Britney Alone pt.1" to her MySpace page, while the better-known "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!"

(part 2) was posted to both Myspace and YouTube.

In "Leave Britney Alone pt.1", an emotional Cunningham stated that she did not want fellow Southerner Britney Spears to spiral out of control like Anna Nicole Smith, who had died in February 2007.

, the video had been viewed over 35 million times and had accumulated a total of over 500,000 comments.

It is just a few seconds shorter than the second part, and Cunningham, although emotional, remains relatively calm and composed, becoming teary only at the very end.

In the videos, Cunningham condemns gossip columnists such as Perez Hilton and reality TV star Simon Cowell who criticized Britney Spears' onstage music performance at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas.

Within the first 24 hours of its posting, the video had accumulated over 2 million views.

, it had accumulated a total of 24 million views and was the second-most discussed video of all time on the site (in all categories), with over 350,000 comments.

"LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!"

was one of YouTube's fastest "climbing" videos, reaching the minimum seven million views needed to be included in the "Top 100".

The video was nominated in the Commentary category in the 2007 YouTube Awards.

The video received worldwide attention and earned Cunningham interviews on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, The Today Show, Maury, The Howard Stern Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Ryan Seacrest's KIIS-FM morning show.

Cunningham and her video were also commented upon in the mainstream media by shows like The View and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

YouTube said "the melodramatic two-minute clip made [Cunningham] an instant YouTube star" and named it one of the top videos of 2007.

Wired magazine named it the top video of 2007.

Prior to the attention from her September 2007 Leave Britney Alone! video, Cunningham was seen as a viral video sensation and was asked by MTV vlogger and news staffer Matt Sunbulli to provide video for MTV's website which also broadcasts on MTV itself.

Cunningham indicated that she hoped to develop her acting career; she agreed to develop ideas for a TV show with Los Angeles producer Glenn Meehan and met with representatives from MTV's gay-themed channel LOGO.

According to Variety, Cunningham signed a development deal with 44 Blue Productions to create a "docusoap" reality television show, which would be called Chris Crocker's 15 Minutes More.

Rasha Drachkovitch, the production company's co-founder, stated, "It's going to pretty much be the Chris Crocker experience. We consider [her] a rebel character that people will find interesting. [She's] going to be a TV star."

Although sometimes shown in conjunction with news footage of Spears' performance, the "pure performance art" video became its own story, with the news media and the gossip industry offering opinions on the phenomenon, joking that Cunningham could be "an insidious satiric mastermind" and comparing her to Andy Kaufman.

In the video, Cunningham proclaims, "All you people care about is readers and making money off of her. She's a human! Leave Britney alone!"

Cunningham stated that although she is often acting in her videos, her emotions were genuine and "straight from the heart"; although she described the clip as a "second take" in one interview, she clarified on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that she meant that it was the second part of a longer video, the first part being "Leave Britney Alone pt. 1".

The "Leave Britney Alone!"

In 2014, Queerty stated that with thousands of Facebook and Twitter followers, Cunningham is "one of those self-invented social media icons".

Cunningham was born in East Tennessee to a teenage couple and was raised by her grandparents.

Cunningham said she "raised eyebrows" by bringing Barbie dolls to kindergarten for show and tell rather than the toys or action figures more conventionally associated with boys.

Cunningham continued to live in Tennessee throughout her youth, and was homeschooled in response to constant "death threats, bullying and glares at her clothes and makeup" specifically after reportedly being "harassed by a homophobic high school gym coach".

Cunningham lived with her fundamentalist Pentecostal grandparents who continued raising her when her teenage parents were not able.

While her grandfather reportedly knows little about her Internet fame, her grandmother has reluctantly appeared in some of her videos.

, Cunningham's videos had received a combined 50 million plays on MySpace, and her vlog channel on YouTube was the 100th-most viewed of all time in all categories, with over 205 million video views, before Cunningham closed her YouTube account in September 2015.

Her work consists mainly of short-form, self-directed monologues shot in her grandparents' home.