This list is from the diary of 22-year-old Thea.

For a year and a half, she lived as a “sugarbabe” with a profile on the Danish website sugardaters.com. On sugardaters.com, young people can exchange sex or intimacy with a (typically) older person who in return offers gifts, experiences or money.

Thea started sugar dating when she was 19 years old. She was inspired by a DR3 documentary about a young woman who drank champagne and fell in love with her "sugar daddy".

Thea was fascinated. It looked like an easy way to make money and have an adventure at the same time, she thought.

That kind of life looked easy.

During much of her time as a sugar babe she confided in her diary - this pink glittery notebook you just opened. She wrote about the men, about the money, about the emotions that got hurt along the way.

A little anxiously, she created a profile on the sugar dating website in the fall of 2019. Thea wasn’t speaking to her parents. She overate because she suffered from bulimia. Junk food was expensive. At the same time, she struggled with several other psychiatric diagnoses.

The things that mattered to Thea were her school and the music she dreamed of making a living from one day.

At the time, Thea had only had one boyfriend. She wasn’t very experienced sexually - not into anything too crazy.

Nevertheless, today she has tried almost everything, sexually. Whatever the men wanted, she gave them.

The first offer that Thea accepted on her sugar dating profile was for 3.500 kroner. The agreement was that they would have sex using protection and that she would take the train to the man’s address.

He picked her up at the station. Thea had placed a hairspray in her bag and put an open knife in her pocket. In her boots, she had hidden scissors - just in case.

The man looked nicer in real life than in the pictures from the sugar dating website.

He had already put the money on the table, when she arrived at his home. They didn’t have to go through with it if she didn’t want to. She would still get her money, she remembers that he said. But Thea couldn’t bring herself to back out. She couldn’t say 'no' because he seemed nice – like an ordinary man.

Afterwards, when she stood at the train station, she looked at the cash in her hand. She had been paid for having sex. It was unreal, Thea thought. And then, she made a decision: She wouldn’t think too much or too deeply about what she was doing, rather she would focus on what she got out of it.

3.500 kroner. For three hours. When she thought about it that way, it was almost… easy money?

Thea set herself a goal: 50.000 kroner. Once she had made that amount, she would stop.

Thea never doubted what sugar dating was. For her, it was prostitution.

That is not the case according to sugardaters.com. The site states that suspicion of prostitution leads to immediate suspension of one's profile.

Nevertheless, Thea and the men who contacted her via sugardaters.com used the website to make agreements about sex for money - with no consequences.

Here is a screenshot from Thea's phone:

Thea and the men she met are far from the only ones who have used the website to buy and sell sex. DR Nyheder has spoken to a number of young people who say they have used either sugardaters.com or other sugar dating websites to sell sexual services.

DR is also in possession of 77 drafts for profile texts from sugardaters.com, which the website in its own moderation system has categorized as "prostitution or prostitution-like behavior".

Despite the website's zero tolerance policy, the profiles have not been closed. Most of them have been allowed to continue their activity after they have deleted or changed their profile text.

DR Nyheder has requested an interview with sugardaters.com, but the website have not responded to our inquiry.

Thea quickly earned between 20.000 and 30.000 kroner a month from the meetings she set up through the website. Therefore, she relatively quickly reached the 50.000 kroner that was her goal.

But she didn’t have another job and the money went as fast as it came; the more she earned, the more she spent.

So, the sugar dates continued. Became a part of her every day.

She typically met with the men in the evenings. They “fixed” what they’d agreed on, as she says, and then she went home, slept for a few hours and showed up at school the next day.

One particular sugar daddy would always meet her at a hotel in Copenhagen at five in the morning. Others, she met with in cars in dark parking lots. Often, the men texted her the car’s licence plate so she knew what to look for.

Some men offered dinners.

At that point, Thea felt she could handle it all.

But she also met sugar daddies who crossed her limits.

Sugar daddies, who were often decades older than herself.

Thea could have said no to the offers that appeared in her mailbox at the sugar dating website. But the money was tempting.

Again, Thea could have said no when she met the men.

But once she sat in front of a sugar daddy, she didn’t dare to deny him anything.

Like the time she had a sugar date with a man she thought seemed weird and who spoke almost incomprehensibly. He had two large suitcases. Thea briefly feared what he might have hidden in them. Tools for torture?

Then he asked about her shoe size.

In the suitcases were leather clothes, stilettos, and lots of make-up.

Thea put it on.

Sometimes, Thea got drunk in order to cope.

There were also sugar daddies who paid her with hash. Or stronger drugs, like speed, coke, or MDMA. She often chose to meet those men again, even if they offered less money than others.

When Thea was picked up at a new train station by a new man, she always introduced herself as the alter ego Sofia - or Anna-Sofia Cat, as she calls her in her diary. For Thea, it was about creating a distance to a world she didn’t feel she fit into.

Anna-Sofia Cat didn’t have bulimia or depression. Her childhood was unproblematic. Unlike Thea's own, the life of Anna-Sofia Cat' was great.

The only real similarity between Anna Sofia Cat and Thea was the music. While Thea imagined that Anna Sofia Cat taught music, Thea herself dreamed of performing on the big venues. And when everything became overwhelming and too much, it was the hope of a music career that carried her through.

The hope. The money.

And the excitement.

But at one point, Anna-Sofia Cat and Thea’s dream of a life in the spotlight wasn’t enough to carry her through everyday life.

The months went by. The men became more numerous.

The diary became a logbook.

Thea had problems before she became a sugar babe. Had diagnoses. And she knew full well that the world she had chosen to become a part of wasn’t good for her.

In between meeting the men, Thea got worse and worse. Different records from different psychiatrists testify to that.

“Is increasingly sad, has difficulty concentrating, low self-esteem. Has suicidal thoughts,” it says in one of them.

In February 2021, she was admitted to a psychiatric ward.

Eventually, 64 diary entries, thousands of kroner and several men later, Thea closed her profile on the website. One and a half year after she had made her first 3.500 kroner from selling sex.

She didn’t want the money and the random men to take her life.

Today, it’s more than half a year since Thea was admitted to a psychiatric ward. More than half a year ago, she deleted her profile on sugardaters.com. Said stop.

In the meantime, she has recorded a few songs and shared them with the outside world. It gives a flicker of the kick she used to get from being picked up at a random train station by strangers.

Bulimia still haunts her on bad days. Sex is ruined for her - as she predicted on the first page of her diary. She has no desire at all to think about the fact that maybe on day she’ll be intimate with someone she loves.

Recently, she started a new job.

It feels unreal to have a real job with colleagues and a real paycheck.

As if her life is about to begin.

Thea is not the woman's real name. The editorial staff know her real name but have chosen to obscure her identity due to the nature of the story.

As stated, DR Nyheder has requested an interview with sugardaters.com, but the website hasn’t responded to our inquiry. In the spring, however, Sugardaters.com stated the following to DR Nyheder when they were presented with a similar critique:

- Sugardaters is a dating site like all other dating sites. We do not encourage sex for money. We do not allow profile texts reminiscent of massage ads, recommendations for sex or similar, the site wrote at that time in an email.