You guys know the MTV show Catfish, right? With Nev and Max, where they bring together a couple having an online relationship, and one of them turns out to be someone completely different from who they say they are? Chelsea Browning is a Tuscaloosa native who appeared on the very first episode of the MTV show, Catfish at the age of 18. However, her appearance was one of controversy—she was the Catfish.

She convinced girls all over the nation that she was a gorgeous, male model, working at the TV show Chelsea Lately named RJ King, aka Jamison. Five years later, after learning from her experience and creating an anti-bullying nonprofit, Win From Within, the 23-year-old T-Town celeb agreed to sit down and share her side of the story with me.

Where are they now? Catfish—Tuscaloosa Edition

Chelsea, Nev and Sunny on the show that aired in 2012

NB: Tell me about yourself! How do you spend your time these days?

CB: I work a lot and I spend a lot of time with my siblings, I have eight siblings, so when we’re in town together, we obviously spend all of that time together. I’m the fourth so I'm almost dead center. I work at Bob’s Victory Grill, Roll Tide! It was awesome growing up in Tuscaloosa. Every time someone new comes here, they are like “Wow, this is ridiculously crazy.”

NB: You were on the first episode of the show Catfish, telling the story of your illegitimate relationship with Sunny, who you told you were a man named RJ King (Jamison). At the end of the episode, after Sunny knew the truth, Nev [Schulman] said, “Do you think about the fact that in those relationships, you're just being yourself, and those people are loving the real you?” and that seemed to really resonate with you.

CB: Oh yeah, I mean I was exactly who I was, the very relaxed Chelsea, just behind another face and name.

NB: How do you think the experience on Catfish affected the person you are today? Is it a prominent part of who you are?

CB: Absolutely. It made me aware of what honesty can do, it made me aware of how who you really are can affect your entire life, and it's obviously taken me a lot of places in life. It's pretty crazy, pretty intense, but it's all been fun.

NB: So would you say that this affected your life in a positive way?

CB: At first it affected my life in a very negative way. I mean, I outed myself on national television. That was the first time I came out to anyone. It was pretty crazy. I knew it was time. It was still a project, and we had high hopes that it would be something more, so if it did turn out to be something more, then why would I lie about who I was? Sometimes I think what happened on Catfish was detrimental to my career, but it obviously benefited me in positive ways because I would say that 90 percent of the people who contact me through Win From Within, or at all, are people who are trying to come out, trying to accept themselves for who they are, trying to figure out if their family is going to accept them for who they are, so I think that coming out for me in that way helped me get my story out to the world, to help them.

NB: How did you get involved with Catfish?

CB: I contacted the show when I saw Catfish The Movie at Sundance Film Festival. I said, "This is pretty much my movie, I'm just doing what Angela did to Nev." When they saw the Facebook and the Twitter and the Instagram, and everything that was active online, they said “Holy sh**, lets do something, we can make more out of this movie, we can do something.” And at first, we thought we could just make another big one about me, but we knew that this was happening all over the world—everywhere.

CB: So we weren’t going to make it about me or just any one person. We were going put Nev, and Max—Nev’s best friend—and I picked Sunny, out of many many girls I was talking to, to film the show with me. I had been talking to, at the time, I would say about 50-ish girls. And so, out of those few, I picked about 10, and they were more excited about just being on the show rather than the subject of the show, and so we just had to really find someone who was more into what we were doing with the show, rather than just being on TV. But at the time, it was still just a project. We hadn’t been picked up by anyone, so we were just doing it as a project, and found a film crew…

NB: When they contacted Sunny did they say, “We want to bring together you and Jamison?”

CB: Yes she was completely under the impression that I was who I said I was. I had her totally convinced, but the weird thing was, we had never Skyped, Snapchat wasn’t out at the time. Snapchat proves everyone wrong every single day now. If you don’t have Snapchat, it's not real! Snapchat or it didn’t happen.

NB: What is your role at Catfish?

CB: I cast for the show. I live at home, which is still really awesome, and communicate with them online every single day.

NB: Do you believe that the show helped you to come to terms with the struggles you were having, and turn your energy in a new direction?

CB: Oh yeah absolutely. Because it not only helped me, but in the end it has obviously helped a lot of other people. I’ve been able to help a lot of other people because they've seen my story and they've not only learned from it, but they've contacted me and I've been able to help them with theirs. I have an organization called Win From Within where people contact me through Facebook, Instagram, pretty much anywhere and just let me know whats going on. I teach self acceptance, if they're getting bullied, going through something at home, I guide them in how to get help. I get contacted every day. Probably 10 to 15 messages a day, which started from the show when it aired.

NB: How do you feel this affected your family?

CB: Not very much. I didn't watch it with my parents. They knew that the show was happening, but they didn't know what it was about. So they watched it together out of town, and I watched it with my sisters, and they all knew, but they were totally cool because they knew it had been going on for a while. They didn't know about the whole RJ thing when it was actively going on, but after the show had been filmed, they knew about everything. So I felt like I should warn somebody, and that somebody should be (my family.) They were all pretty cool, they accepted me for who I am, and my parents do too, they’ve never said anything negative about it, because they know I’m obviously doing something better for myself and for other people.

NB: Can you tell me a bit about your organization Win From Within. What does the organization do to help victims of bullying, and how did it begin?

CB: It is a nonprofit. It all started the day the show aired, that's when people started emailing me, “How did you deal with this? How do I deal with this? How can I get help with this?” and I have a lot of people messaging me saying, “I’m thinking about committing suicide,” So I teamed up with LOVE, which is another organization in New York City, which stands for Leave Out Violence, and we teach self acceptance, how to get advice, how to get help from a psychiatrist. Up in New York with LOVE they do a bunch of group work where they get together and just do artwork. It sells all over the city, and that's also nonprofit. We’re honestly just trying to let the world know what's happening out there. That was my intention the whole time, to come clean, to be honest about what I did.

NB: How can others get involved in Win From Within?

CB: People can donate through LOVE, contact me through any social media. Win From Within is just me. There are a lot of people who work for LOVE and they sponsor Win From Within. Its actually Nev’s mom who created LOVE, long before Catfish.

NB: What are your thoughts on online dating?

CB: Don’t do it. I mean… I guess Tinder is okay. Some people need it, but I know the worst that can happen. I see it every single day with the people I work with [at Catfish]. I know all of the stories before they have been filmed, it is just terrible. Some are so bad that we can’t show it on television, which is sad.

NB: What are your plans for the future, career wise?

CB: I want to be in film. MTV just picked up season five, so we hope that it will get to 10 and 20. But at the same time, we also hope that people stop doing what they're doing. We hope that the “catfish” are real.

Chelsea in 2015