THE MOST UNLIKELY INFLUENCER

During a horrific childhood, Jordan Turpin found solace in social media stars. Now, with nearly one million TikTok followers, she's becoming one.

- CARRIE BATTAN

Jordan Turpin would argue that Justin Bieber saved her life. The young woman, who is now 22, grew up in the most unusually cruel and isolated of environments—effectively what people mean when they hyperbolize that someone is “living under a rock”—and still felt the impact of Bieber’s world-dominating stardom. It’s the reason she was able to escape her circumstances, she says. Jordan, along with her 12 siblings, spent nearly all of her days sealed inside a home in Perris, California, that would later be described by tabloids and talk shows as a “House of Horrors.” There, Jordan’s parents, David and Louise Turpin, often shackled their children to their beds, starved and beat them, and only allowed them one bath or shower a year. The outside world was only a fantasy to the Turpin children, who lived with the blinds closed during the day.

By the time Jordan made her break five years ago, escaping from the house at age 17, she was so untrained that she ran down the middle of the street because she didn’t know what a sidewalk was. She perplexed the 911 dispatchers on the other end of the line with how naïve she was to the basics of modern life. “Does anybody at the house take any kind of medication?” the respondent asked her. “Oh, I don’t know what medication is,” Jordan said. Later, when a police officer arrived on the scene, Jordan apologized profusely. “I’m sorry if I talk too much.… I’ve never talked to anybody out there...so this is very hard for me to talk,” she told him.