A fetish cam girl who says she was paid $5,000 over the past two years to dominate Kristi Noem’s husband while he wore big false boobs has told the Daily Beast: “There is no way in hell that she did not know.”
Lydia Love, 28, is a high-profile performer in the “sissy sub” and “bimboification” world, a niche area of the adult industry where men adopt an ultra-feminine persona, often involving cross-dressing, and like to be bossed around.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Love—her stage name—claimed that Bryon Noem—the former homeland security secretary’s husband of 34 years—would often come online to tell her how stressed he was, and that he was doing this to relax. His love of wearing gigantic fake breasts on webcam was revealed Tuesday by the Daily Mail.
Kristi Noem, 54, claimed in a statement that the Mail revelations had “blindsided” her. But Love, the first of Bryon’s cam girls to speak publicly, said: “I don’t actually believe that—not in the slightest.
“There is no way in hell that she did not know for that long. He didn’t just wake up two years ago and start talking to cam girls about wanting to be a woman.”
She added: “A lot of the wives know—and either they’re in denial or they have a really secretive partner.”
Love, who is based in Los Angeles, California, said she recognized Bryon Noem the moment photographs from the Mail story began circulating on social media.
His specific fetish, she said, involved wearing yoga pants and a tight shirt with his nipples pressed against the fabric, and he wanted her to instruct him to bend over, arch his back, spank himself, and show off what she describes as the largest prosthetic breasts she had ever seen on a client.
“I have never had a client who wanted them so big,” she claimed. “That’s why it was so shocking to me.” Love was unsure whether Bryon’s breasts were high-end balloons or a silicone chest plate—both are sold commercially—but says they had visible nipples, which Noem liked to have poking through his shirt.
Love also offered a theory about why Bryon, an insurance agency boss, may have been drawn to her particular corner of the internet in the first place. Kristi Noem has been open about some of her cosmetic procedures, and Love sees a pattern she recognizes. “A lot of the time, these ‘sissy’ guys want to be the women that they are in relationships with—and look like them,” she said.
“So seeing Noem’s transformation with cosmetic procedures makes a lot of sense to me. I’m sure he was living through her in some ways.” It is, she adds, a dynamic she has encountered in her personal life too. “I’ve dated guys with this fetish before, and there were points where I was like—do you want to date me or be me?”
When the story broke, Love says, a fellow cam performer reached out with a striking claim of her own. “She was like, ‘Wait—was he a cam client? I swear I had him too,’” Love said.
Bryon, 56, would typically open their sessions by mentioning how stressed he had been, she recounted. Love had a routine response. “I’d go into the whole spiel of ‘now we can have fun—I hope this makes your day better,’” she said.
She says he came to her cam room around 10 to 15 times over roughly a year and a half to two years, with gaps of up to three months between appearances. At Love’s rate of about $20 per minute, with private sessions running approximately 10 minutes each, she estimates she earned about $5,000 from him in total.
Love found Bryon a frustrating client—not because of what he wanted, but because of how he went about getting it. Despite paying to be dominated, he had a persistent habit of trying to direct the action himself. “He would be like, ‘tell me to do this, tell me to do that’—kind of excessively,” she said. “If you want to be dominated by a woman, let me dominate you. Why are you telling me to tell you to do all this?”
She says he also had a habit of loitering in her public chat room, typing sexual self-descriptions to bait her attention without paying for a private show. “It’s kind of like a stripper,” she said. “Are we gonna sit here and talk all day, or do you want to go into a private dance?”
Love says she knew Bryon—who has three adult children with Noem—was married but had no idea he had any political connections. He rarely showed his face during sessions—only at the start, and occasionally mid-show. “It makes me uncomfortable when I know my clients are married,” she said.
That detail—a senior political spouse conducting webcam sessions under a degree of anonymity—prompted Love to offer a more unsettling theory. “I wonder if he wanted to be exposed one day,” she said, “because a lot of the sissies are into blackmail fetish, too.”
She added: “I’m not saying that he gave me any information like his name or exact location but him showing his face was part of the arousal of ‘getting exposed’—it’s super common.”
He told The New York Times after the photos were published that he would speak about it, saying, “I will at some point. Today is not the day.”
The remark will raise eyebrows given that Bryon’s wife ran the Department of Homeland Security until last month, overseeing some of the most sensitive law enforcement operations in the country, before she was fired by President Donald Trump, 79, for helping turn his mass deportation drive into a car crash.
Love is at pains to say she is not judging Bryon for what he got up to in her cam room. “I really pride myself on keeping my clients’ confidentiality, and I don’t mind people exploring their kinks as long as it’s not harming to others.”
But, she added, “Where my problem is, is that this is a conservative family who publicly shares values that are entirely opposite to what’s happening behind closed doors. They’re building careers by pushing beliefs that they themselves don’t follow and it’s extremely common in these circles. I hate the hypocrisy of it all. I like when people stand in what they believe in.”
It is a charge with teeth. Noem spent her tenure at DHS championing an administration that has sought to restrict transgender rights, ban gender-affirming care, and roll back federal protections for LGBTQ+ Americans. As governor of South Dakota, she railed against drag shows.
Her husband, meanwhile, has been accused of spending $20 a minute to be instructed to show off his yoga pants on a cam girl’s screen.
“I don’t think that he should feel bad about what he does in the privacy of his home, but he should feel bad about the hypocrisy,” Love said.
Kristi and Bryon Noem did not return a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
