She started a YouTube channel at 12 to fight back against bullying. Now she has 1.3 million TikTok followers, a Netflix show, and a front-row seat to her own lesson about trusting the wrong person.
When Netflix announced the “Calabasas Confidential” cast, most of the attention immediately went to the famous last names — Pippen, Woods, Michaels. Suede Brooks doesn’t have a celebrity parent, but she has built something arguably more interesting: a following entirely her own. Here’s everything you need to know about her. Then she came to Calabasas for the summer and learned something no follower count could have prepared her for.
Who Is Suede Brooks?
Suede Brooks is a Las Vegas, Nevada-born model and social media influencer who has been building her platform since she was a kid. She was born on February 8, 2001, making her 25 heading into the “Calabasas Confidential” premiere. She has a brother named Blaze, a sister named India Rae, and lost her father Steven in July 2021.
She is, at 5’11”, exactly the kind of person who was always going to end up in front of a camera professionally. What she did with that was entirely up to her.
How She Got Here
Suede’s origin story is one of those that makes you root for her from the jump. She started watching YouTube videos at 10 years old, discovered her passion for content creation in middle school, and launched her own YouTube channel at 12 — not to post makeup tutorials or fashion hauls, but specifically to speak out against bullying. She had faced it herself and decided to do something about it.
She first found a significant following on Tumblr before pivoting to YouTube, Instagram, and eventually TikTok, where she now has over 1.3 million followers. Her content spans fashion hauls, Get Ready With Me videos, travel vlogs, and lifestyle content. Her YouTube channel has over 330,000 subscribers. Her Instagram sits at around 1.6 million followers. She is represented by United Talent Agency.
The Drake Moment
In July 2022, Suede was spotted with Drake in St. Tropez, France, which sent the internet into a brief but enthusiastic spiral. Neither confirmed nor denied anything. The rumor lived its life, the internet moved on, and Suede kept posting.
The Calabasas Connection
Suede is actually from Las Vegas, not Calabasas, which makes her one of the show’s true outsiders alongside Sterling Retzlaff. She didn’t go to Calabasas High School, didn’t grow up in the group’s social ecosystem, and came into the summer without the years of history everyone else was carrying. She knew Nicole going in. She didn’t know Dylan Wolf at all.
Jemma explains who he is in the opening scene of the show. That context matters for everything that follows.
Suede Brooks on ‘Calabasas Confidential’
Suede arrives seeming like the wisest person in the room. When Jemma tells her about Dylan’s history at Point Dume beach — the Bloody Mary rumor, the humiliation, the years of coming back anyway — Suede’s response is immediate: “It’s smoke, babe.” She has Jemma’s back. She means it.
Then she meets Dylan at Kiki-Chella and finds a different person than the one she was briefed on.
What follows is one of the season’s most compelling arcs. Suede is funny, self-possessed, and genuinely unbothered by most things — which makes the Dylan situation all the more revealing when it gets to her. She co-signs him to the group. She tells the girls he’s a cool kid. She sits between his legs at a beach day while Jemma watches from across the sand. She FaceTimes Nicole in the middle of an apology lunch to ask if Nicole spread the date story — a move Dylan orchestrated and Suede walked right into.
The Yamashiro date is the clearest window into what they are. Dylan brings up communication. He’s calm, specific, and completely unbothered by whether what he’s saying lands well. He wants her to show up every day, not just in high-tension moments. She calls it a chip on his shoulder. She thanks him for dinner and walks out mid-meal.
By Episode 7, the hickey at the carnival, the news that Dylan went on a date with Emilie’s friend, and a conversation at a restaurant in Malibu bring it to a head. Suede tells him she co-signed him to everyone — all the girls, all his boys — and he did this. She tells him she’s starting to understand Jemma. She tells him directly: “You f—ked Jemma up, babe. Like, bad. The way you treat women.”
The apology to Jemma at Sagebrush Cantina in Episode 7 is one of the season’s best moments of accountability — specific, unconditional, and delivered without Suede making any part of it about herself. “I got got by a boy,” she tells the cameras afterward. “It makes me take a step back and realize where I put Dylan in my life. Period.”
Where Suede Brooks Stands After the Season
Post-season, Suede confirmed that she and Jemma are no longer friends, saying the two don’t share the same values. She and Dylan still follow each other on social media, and after filming the two were visibly flirting — she commented “there he goes” on one of his posts and he replied “buzz me in.” Her post-season read on him is generous given the circumstances: “He’s one of my favorite people. How could you get mad at him for longer than a few hours?”
Whether that door stays open, closes, or does what it did all season — opens a little, closes a little, opens again — is a question Season 2 will likely answer.
What Suede Brooks Brings to “Calabasas Confidential”
Suede is the show’s most complicated presence because she arrived as its moral compass and left as its most instructive cautionary tale — and neither version cancels the other out. She was right about Dylan from the beginning. She was also the one who ended up proving herself right the hard way. The girl who started a YouTube channel at 12 to fight bullying spent a summer defending the person doing it, and figured it out before the season ended.
That’s not a failure. That’s a story worth watching.
“Calabasas Confidential” is streaming now on Netflix.
More ‘Calabasas Confidential’ Cast:
For more ‘Calabasas Confidential,” check out our Full Calabasas Confidential Guide here.
Want the daily reality TV drama — no spam, just the good stuff?
Subscribe