Your bag is empty.
By day, Gabe Trew is the owner of POP, a marketplace for locally-made goods in Canberra, Australia. But off the clock, he runs Confession Daddy, an Instagram page divulging some of the juiciest secrets ever to grace Mark Zuckerberg’s internet. The page emerged just last week, but it’s taken the algorithm by storm thanks to anonymous admissions like a snot fetish, a midwife hookup, and a food kink you’ll have to read to believe.
“The people that have these wild confessions, they’re just everyday people like you and me,” says Trew. Confession Daddy is his third foray into the online confessional space. The first began in 2024, when the Instagram account for POP asked followers to submit anonymous crushes for Valentine’s Day, which they posted on their Stories. One submission contained a mild, unrelated confession (“something about her workplace,” Trew says), which opened the floodgates. “After posting it, I think I got about a thousand confessions in 24 hours,” he says. “I was like, OK, we’ve hit on something here.”
Soon, Trew moved the operation to his personal Instagram, where he posted confessions from people around the world via Stories. He says the idea for Confession Daddy came from his audience. “A commenter just said, ‘You’re our daddy,’ and then everyone piled in and said, ‘You have to be the confession daddy,’” he says. “We all need a confession daddy.”
Scroll through the Confession Daddy Instagram, and you’ll find a riveting mix of strangers’ darkest secrets, sexual and otherwise. Every now and then, Trew disrupts the drama with a sweet story, but most confessions border on grotesque and downright diabolical. On every post, Trew peppers in lighthearted on-screen commentary, as if he’s responding to a wild message received in a groupchat with trusted friends. Case in point: A confession about mid-flight sex with a pilot reads, “So this is what turbulence is.”
Confession Daddy’s Instagram bio notes that some confessions may be fictional, which Trew says was “purely a suggestion from my lawyer.” Trew himself hasn’t written any of the confessions that he posts, he says. Of the ones he does receive, he estimates only 20 to 30 percent are totally made up. “I don’t think people are that creative because they’re very specific,” he says, adding that most fake confessions make their falsehoods obvious: “I get thousands and thousands that I don’t post, that are just bad and clearly made-up or poorly written. I make sure to curate only the best.”
Whether fact or fiction, Trew says every great confession has a few hallmarks, shock value being the most apparent. Still, he feels a post-worthy confession should be relatable in some way. “A really juicy confession is something shocking that pushes the edges, that people could also imagine themselves falling into,” he explains. “And then there are some that are so out there, you wouldn’t even think about them. You wouldn’t even think it’s a thing. It’s so shocking, people just lap it up.”
Right now, Confession Daddy is a solo project, but Trew hopes it’ll grow into a multi-platform, multi-person endeavor. Thankfully, the lessons he’s learned from this experience are more wholesome than the confessions themselves. “Everybody wants to connect to people and have someone hear them,” he says. “It’s made me realize that no one has a script for life. Everyone’s going through this for the first time.”
We rounded up a couple of Confession Daddy’s most scandalous entries. Read on without judgment, but with caution—you may never look at ham the same way.
Button Butt
Santa’s Helper