Rachel Dolezal Says She’s a ‘Certified Sex Coach,’ Opens Online Practice: ‘This Work Is Personal’

Nkechi Diallo, the controversial figure formerly known as Rachel Dolezal who notoriously claimed to be Black, is following a new career path.

“The cap & gown🎓and a new title! 💋,” Diallo, 48, wrote via Instagram on Saturday, September 12, alongside photos of herself wearing a graduation cap and gown and holding a personalized desk sign reading, “Nkechi Diallo, Certified Sex Coach.”

Diallo said she graduated from The Sexology Institute’s “300+ hour certification program” and has subsequently opened her own “online intimacy and relationship coaching practice,” called Bandwidth.

The Sexology Institute confirmed to Us on Sunday that Diallo has graduated from their program and is certified as a sex coach.

“This work is personal,” Diallo continued in her post. “As a single mom of three boys, I know what hypervigilance, burnout, and carrying the mental load do to connection — and I believe joy, closeness and aliveness in your body aren’t luxuries. They’re capacities we can design, develop and expand.”

Diallo added, “Bandwidth is for the people who’ve poured into everyone else: single parents, parents of neurodivergent kids, and folks whose work lives at the margins. Together we clear the static, make room for what matters, and expand your bandwidth for a life that’s authored — not absent or performed.”

The photos showed Diallo sporting a black cap and gown, a red stole and black fishnet tights. Diallo also included a professional headshot for her Bandwidth business.

“Certified. I did it! Woohoo, my office is open!” she wrote over the images.

Diallo is a former college instructor who made headlines in 2015 after claiming to be a Black woman for years despite having a white mother and father. Her parents, Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal, told Spokane newspaper The Spokesman-Review at the time that Diallo began to “disguise herself” after adopting four Black children.

Diallo doubled down regarding her identity, telling the outlet, “There’s a lot of complexities … and I don’t know that everyone would understand that.”

Amid backlash over her claims, Diallo resigned as president of her chapter of the NAACP and lost her part-time teaching job at Eastern Washington University.

“Everything I do is connected to other people, so I don’t know how to assess the damage other than within my own mind,” she told Vanity Fair in July 2015. “It’s taken my entire life to negotiate how to identify, and I’ve done a lot of research and a lot of studying. I could have a long conversation, an academic conversation about that.”

Diallo told the outlet that she felt she “didn’t mislead anybody.”

“I didn’t deceive anybody. If people feel misled or deceived, then sorry that they feel that way, but I believe that’s more due to their definition and construct of race in their own minds than it is to my integrity or honesty, because I wouldn’t say I’m African-American, but I would say I’m black, and there’s a difference in those terms,” she added.

Diallo later drew attention again in February 2024 when she was fired from a teaching position in Arizona after administrators discovered her OnlyFans account.