Is the Porn Industry Doing Enough for Performers’ Mental Health?
UPDATE: Adult performer Olivia Lua, who also went under the name Olivia Voltaire, was found dead this weekend in a rehab facility in California, making her the fifth porn performer to pass away in the past three months.
***
When the Adult Video News Awards take place next weekend in Las Vegas – arguably the biggest night in the adult industry and one that has the power to transform young porn stars into household names – at least two of its nominees will be noticeably absent: Olivia Nova and August Ames. Nova, a 20-year-old Minnesota native whose friends and family knew her as aspiring singer and model Alexis Forte, was pronounced dead by the Clark County Coroner’s Office at noon on January 7th in a private home in Las Vegas. She had been working in the industry for less than a year. Her cause of death has not yet been determined.
The news came roughly a month after Ames, a prominent Canadian-American performer with four years of adult film credits to her name, was found asphyxiated from hanging in a public park near her Camarillo, California home. Ames, identified by the Ventura County Medical Examiner as 23-year-old Mercedes Grabowski, had battled social media accusations of homophobia after tweeting that she’d declined to shoot a scene with a male actor who’d previously shot gay porn. In a letter published to her website last week, her widow, Kevin Moore, attributed her death directly to online bullying and harassment from fellow members of the industry.
“We are in a crisis in the adult industry. It’s almost becoming like an epidemic,” says Amber Lynn, a porn star who has been performing since 1983 – far longer than many of the industry’s young starlets have been alive. “Our [ideological] differences are not as important as our survival and our future.”
Ames’ death was highly publicized in part because of the controversy surrounding it, but it was not an anomaly in the adult industry. Over the last two months, the porn community has mourned the deaths of Ames, Nova, and at least two other female performers: 35-year-old AVN Hall-of-Famer Shyla Stylez, who “died suddenly in her sleep,” according to the Calgary Herald, and 31-year-old industry veteran Yurizan Beltran, who is suspected to have died of an overdose.
But the rash of sudden, consecutive deaths has prompted some performers to call for change in an industry with a low barrier to entry, minimal oversight and nearly non-existent job security despite extreme working conditions. Unlike pre-Internet porn stars, performers today face the added pressures of social media interactions, increased competition without increased pay and a demand for more physically taxing sex scenes – all of which can exacerbate existing mental health or substance abuse issues. So is the adult industry doing enough to protect its performers?
To Ruby, an AVN Hall of Famer who performs under a single name, the answer is a resounding no. “In my opinion, they really don’t care whether we die or not,” she says of the industry’s producers. “In fact, I’m going to be probably a little crass here, but this is true: They’d prefer we die because they can make money off of us forever.”
That wasn’t always the case. When Ruby began performing in adult films in the early 1990s, she says, women had far more agency and a lot more choice. “You used to be able to pick exactly who you wanted to work with and exactly what you wanted to do,” she says on a phone call from her home in Ohio, where she now works as a cam girl – a job she says is more appealing because it cuts out the middlemen. “They don’t let them choose anymore. They expect extraordinarily rough scenes for most of the work now and that has to take a toll on you mentally. It just has to.”
Jewels Jade, a retired porn star based in San Diego, can attest to that. She recalls getting hired for a so-called “light bondage” scene in which she was restrained in the back of a dump truck with suction cups, clothespins and rope. The experience, she says, made her suicidal. “I just wanted to eat a bullet. On the way home I was just crying my eyes out and calling my husband. Like, I couldn’t even function. And this has happened to a lot of girls,” she says. “They go on set and [directors] want to capture that fear because this is what the fans want, and there are some sick people who want some really bad stuff. They do this to these girls and if you think you’re going to recover from that, I barely recovered from that.”
Jade, who made national news last spring after her Navy SEAL husband was investigated for costarring in videos with her, says the scene went on to become one her most popular. Had she refused to shoot it, she says, it likely would’ve been the end of her career. “Girls, they’re told not to speak, to shut up or you won’t work again,” she says. Like Ruby, Jade believes porn production companies, producers and directors are complicit in the deaths of young women: “They don’t care about the girls. They care about the fans.”
Despite the physical and mental demands of a job with a notoriously high turnover rate, Jade says the reasons women get into porn are obvious: The money is good, the hours are flexible and the attention can be intoxicating. “A lot of girls have low self esteem. All of a sudden they have fans, people who are wooing over them, they’re feeling beautiful and, of course, as you get more and more popular you get recognized,” says Jade, who now owns a rental car business with her husband and says she plans to write a tell-all book about the porn industry. Aside from the awkward encounters she now fields as a parent – among the fans that have recognized her lately are her 11-year-old son’s friends – fame can be a double-edged sword for any performer: “You can’t get a normal job. The more and more popular you get, no one’s going to hire you. You’re trapped,” she says.
Lynn, who hosts a weekly radio show about the industry, sees things differently. She attributes her atypical longevity as a porn star to her stints working in other fields including real estate, drug addiction recovery and mainstream acting. To her, the onus is on performers to better define their boundaries and learn to step away from the gig – including its social media obligations – if it becomes hazardous, mentally or physically. “A lot of these people get into the business and they don’t think they can be anything else. They don’t think they can survive outside the industry and that’s not true,” she says. “You can get out of the industry tomorrow if it no longer works.”
Having survived her share of tragedy – her brother, the late porn performer Buck Adams, died of heart failure in 2008 and she says she was there when porn star Savannah killed herself in 1994 – Lynn, like many veteran performers, sees it as her responsibility to ensure her younger peers are getting the help they need. She serves as an officer at the Adult Performers’ Actors Guild – a chapter of the International Entertainment Adult Union, which was formed just two years ago and bills itself as the only adult actors’ union recognized by the United States Department of Labor – and says the group is working to strengthen its network of mental health resources for performers. Meanwhile, the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee, a separate, non-union group chaired by porn star Tasha Reign, offers a mentorship program for newer performers and a list of industry-friendly psychologists and therapists, mental health support organizations, and hotlines for suicide, abuse, and addiction. Still, the industry lacks any kind of established support system for mental health.
“We really don’t have anything to help the performers. We just kind of offer outreach to them,” admits APAG board member Kelly Pierce, a performer who now focuses on cam work because of the freedom it offers. “We’re working on getting something together as far as a mental health facility for our performers, which will obviously take time and we’ll have to utilize grants for that, but most of it is outreach.”
In the absence of a comprehensive mental health care network, some performers have taken matters into their own hands. Performer and director Nikki Hearts says she and her wife, porn actor Leigh Raven, have opened up their “really clean, wholesome household” as a safe haven to performers so often that they’ve been nicknamed mom and dad. Part of the problem, Hearts says, is that most performers lack health insurance and many don’t know how where to begin when it comes to finding a therapist; others use drugs to self-medicate. “Female performers are suffering because we’re not being taken care of by the industry that we give everything to,” says Hearts, who is quick to add that she loves her job and the people she works with, many of whom she now thinks of as family. “There’s no person saying, ‘What you’re dealing with is really difficult mentally, it’s taking a toll on you.'”
Hearts dreams of someday helping to establish a health clinic where adult performers can receive therapy and substance abuse treatment that’s tailored to their line of work. She believes mental health care should be just as accessible and routinely offered to performers as STI testing, which is mandated every two weeks by an industry trade group. “I’ve gone to therapy almost the entire time I’ve been in porn just to stay grounded. I’m a big advocate for mental health,” she says. “But there’s no one out there in our industry saying, ‘Go to therapy, it’s okay.'”
Hearts, like so many others in the industry, hopes that may soon change. She looks forward to a day when performers can easily access mental health services all in one place, without fearing they’ll be stigmatized by a healthcare provider. Until then, performers are looking to agencies, production companies and labor groups to better advocate for their wellbeing on and off the set. They’re counting on each other to look out for one another’s health and survival, even if that means checking in on social media or offering up a safe, sober place to spend the night. Porn consumers, who dictate the direction of the industry with their clicks and subscriptions, also have a role to play.
Above all, performers say, attitudes about women in porn have to change before the industry can start to evolve. “People have to start caring. The problem is that nobody cares about these girls. They’re dehumanized,” says Jade. “These are girls. They’re humans.”