Varnakis

Pimp Earl sat down on camera and admitted the women he finds easiest to pull into the game are the ones who grew up without a daddy. His version: a woman from a broken home, raised by a grandmother or an aunt with no father around, sees a man act the way she wished her own father would, and it draws her in "closer and stronger." In his words, you can use a woman against herself. Anti-trafficking groups warn about almost exactly this. Polaris says controllers target people with needs they can fill. Shared Hope says girls with an absent father figure are more likely to be targeted for the commercial sex trade. And in Polaris's guide to the American pimp, "Daddy" is listed as the word women use for their pimp. Earl has more rules. Don't be quick to sleep with her, because then it's "very easy to control her." Sometimes women need "correction and direction" more than love. Money beats love every time, since "a broke motherfucker can love you." The penitentiary got him more than once, for breaking into places, taking jewelry and a gun charge, and by his account prison only made him smoother. He won't call the women around him a "stable" because they don't like the word, and he claims some are dancers, nurses, even one who owns a tax company. No regrets, he says, and he's right where he wants to be in life. Pimp Earl: brutally honest old school player or a man reading the trafficker's playbook out loud?

Sidra lost her corporate job in the COVID crash, started camming because she was broke and "really horny," booked nine porn shoots in her very first month, and says she's already been roughed up on a content shoot with no crew around to stop it. At the start of 2020 she was 27 and running a 60-hour-a-week management job. She lost it in March, and her unemployment checks took forever to arrive. A sugar daddy someday had always seemed possible to her, porn never did. Then the money ran low and lockdown hit. Calling herself an exhibitionist, she turned on a webcam and right away was out-earning her old job. A random porn offer showed up out of nowhere, and her reaction was: wait, for how much? That one fell through, but it planted the seed. She signed with an agency, booked about nine shoots in month one, and shot her first scene that summer. In her words, she spends 99% of her time alone and is estranged from her family, so having sex with people for work is a nice add-on to her social life. Camming taught her that a new girl gets about a hundred men a day trying to scam her for free shows, and plenty of guys online pose as agents. Porn is moving to "content shoots," just two performers and a camera with no director and no crew, and she says that lets men blur the line between making content with her and simply wanting to have sex with her. It happened to her: she says she got roughed up too much on one of those shoots, and she's heard the same from a lot of other girls. Her first summer in porn was one of its ugliest. In June 2020 Los Angeles prosecutors charged Ron Jeremy with rape and sexual assault, and the industry's #MeToo conversation blew open. She doesn't think anything will actually change. The year she lost her job, millions of Americans did too. US unemployment hit 14.7% in April 2020, the worst since the Great Depression, and OnlyFans gross revenue jumped 118% the next year. Lucky break out of a dead-end job or a 27-year-old learning the hard way that nobody's watching on set?

Johnny Sins started in porn by answering Craigslist sex ads, got $100 for his first oral scene, and one of the sites he hunted for work on later had its founder sent to federal prison. In this video he tells guys how to get into porn. In college in 1998 he talked his parents into buying him a computer "for studies", then used it mostly for porn. A girl from his high school who was already in the business kept coming up to party, they hooked up, and she told him he was perfect for porn. Five years later he was in Las Vegas working construction management, 12-hour days, six days a week, for what he remembers as about $12 an hour. He quit, packed up, and moved to LA without knowing a single person in the industry. His search ran through Craigslist's adult section, SexyJobs and Backpage, and he says 99% of the ads were bullshit or bait to get guys into gay porn. At first he shot amateur scenes for free just for the experience. His first paid gigs were CFNM shoots, where the woman stays clothed and the man is naked, for around $100. Shane's World, which used a lot of amateur guys, paid him $100 for an oral scene. Backpage was the internet's leading forum for prostitution ads from September 2010, when Craigslist shut down its prostitution ad section, until April 2018, when the United States seized Backpage.com. Authorities said it brought in $500 million in prostitution-related revenue. Co-founder Michael Lacey was sentenced to five years in prison and three years of supervised release, plus $3 million in fines on one count of money laundering. Two other executives got 10 years each, and the judge told Lacey he knew about the allegations and "You didn't do a thing." Craigslist had already shut its adult services section in 2010 under pressure from law enforcement, and in 2018 it dropped its personals section too, after Congress passed FOSTA. Shane's World built its name by taking porn stars onto college campuses. Shane Enterprises from Van Nuys, Calif., taped 20 to 30 students engaging in sexual acts in an Indiana dormitory, and Indiana's dean of students warned that those involved could face anything up to expulsion. Wikipedia notes the company has been criticized for exploiting drunken college students who will later regret their performance in a porn film. Its campus series still won Best Gonzo Series at the 2007 AVN Awards. Then Sins tells his viewers not to do it if they want a normal life. People leave porn, get a job, get found online and get fired, he says. He reads out Ryan Driller's warning, "The moment you're labeled a porn star, your credibility is gone", and agrees 100%. If you want a 401k, a white picket fence, a dog and kids, porn isn't for you. When strangers ask what he does, he usually says he's a personal trainer. A California middle school science teacher was fired after students found her old videos, and a three-judge panel unanimously decided she was unfit to teach. Salon reported that former performers can be fired if their past comes out, and there's no legal recourse. Most honest career advice in porn or the bald guy who made it telling you that you won't?

Maddy May's husband had dreamed about Johnny Sins since he was a kid, and before they split he asked her to fuck Johnny and send him the video. So she DM'd Johnny: "My husband is one of your biggest fans and wants me to fuck you." Johnny wrote back, "Sure, I'll be there at five." He turned up and put her in positions she didn't know a man could pull off. In one of them they lay completely flat on top of each other, "like pancakes," and he kept fucking her without moving up and down. She admits it probably didn't look hot, but it felt good. Afterwards she sent her husband the video with one word: "Enjoy." He asked whether it was everything he'd hoped for. When the hosts called him a cuck for Johnny, Maddy didn't argue. Why else would he be fine with her fucking other people and want to watch? The marriage was already over, and his request boiled down to "Before you leave me, can I just watch you fuck Johnny one time, please." She calls herself "a natural whore." Before porn, anal scared her because of the "wrong hole" accidents in doggy. Once she was in the business she decided anal was the fastest way to the top, and she lost her anal virginity on camera. The crew offered to let the guy warm her up first, since she'd never had a dick in her ass, but she said no because she wanted her first real reaction on film. She loved it. Now she says anal is easier for her than vaginal, no matter the size. In 2022 she co-directed and creatively directed her own showcase, Maddy May's Mayhem. Across its four scenes she does her first interracial double penetration, her first double-vaginal and double-anal, her first scene with a trans partner, and her first gangbang. The gangbang, with Mick Blue, Seth Gamble, Alex Mack, Codey Steele and John Strong, earned an XBIZ nomination for Best Career-First Performance. Her December 2023 scene with Sophia Burns is titled "Massive Toys, Double Fisting, and Anal Submission." Before porn she spent five years stripping in Arkansas, at clubs she says were flush with drug money. She dated two different girls from the club. When she was drunk she'd let one of them play with her hair right in front of her girlfriend, the two would end up fighting, and drunk Maddy would announce there was "enough love for everyone." She was born on 22 December 1993 in Little Rock, Arkansas. She won the 2023 XBIZ for Best Sex Scene, Featurette for S.I. with Codey Steele, and was nominated for AVN Female Performer of the Year in 2024. In 2025 she was up for AVN Best Anal Sex Scene with Mike Adriano and Best Trans One-on-One Sex Scene with Lola Morena. The ultimate cuck move, or the best breakup gift ever?

Mr. Marcus says he thought the rash on his hands was just stress. He tried lotion, vitamins and cortisone, kept showing it to people on set and asking what it was, and figured it was a skin thing. Then his private doctor ran a blood test and it came back positive for syphilis. In this interview he blames the testing schedule. Performers got checked for HIV, chlamydia and gonorrhea every month, but for syphilis only twice a year. According to him, nobody in America was thinking about syphilis and the outbreak came over from Europe. He's pro choice on condoms and says he trusts the testing system. The court record reads differently. His Wikipedia page says that back in May 2012 a performer noticed marks on his penis and refused to work with him. On July 13 he got a penicillin shot after testing positive, and on July 21 he tested positive again. Prosecutors say he then covered up the syphilis result on a photocopy of his test form and used that copy to work two shoots, on July 24 and July 26. A producer spotted that the paperwork had been altered, and the two actresses from those shoots went to the police. Nearly a dozen performers tested positive that summer, and the whole industry stopped filming for about 10 days. Another performer who worked with him in June later sued the studio, saying it should have known. In June 2013 he pleaded no contest to knowingly exposing others to a communicable disease. He got 30 days in jail, 36 months of probation and 15 days of community labor. AP reported that by then he was already in jail on $200,000 bail in an unrelated drunk driving case. The DA said neither actress from those two shoots caught syphilis. One report says he probably picked it up on set and may not have been patient zero. His defense called the prosecution political, because the scandal hit right as LA County was about to vote on mandatory condoms in porn, which passed that November. He'd been in the business 19 years, was in the AVN Hall of Fame, and was once called the LL Cool J of porn. In this same interview he gets credit for making hats in bed sexy and names stamina as his proudest achievement. Asked whether that's camera tricks, he says "a good editor helps." Honest mistake that spiralled, or the worst lie in porn history?

Kyle Overmyer was the youngest sheriff in Ohio at 34, running a jail, a SWAT team, more than 100 employees and a $4 million budget, while he was stealing opioids from the police stations in his own county. In his telling, it started in 2010, when he was diagnosed with arthritis from two ankles he broke as a kid and got prescribed 105 Vicodin a month, three or four a day. That same year his SWAT team went into a house after a man with a gun. The man pointed it at them, two of his deputies opened fire and killed him, and the family hit him with a $20 million lawsuit, personally. Protesters stood outside with a sign that, as he remembers it, said Bryan's blood was on his hands, and the case dragged on for years. He got his deputies counseling and told himself he was too strong to need it. Then the month's supply started lasting weeks. He began doctor shopping, figuring nobody questions the sheriff in his own county, and graduated to Percocet, and he even talked his own jail doctor into putting him on OxyContin. Next came his parents' arthritis and pain clinic pills. He volunteered to pick up his dad's prescriptions so his dad wouldn't have to drive, and kept a stapler in his car so he could open the pharmacy bag, take some pills and staple it shut so his dad would never know. One Saturday, running low, he unlocked his department's drug take-back box, the bin where people dump old prescriptions, found a whole bottle of Percocet, popped some and says he never mowed the lawn like he did that day. After that he made the rounds of other police departments in the county, offering to collect their boxes for the DEA like the good sheriff. Back in his office he locked the door, barricaded it with chairs and dumped the pills out like a kid on Halloween, sifting for what he needed. He told himself they were trash anyway. The man in the 2010 shooting was Bryan Jones. According to the court record, his father had called asking deputies to remove his son from the house without violence. Overmyer ordered a dynamic entry, a deputy threw a flashbang, and two deputies, brothers Jose and Mario Calvillo, shot Bryan, who was sitting on the couch. A federal judge first ruled the officers weren't entitled to immunity. In October 2014 a jury rejected all of the family's claims. In 2015 police chiefs noticed that the sheriff, who rarely visited, kept showing up to collect their take-back boxes, and investigators later said he lied that he had DEA authority to take them. In August 2016 he was indicted on 43 counts, 20 of them drug-related, and walked into his arraignment in handcuffs and an orange jail uniform. He refused to resign, called the case politically motivated, ran for re-election anyway and lost, and a special prosecutor tried to get him jailed again for contacting witnesses. He then pleaded guilty to 13 felonies, including theft in office, deception to obtain drugs and tampering with records. He cried in court, and the judge called him narcissistic. The Clyde police chief called him the worst kind of criminal, one with a badge. He got four years and about $25,000 in restitution. In 2017 prison guards found a bottle with more than a dozen unidentified pills in his cell, and he said they were multivitamins. The man who swore an oath to fight drugs ended up sifting through his county's take-back bins for Percocet. Was Kyle Overmyer a broken man who needed help, or a cop who used his badge to feed his habit until other cops stopped him?

Jordan Belfort says that when he got sober on April 17, 1997, someone grabbed the bag he was carrying, and it held 22 different drugs he'd been taking at any given moment. Maybe not all in one day, but all within a few days or a week. He calls it a potpourri of dangerous pharmaceuticals that he used to balance each other out. One drug made him tired, so he'd take something to come back up, then he'd be dying of anxiety and reach for an anti-anxiety pill, until it was one drug on top of another and everything he did and said seemed perfectly normal. The real story, according to him, was crazier than the movie. His female editor loved every insane scene in the book, called him so bad and called it a great redemption story, right up until he wrote out his bachelor party in gory detail. Then she told him other human beings wouldn't understand it, and they cut it. His explanation is unlimited money plus a crowd of young people in a closed world: mob mentality takes over, everyone tries to top each other, and as an action junkie you keep looking for higher cliffs to jump off and shallower pools to land in. Stratton Oakmont, the Long Island boiler room he ran from 1989 to 1996, at one point had more than 1,000 brokers and was involved in over $1 billion in stock issues, including the 1993 IPO of Steve Madden's shoe company. Madden was a childhood friend of Belfort's partner Danny Porush and got tangled in the scheme. Porush, the real man behind Jonah Hill's Donnie Azoff, really did marry his first cousin and admitted to eating a broker's live goldfish. He denies the dwarf-tossing, and he did 39 months. Quaaludes were Belfort's drug of choice, and he crashed his own helicopter on his front lawn while high. In June 1996 he made his captain sail the Nadine, a yacht built in 1961 for Coco Chanel and renamed after his second wife, into a storm on the way to Sardinia. It sank in over 1,000 meters of water after everyone was pulled off. In one interview he said they had to push the helicopter off the deck so a rescue team could get down to the yacht, and that his private jet crashed ten days later. The bachelor party his editor cut took place at the Mirage in Las Vegas. He pleaded guilty to securities fraud and money laundering and did 22 months at Taft in California, sharing a cell with Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong, who was in for selling bongs. Chong said Belfort's arrival was like Elvis coming to jail, compared the place to a Manhattan hotel, and pushed him to write the book that became the movie. In 2003 a court ordered Belfort to pay $110.4 million in restitution to 1,513 defrauded clients. Prosecutors say he paid about $700,000 from 2007 to 2009 and nothing in 2010, and Businessweek reported that out of roughly $1.2 million he got for the movie before release, $21,000 went to restitution. In 2014 he said he hoped to earn north of $100 million from speeches about his redemption so he could pay victims back. In 2018 prosecutors dragged him back to court, called him a deadbeat, said he still owed about $97 million, and said he kept all of at least $9 million in speaking fees from 2013 to 2015. They once also claimed he fled to Australia to hide assets, then took it back and apologized. Belfort has said he paid more than the courts required and never profited from the book or the movie. He used to carry a bag of 22 drugs, and now he sells sales training and motivational speeches. Is that the ultimate redemption story, or a con man who turned his own crimes into the product?

Sasha Grey never actually announced she was quitting porn when she quit. She thought it would be her life and planned it that way, but she always had other interests, so porn wasn't the only thing she relied on, except maybe for money at the very start. She was always writing, and early on she built a close, intimate online relationship with her fans, answering fan mail on social media and blogging all the time, which she said even back then she couldn't keep up forever. Her fans knew her for porn and also for everything else she was into, and she thinks that gave her the balls to leave. She didn't plan it, she says, she just went for it. Host Holly Randall points out that she stopped shooting in 2009 and only made it official a couple of years later. Sasha says that came out of a book tour, when a journalist kept asking her about the industry and she realized she couldn't answer, because she wasn't part of it anymore and didn't want to be its spokesperson. She doesn't regret any of it. Born Marina Ann Hantzis in North Highlands, California, in March 1988, she went through four high schools and graduated a year early at 17. Waiting tables at a Black Angus steakhouse got her $7,000 in savings for the move to LA, where several agencies turned her down because she didn't look the part. The stage name came from Sascha Konietzko of KMFDM and Dorian Gray. Her first scene, a few weeks after her 18th birthday in 2006, was an orgy with Rocco Siffredi in Fashionistas Safado: The Challenge, and mid-scene she turned to him and asked him to punch her in the stomach. Between 2007 and 2010 she won 15 awards, and in 2008 she became the youngest woman ever to win AVN's Female Performer of the Year and started representing herself through her own agency. After around 224 films, she shot her last one at 21 in 2009 and announced her retirement on Facebook on April 8, 2011. In 2009 she played a call girl in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, meeting real escorts in LA and New York to prepare. She also played a fictionalized version of herself on HBO's Entourage, appeared in Eminem's Space Bound video, and voiced Viola DeWynter in Saints Row: The Third. On November 2, 2011, months after she retired, she read Dav Pilkey's Dog Breath to first and third graders at Emerson Elementary in Compton. Parents complained, and the school district at first denied she'd ever been there, until TMZ published photos and she tweeted about the sweetest 1st and 3rd graders. The National Education Association said she wasn't part of its official Read Across America program, and she said she would not live in fear of her past. She's been streaming on Twitch since 2019 and has over 1.2 million followers there. In June 2025 she was the most-watched Doom: The Dark Ages streamer on Twitch, ahead of the top creators in that category, and in 2023 she voiced Ash in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. In 2023 she also went into both the AVN and XRCO Halls of Fame. Her name keeps getting her in trouble online. In 2021 another streamer found that Twitch wouldn't allow "Sasha Grey" in a go-live notification, and a Reddit user's theory was that the name hides the word shag. In 2024 the game Last Epoch had her name on its banned list, and she had to ask the devs to let her use it. When viewers bring up her past, she tells them so what, and when haters doubted her gaming she said she beat Sekiro on her first try. In April 2026 she abruptly cut a segment on her stream after the video she was showing seemed to undercut her defense of Hasan Piker using an electronic collar on his dog. Did Sasha Grey leave porn on her own terms the way every performer dreams of, or did she just get out before the industry could decide she was done?

Phoenix Marie had never watched porn when a coworker talked her into going to AVN. After seven and a half years in finance at a Harley-Davidson dealership, working 80-hour weeks, she showed up in her business outfit and stood in line to meet Jenna Jameson as a fan, without even knowing who she was. Jameson, she says, treated her like she was beneath her and brushed her off. Jesse Jane and Tera Patrick were nice. Later someone handed her a business card and told her she should do porn. With five guys in her whole life, she said no, but a friend kept the card. After 10 months of messages on MySpace she walked into an agency, got naked in front of a stranger for the first time, and heard he could guarantee her three scenes a month for three grand. Her first scene was for Vivid. The director had a fridge full of alcohol and told her that if she took a sip, he didn't see it. She decided that if she needed to drink to do this, she shouldn't be doing it. Her male co-star was so big he tore her and she bled, and he joked that he'd just broken her hymen. Her third co-star couldn't get hard, and she felt like it was her fault. Her fourth scene was her first time with two men, Mr. Marcus and Marco Banderas, for Lexington Steele. Then she watched Tory Lane run a DP on set, giving the director orders, and decided she wanted to be her. Her count is 1,287 scenes, the last one shot the day before this interview, and she's tracked every one of them, down to positions and titles. In all those scenes she's worked with only 21 men, 26 if you count her whole life. At least 35% of her scenes are girl-girl, and she calls herself the anal whisperer, because girls trying anal for the first time get her with a strap-on. The day before, she'd done exactly that with Kylie Sinner. Tory Lane made the final round of Jenna Jameson's Playboy TV show Jenna's American Sex Star in 2006 and lost the Club Jenna contract. In February 2015 she was arrested at LAX after allegedly getting drunk on a Delta flight from Atlanta and attacking passengers, the crew and a cop. She was charged with battery on a police officer and public drunkenness, and a flight attendant later sued her. Phoenix was born Melissa Hutchison in Riverside, California in 1981. She went into the AVN Hall of Fame in 2022 and won an XBIZ Award in 2025 for a scene in American MILF. In April 2024 the Daily Beast reported her $30 million federal lawsuit against Aylo, the company behind Pornhub and Brazzers, and Danny D, a British performer and director best known for his Brazzers work. Her claims start on an October 2023 shoot in Barcelona with Danny D, Cherie DeVille and others, where Danny D's girlfriend worked as makeup artist and production manager. On the last day, during an orgy scene by the pool, co-star Zaawaadi had taken too much lithium and nearly died. Phoenix says Danny D held off on calling an ambulance, wouldn't let her ride to the hospital even though Zaawaadi wanted her there, and made her finish the scene, grabbing her, blocking her from leaving and forcing her to have sex after she repeatedly said no. Afterward, she claims, he told her Zaawaadi was in a medically induced coma and showed her video of her convulsing in a hospital bed. The suit says the lithium belonged to Danny D's girlfriend and that he spread a story that Phoenix had poisoned Zaawaadi. She says she turned down a $60,000 NDA, and after that Aylo canceled her shoots and signings, stripped her tags and buried her videos. She also lost a Fleshlight deal and can't find a makeup artist who will work with her. Her lawyers say they'll raise the claim to $80 million and argue that Aylo controls about 90% of online porn distribution. Aylo says it doesn't comment on ongoing litigation, and Danny D didn't respond to the Daily Beast. Is Phoenix Marie proof you can last 1,287 scenes in porn by setting your own rules, or proof that the rules stop mattering the moment something goes wrong on set?

Stacie Lane had a trick worth more than a thousand dollars a scene before she even knew what it was called. When she got into porn, she had never watched any, and her agent handed her a checklist of what she would and wouldn't do on camera. She couldn't check the box for squirting because she didn't know what the word meant. For anything she didn't recognize, the agent put on a movie and pointed it out on screen. When they got to squirting, she told him she could do that. He told her she was going to make a lot more money. She can do it on command, she says, and she doesn't think most women can. The women she knows who can usually can't control it or repeat it, which becomes a problem once someone books you for a squirting movie and pays more than a thousand dollars for it. If she couldn't deliver, they'd be paying for nothing, so she figured out exactly what sets her off: a Hitachi wand and clit stimulation. She'd rather hold off and turn it into a full orgasm, because it comes out stronger that way. Science is less romantic about it. In a study published at the end of 2014, French researchers ran ultrasounds on seven women who squirt. Each emptied her bladder first, and by the moment before orgasm it had filled back up. Right after, it was empty again. The Journal of Sexual Medicine paper concluded that squirting is essentially involuntary urination, sometimes with a little fluid from the female prostate mixed in. That same December, new UK rules for paid online porn put female ejaculation on the restricted list. Censors said they couldn't tell it apart from pee, though the regulator insisted there was no blanket ban. Protesters responded with a mass face-sitting outside Parliament. Off camera she calls herself a dom. Her idea of fun is bringing a girl home and telling her to sit down, or watching her go down on Stacie's boyfriend. They've had exactly one threesome, and she has no interest in making it a habit. He knew what she did before they started dating, and a week or two before this interview he told her he never thought he'd be dating someone he used to jerk off to. When young girls ask her about getting into porn, she tells them it never goes away. Even if she becomes a doctor one day and dies at 85, she'll still be the woman who did porn in her twenties. She got paid extra for a trick scientists say is mostly urine, and her boyfriend used to jerk off to her videos. Is that the dream relationship, or a ticking time bomb?

Stormy Daniels is still bitter about the dinner she never got. In 2006 Trump's bodyguard invited her to dinner, and she went up to his suite in Lake Tahoe. She was 27 and he was 60, and Melania had given birth to Barron a few months before. She stayed about three hours. No food ever came, they drank only water, and she doesn't think he drinks at all. The suite was bigger than her first three apartments put together and had a conference table, a living room and a kitchen. He opened the door in silk pajamas. They talked business, she told him about her family and her dream of directing, and he pitched her on getting onto his TV show. At some point she kept calling her friend Alana Evans to come up, and according to Evans, Trump took the phone himself and invited her to party. When Stormy needed the bathroom he sent her through the bedroom, and she went through his toiletry bag. To this day she can name his shampoo and the pocket where he kept his gold-plated tweezers. In court she said it was Old Spice and Pert Plus. She came out to find him perched on the bed in boxers and a T-shirt, doing what she calls the most tragic Burt Reynolds impression. Her heart dropped so hard she says it felt like it fell out of her vagina. When she tried to sidestep him, he got up and blocked the way, and his bodyguard was standing right outside the door. Then she blacked out. She insists there were no drugs and no alcohol. Her next memory is lying naked on the bed with him on top of her, no condom, on the opposite side of the bed from where they'd been standing, with no idea how her gold strappy heels came off. She never said no, she says, and she never said yes either. Afterward her hands shook so hard she could barely get the heels back on, and he called her honeybunch and said they should do it again. Evans says Stormy later told her Trump had chased her around the room in his tighty-whities. They did meet again. A year later, in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, she says he made her watch Shark Week with him. Part of this never made it into her book, because she didn't remember it until she saw Bombshell in 2019. It came back to her in the theater, and she broke down in front of her date. What she remembers now is him telling her, right before, that if she didn't want to go back to Louisiana and wanted to be taken seriously as a director, she had to prove she'd do whatever it takes. On the stand she put it as him saying this was her only way out of the trailer park. Eric Trump sat behind his father in court while she told it. The host pointed out that most porn girls escort, so a porn star going to a man's hotel room looks like a transaction. She said she wasn't escorting, that he never offered money and never paid her, and that all her friends are escorts and she's fine with it. If he had paid, she says, there'd be no story, because you don't sell out a client. These days she reads tarot cards for clients. In 2018 she told Vogue it was normal-people sex and lasted maybe two minutes, and she was being generous. By 2024 she was testifying about an imbalance of power and a blackout, and Trump's lawyers asked for a mistrial over the details. The judge refused. Trump denies they ever had sex. Days before the 2016 election his lawyer paid her $130,000 to keep quiet, and in 2024 a jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts of hiding that payment. She went upstairs for a dinner that never came, and a year later she was watching Shark Week with him. Did Trump con her with a TV show, or has Stormy kept changing her story about that night?

Jade Venus' first masturbation story started in a friend's basement, with a tent, anime porn on a PlayStation, and a Fleshlight ordered through her mom's Amazon account. She talks about being much younger at the time. Sleepovers at a friend's house meant hanging out in a tent set up in the basement and watching anime porn on PlayStation. Eventually, curiosity took things a little further. And somehow, a Fleshlight ended up being ordered using her mother's Amazon account. That's the tame part of her story. Jade Venus got her start online before making the move into professional adult films. She began camming, built an audience, and eventually caught the attention of Grooby Productions, which helped launch her career in the industry. She made her professional debut in 2020 and quickly started gaining recognition. In 2022, she won the AVN Award for Best Trans Newcomer and was named Gender X Model of the Year. Since then, she's worked with some of the biggest names in the industry and appeared in hundreds of productions. Even her stage name has a backstory. Jade was inspired by one of her favorite Bratz dolls, while Venus was simply a name she liked. Is Jade Venus one of the most interesting personalities in the adult industry, or is there a lot more to her story than people realize?

Lately, Cory Chase says, the thing that worries her most in porn is that performers have stopped checking each other's STD tests. During convention week, creators trade scenes in hotel rooms, and plenty of them, she says, just take the other person's word for it. Some don't ask at all. According to her, it happens on major productions too, where testing is the step that gets overlooked. The studio or the agent probably checks, she says, but for your own safety you should ask anyway. On a bad day nobody gets around to it, and in the chaos of a convention you might not even notice your own test has expired while you're still working on it. Her rule is to show your paperwork before anything sexual starts: "Here's my test. Can you show me yours?" The Adult Time host explains the official standard. Every performer needs a full panel test from the last 14 days, the talent show each other their results during the consent conversation, and the studio checks again on top of that. She agrees that casual collabs are where it slips. You figure it's your friend and they wouldn't do you dirty, or the other performer says the test just expired. They both end up in the same place: it's a close community, so if you get someone sick, their work suffers too. Before porn, Cory Chase was a paramedic. She has shot with her husband Luke Longly for close to two decades, and this year fans nominated them together for Favorite Cam Creator Couple. She's glad Luke is finally getting recognition, since he's usually the one behind the camera. In her words, what viewers see of him is "nipple down." She's also up for Favorite MILF Star. "Obviously," she says. When one of the most searched MILFs in porn says performers are working on expired tests and nobody is checking, is the industry as safe as the studios claim, or has everyone just been lucky?

In 2007 a fan sent Cory Chase a custom video request. He wanted her to play a stepmom. Her husband would play the father. The stepdaughter would be Christy Mack, coming home from college with tattoos and a shaved head. They shot it out of their house. It took off. Sixteen years later stepmom is still a top ten search term on Pornhub every single year. She didn't invent the genre. She was the first person willing to keep shooting it when the rest of the industry thought it was too niche to scale. By 2009 she was producing fauxcest full-time. Then mainstream television caught up. Game of Thrones and Dexter started writing taboo family plotlines. Spartacus had cousins sleeping together. She says porn trends follow Hollywood by about two years. When ankle bracelets were popular among mainstream actresses in the early 2000s, foot fetish content spiked. When prestige TV normalized the taboo, the category exploded. By then she had been filming it for years. The host asks if there are men with small penises in porn. Yes. For diversity, and because different genres require different things. The genre that requires them most is the one she built her career on. Family roleplay. People tell her she looks like Jessica Simpson. Also Emily Ratajkowski, Kristen Bell, and the actress who plays Felicity on Arrow. Her answer: any blonde who wears glasses and smiles, we all look alike. She has stalkers. Most of them are decent enough, she says, then turns to the camera: please don't come after me. Off camera she calls herself a step-girlfriend. Her boyfriend has a nine-year-old son. The boy still believes in Santa Claus. The woman who has been producing taboo family porn for almost two decades now has to figure out what to say when a child asks where the presents come from. The host asks whose cum tastes the best. Her husband's. Because they both eat healthy. Then she lists the rules: pineapple, no cigarettes, no asparagus, no energy drinks, add zinc. She delivers dietary advice the same way she explains her production schedule. The woman who filmed the first mainstream fauxcest scene out of her house with a fan's script and Christy Mack is now sitting in an interview calmly explaining that Game of Thrones is the reason she has a career and that her boyfriend's kid still believes in Santa. Did Cory Chase build the most searched fauxcest brand in porn by accident, or did she read the culture two years ahead of everyone else and never stop filming?

Lana Rhoades has been trying to get her content removed from Pornhub for years. She has 345 million views across the platform. Every single video still online. Legally, none of it belongs to her. She signed the rights away at 19 for a flat rate per scene. The studios made millions off her. She made a few thousand per shoot and left. Her real name is Amara Maple. Small town in Illinois, religious household. By 14 she had decided she wanted to be a porn star. At 16 she was in juvenile detention. Her boyfriend at the time had been robbing houses and she was there when it happened. She caught the charges, served a year behind bars, got her GED in prison. Walked out early for good behavior, moved to Chicago. At 19 she answered an ad and shot her first scene. Her first agent controlled her schedule and refused to let her see a doctor when she developed internal injuries. The second pushed her toward categories she had not agreed to. She has described calling her agency, saying yes, I love this, I'm so happy. Then hanging up and having a panic attack. Eight months total. She quit in late 2017. The studios kept releasing unreleased footage for years after she left and she earned nothing from it. Most searched name on Pornhub three years running. Sixteen million Instagram followers. A son named Milo, born January 2022, reportedly fathered by an NBA player whose name she has never confirmed. She says she is asexual now and has called for the entire industry to be made illegal. She was 19 when she started and 30 now. On the internet there are still hundreds of videos of a 19-year-old version of her earning money for companies she has no relationship with. She once said prison was the best thing that ever happened to her because without it she was heading somewhere worse. She was 16 when she said that. She had not yet been to Los Angeles. Did the porn industry exploit a teenager who had already been through the system, or did a teenager who had already survived prison walk into the only industry that would pay her what she thought she was worth?

Lana Rhoades spent a year in juvenile prison at 16. At 19 she signed a porn contract. Within two months she was the most searched name on Pornhub. She went home after every shoot and cried. She has said she thought about killing herself. She was active for 8 months. The internet will never let her forget a single one of them. Her real name is Amara Maple. She grew up in a religious family in a small town in Illinois. By 12 she was watching adult stars on TV and dreaming about being one of them. By 14 she had made up her mind. By 16 she was sitting in a juvenile cell. Her boyfriend had pulled her into house robberies. She watched while he and his friends broke in. She caught the charges anyway. She got her GED behind bars, walked out after a year for good behavior. She has said jail was the best thing that happened to her because she was heading somewhere worse. At 19 she shot her first scene. Her first agent was aggressive and controlling. She developed internal injuries from the work and her agent refused to let her take time off to see a doctor. She took a break on her own, came back with a different agent. He was worse. He kept pushing her toward more extreme content. Scenes she didn't want to do. She has described what it was like. Her agent would call and ask if she wanted to do something she was terrified of. She would say yes, thank you so much, I love this work, I'm so happy. Then she would hang up and break down. She had panic attacks before every set. She walked onto sets knowing she would hate every second of what was about to happen. She quit after 8 months total. Four months on, six off, four more. The studios kept dropping unreleased footage for years after she left. Two years after quitting she was still number one on Pornhub. 345 million views. The companies made millions. She didn't see a dollar of it. She now has a son named Milo. The father is reportedly an NBA player whose name she bleeped out on her podcast. She has 15 million Instagram followers and makes more money from social media than she ever did on set. She says she is pretty much asexual now. She wants porn to be illegal. Every video she ever made is still online. She has begged for them to be taken down. Legally, they aren't hers. The companies still earn from every click. Somewhere right now a 19-year-old version of her is performing on a screen for an audience she never agreed to, making money for people she will never meet. She worked in the industry for 8 months. She has spent the rest of her life trying to erase them. Did Lana Rhoades choose her career, or did a teenage girl fresh out of prison get handed a pen by men who already knew what she was worth to them?

Mia Khalifa was 21 when she filmed one scene in a hijab. Days later, ISIS sent her a photoshopped image of her own beheading. Her family disowned her. She quit after 3 months with $12,000. 10 years later she can't delete a single video, and someone is still getting rich off them. She was born in Beirut and moved to the US as a kid. Growing up she was the overweight girl with braces who never got asked out. She has said she spent most of her teens hating how she looked. At 21 she lost the weight, got a breast job and was working in Miami when a man walked up and told her she should be modeling. A few weeks later she was signing a contract she says she never really read. It was October 2014. Within two months she was the most searched name on the biggest adult site in the world. Then the studio put her in a scene wearing a hijab. She says she was scared, told them she didn't want to do it, and did it anyway because she didn't think she could say no. The video exploded across the Middle East. Lebanese newspapers ran her name on the front page. Strangers found her parents. Her family released a statement saying they had nothing to do with her. Then the ISIS threat came: a photoshopped picture of her being beheaded, with the message that she would be next. She had to move out of her apartment and was told by security to stop telling anyone where she lived. She quit in early 2015. In total she says she made around $12,000. The company kept the rights to everything she filmed, and the videos still sit on the same sites today, pulling in views every single day. She has tried to get them taken down for years. Legally, they aren't hers. She now says she was a young woman with no confidence who was easy to talk into anything, and that the industry knew exactly who to look for. People in the comments still tell her she made her choice and should live with it. She worked in porn for three months. She has been paying for it for over a decade. Was Mia Khalifa a grown woman who made a choice, or a 21-year-old who got used by an industry that will make money off her forever?

On November 3, 1994, Susan Smith held her husband's hand on a sofa and told three morning shows she was no more of a suspect than anyone else. Her two little boys had been missing for nine days. That afternoon she confessed to the sheriff and told him where to find them. At the bottom of John D. Long Lake. Still strapped into their car seats. Michael was 3. Alex was 14 months. She had let her car roll down a boat ramp with both of them inside. The car took six minutes to sink. For nine days she told the whole country a Black man in a toboggan hat had driven off with them. The man next to her on that sofa was their father. In the video below David Smith squeezes her hand and defends her on national TV. He says it hurts that anyone could think either of them had anything to do with the abduction of their children. Then he says: me and my wife know the truth. By that evening he knew what the truth was. Investigators found out why she did it. The wealthy son of her boss had ended their affair. She believed the kids were the reason. Her lawyers said she had a breakdown and meant to die with them but got out at the last second. Prosecutors said she planned it. A jury spared her the death penalty in 1995. Thirty years later, at her first parole hearing, the man who had defended her on television asked the board to keep her inside. David said she had never once shown him remorse and promised to come to every hearing she ever gets. The vote was unanimous. She can try again in two years. Was she a mother who broke down, or someone who planned every minute of those nine days?

Tommy Lynn Sells smiled when he said killing was the best feeling he'd ever had in his life. Better than anything. Like a shot of heroin straight to the brain, and he spent decades chasing that high. He estimated he killed somewhere between 20 and 50 people. He didn't know the exact number. There were too many to count. Texas executed him in 2014. He killed a pregnant woman 7.5 months along. She went into labor during the attack. He killed the newborn too. Her husband's body turned up the next day, shot three times in the head. In the video below, ABC News sits down with Tommy Lynn Sells on death row, and what comes back across the glass is something the interviewer says she was grateful the glass was there for. He said he didn't know what love was. Sorry was a word he didn't use. When he looked at the camera he saw hate and that's all he'd ever known. The interviewer asked what would happen if she said something he didn't like. He said her head would go down into the concrete and crack like a coconut. Then he smiled again. What finally caught him was a 10-year-old girl who survived with a sliced throat. In 1999 he broke into a trailer, cut the throat of 13-year-old Katie Harris while her friend Crystal watched from the top bunk, then came back for Crystal too. Left her for dead. She described him to police from a hospital bed. It ended 15 years of killing. When asked if he had anything to say to the little girl who lived, he paused. Said she probably didn't want to hear what he had to say. Was Tommy Lynn Sells born without the part of the brain that makes killing feel wrong, or did something destroy it early enough that nothing could have stopped what came next?

Brenda Spencer told a reporter she didn't like Mondays. She was 16, barricaded inside her house with a rifle her father gave her for Christmas. The elementary school across the street was covered in blood. She fired 36 shots. Hit 8 children. The first one was 9 years old. Principal Burton Wragg, 53, ran out to help the kids. She killed him. Custodian Mike Suchar, 56, ran out to pull a student to safety. She killed him too. A police officer went down next. When a reporter called her house during the standoff and asked why, she said: "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day." By that summer Bob Geldof had turned her words into a No. 1 hit in Britain. The song is still on the radio. The children she shot are still living with it. In the video below, Brenda Spencer is 31, in glasses and a prison uniform, calmly telling a News 8 reporter that she wants a normal life. School. A job. And maybe some work with kids. With kids. She sat at a window with a .22 caliber rifle and started shooting at children arriving for school on a Monday morning. No motive anyone could understand. No history anyone saw coming. A teenage girl and a Christmas present and a schoolyard full of targets. She pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and was sentenced one day after her 18th birthday to 25 years to life. The parole board has turned her down six times. Most recently in February 2025. She can try again in 2028. When asked if she had anything to say about what she did, she talked about wanting a normal life. She never once talked about the kids. Should someone who did this at 16 ever be allowed out, or did something about that Monday morning never leave her?