In 2010, our Jef Otte wrote a post entitled INTERVIEW WITH A PORN STAR: ANGELA ASPEN ON HIV, YOUTH MINISTRY AND WHY PORNOS HAVE PLOTS.
The mini-profile starred Colorado-born Angela Aspen, who spoke boldly and positively about the porn industry.
Now, however, Jessica Neely — Aspen's real name — is telling a very different story.
In a video on view below, she reveals how porn nearly destroyed her life.
The clip was created with the assistance of Fight the New Drug, an organization that describes itself as "a group of passionate and innovative problem-solvers who want to make a difference in the world. Our mission is to raise awareness on the harmful effects of pornography through creative mediums."
Neely's account certainly fits the latter description.
In 2010, Neely told reporter Otte that she grew up the daughter of an Assemblies of God pastor and actually served as a youth minister for a time.
However, she claimed that she became "alienated from the church" and became enamored of sex — something with which she'd had little previous experience.
Here's how the 2010 post describes her sexual awakening and what followed:
She liked it. In fact, she loved it. In fact, she wanted to do it all the time. Within months, she was "renting out B&Bs and doing tons of gang-bangs" — and filming them. She'd find guys on Craigslist, have them get tested and come on in, if you're catching that drift. "I didn't know you were supposed to start out slow," she jokes.The truth was much more painful.
Or maybe you aren't, because that go-getter attitude seems to have paid off. There's plenty of work in gonzo porn, because guys "just want to get off in two minutes." What's more difficult, she says, is getting women to care.
"You know, people are working porn into their sex lives, and the plots you see in feature films kind of reach out to women," she says. "And it's a lot more work to reach out to females than males — you have to entice them, the soft lighting, the special effects, it's erotic. Men just want to see penetration and get off. Women want to be seduced." Plus, she adds, there's always the novelty. "It's like, 'yeah, I'd love to see Catwoman get fucked in the ass.'"
According to Neely, she was raped in her early twenties, and the trauma she experienced left her feeling shattered.
"My whole dream of life was gone," she says in the video. "Everything that I wanted to grow up to be died on the pavement."
From there, it was a short trip to porn.
“I went from that to a party and this guy owned this website,” Neely recalls. “The model had flaked and I was like, ‘sign me up.’ I didn’t call myself a porn star because I didn’t know what I was doing, I had just lost my virginity, I didn’t know up from down. But quickly people coached. And I was booked. I was $400. I now had the reality that I had a price tag on my body."
She quickly gained notoriety in the porn biz, in flicks with titles such as Jersey Shore XXX and A-Team XXX, and earned an AVN award, which she characterized to us as "the Oscars of porn," in the "Best New Starlet" category.
However, her self-esteem remained at a low ebb.
“If my sex was painful — the harder and crazier it was — it was kind of like, the more you beat me up, the more you slap my face, the more violent you are to me, like maybe I deserve this,” she says in the video.
She admits to being well-compensated for her work — but before long, that ceased to matter.
In the video, she describes having sex with "an old man" whose sweat was dripping into her eyes. Afterward, she continues, "I remember coming home to a beautiful marble floor, gorgeous counters, and I went up on the counter and I just laid there.... I'd just look and stare at the money, because the only difference between rape in that moment was the money.
"I no longer had friends. I didn’t have my family. Money is what I would have in one hand, and a bottle of alcohol in the other when I went to bed. Pornography took everything."
She became suicidal: "I would pop as many pills as I could get my hands on, and then just drink and drink and drink, trying to overdose.”
But before the worst could happen, she reached out to her parents and re-embraced her faith — key factors in her decision to leave the porn industry and start over again.
Today, Neely is living in Kansas City, where she's been working as a pizza-delivery person. Yesterday on Facebook, she wrote, "Denver, don't look. I am about to buy a Kansas City Chiefs hat solely for pizza delivery driver tips.... Broncos who? I hold on to that credit card receipt till I can make a joke!"
More seriously, Neely is dedicated to shattering the porn-star fantasy and sharing what really happened during her years as a porn star.
The video is a first step in that mission.
See it here.
