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All kinds of people get into porn, most of them normal, a few of them exceptional. Those rare individuals may turn out to be exceptionally talented, friendly, and move on to do other great things when they leave the skin business. Others turn out to be profound douchebags or even be monstrous.
So, to draw attention to the people who deserve praise, let’s look at some of the finest fap film stars who enjoy amazing post-porn careers. To be fair and balanced – not to mention distance myself from any endorsement of their behavior – I’m also going to cover those pornographers who deservedly fell from fame.
Donald Carlos Seoane AKA Donny Long
For sure, Long had an impressive pedigree having performed in a thousand movies for some of the best studios in the business. But it would seem that when some people become famous, they lose their fucking minds.
Long is most infamous for being the founder of Porn WikiLeaks, a glorified doxxing site that outed something like 15,000 adult performers.
He also used Porn WikiLeaks leaked the medical records of the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare organization, which led to AIM shutting down. This created a holy hell-storm that Long thoroughly reveled in, and he still has not apologized for.
He’s also used PWL and his own social media platforms to spread some homophobic and racist shit. While not trolling online, he’s also been credibly accused of harassing women in the business and those who had retired.
How he didn’t get arrested, I’ll never know.
Then in a profound act of professional douchebaggery in 2017, Long loudly claimed that he had HIV after doing it bareback with other performers. Almost overnight, the entire southern California porn industry shut down weeks to test two generations of performers who had come into contact with Long.
As it turns out, Long was lying about his status.
When his short-lived porn studio failed, Long retreated to Thailand for a few years, until moving to Florida and fading into obscurity.
So much for his favorite saying, “Donny Long always wins.”
Miriam Weeks AKA Belle Knox
This woman has one of the most uniquely Millennial American stories out of probably any person who joined the porn industry. For those who don’t know, attending university in the States, especially an elite school like Duke University, is incredibly expensive.
Rather than saddle herself or her family with $60,000 worth of debt per year, Miriam Weeks googled “how to become a porn star,” did her research, and started applying to studios to cover her tuition costs.
Operating under the alias Belle Knox, she managed to balance her studies during the week while cranking out fap films on the weekend. Impressively, she was on track to cover her tuition costs and somehow know one recognized her for a semester.
Then all hell broke loose when some frat boy, Thomas Bagley, who (probably after wanking to one of her videos) outed her to his buddies who spread it through the entire campus.
At first, Knox played it off but did admit that she was a porn performer. This set off a firestorm that got Knox even more attention and works along with on-campus harassment and even death threats. Apparently, Knox needed protection from the university’s security service, but she also got some surprising amount of attention and sympathy from the mainstream media.
How often does that happen?
Some up this strange story, Belle continued to work in the skin business while embracing her identity for a couple more years, until abruptly exiting with enough cash to pay off her school bulls.
Since then, Knox has sadly permanently retired but continued to defend her position to join the skin business and the industry at large. Besides all sorts of news shows and podcasts, she’s also been on the net-based entertainment show Sex Factor and narrated a program for MTV.
I’m not sure how much she’s making, but last I knew, after graduating from Duke, she was in the middle of studying to become a civil rights attorney.
Bryan Kocis, Harlow Cuadra, and Joe Kerekes
With all of its backstabbing, sex, plotting, and murder, this bizarre tale reads like something you’d see on Game of Thrones.
Back in the middle of the aughts, the owner of Cobra Video, Bryan Kocis, signed a young twink who performed under the name Brent Corrigan. At first, the pair worked together with Kocis directing and Corrigan performing as an exclusive for his company.
In fact, Corrigan was so popular that Cobra Video’s movies blew up on store shelves and on the burgeoning internet. However, a ton of drama began to plague Kocis’ life about the time he tried to pull a power move and trademarked Brent Corrigan to ‘own’ the performer.
He even tried to sue Corrigan when he fought back even going so far as to claim Brent ‘owed’ him to perform sex for his company.
Apparently, karma’s a bitch since Cobra Video was sued for selling k*ddy porn since Brent had allegedly signed up shortly before he turned eighteen. Eventually, the suit was dismissed, but Cobra took Corrigan’s earliest movies off of the shelves, and Kocis’s reputation was shot to shit.
Of course, it didn’t help that he had already pleaded guilty to having sex with a minor in 2002. In that case, too, the guy he was with used a fake identity, but obviously, this isn’t going to win you any fans.
Worse still, there were a pair of undeniable psychopaths, Harlow Cuadra and Joe Kerekes, who were trying to sign Corrigan to their studio. This didn’t end well for any of the three, as Kocis ended up brutally murdered in his apartment at the hands of Cuadra and Kerekes.
The homicidal duo is currently doing life sentences, Kocis has been buried six feet under, and Corrigan has come out surprisingly well.
Side note: there is a movie about all this drama called King Cobra, which isn’t all that great, but the soundtrack is banging. I’d check it out just for that reason.
Sean Paul Lockhart AKA Brent Corrigan
Since I brought up the Cobra video debacles, there is at least one person who came out on top and (mostly) scandal-free. On top of that, he didn’t have to deal with any stigma as he went on to perform with other industry giants in the gay porn scene like Brent Everett and Pierre Fitch, which put him on a trajectory to be one of the first legendary Fleshjack Boys.
He continued working in porn on and off throughout the 2000s and solidified his position as one of the ‘it’ boys in the business. As you would expect, he landed hundreds of shoots with some of the top guy-on-guy porn studios such as Falcon Studios, directed a few skin flicks, and even ran his own site for a while.
For some reason, that site went down in ’16, but that was not the end of Corrigan’s career.
Technically, he returned to the industry full-time in 2016. But in the interim, Corrigan got decent work as a safe sex advocate and directed, wrote, and played in seventeen non-nude films. Granted, they were all low-budget, but a couple like Triple Cross and Chillerama has gotten a cult following.
Shelly Lubben AKA Roxy
I’ll start out by saying that it is unfortunate that she died last year of a drug overdose and that she had a somewhat troubled childhood.
Having said that, as to not come off as a douche bag, I’ll add that Shelley Lubben is probably one of the most unstable and crazy bitches to ever get kind of famous. And I only mean a little famous; she was never the porn *star* she claimed to be.
After several years of turning tricks unprotected, getting knocked up, and (allegedly) getting herpes, Lubben started doing porn. She did do about fifteen movies but, with one possible exception, none of them got popular enough to make her a superstar.
Following a year of unremarkable porn performing, Lubben went a new series of misadventures, which included a variety of low-level criminal activity and general recklessness.
For instance, after wracking up some priors, she used her using her sister driver’s license to get out of getting arrested. She wrecked a car her parents bought her in an attempt to help Shelley. And apparently, she got hooked on a whole lot of drugs while neglecting to take care of her baby.
As so often seems to happen with washed-up mainstream actors, when she approached middle-age, Lubben conveniently found religion and embraced Jesus.
Hallelujah!
So, you would think that this would mean the end of her being chronically irresponsible and hurting people, right? Not at all, this was only the beginning.
Lubben founded The Pink Cross Foundation to “help” ex-porn stars and lobby against the adult industry. Fortunately, they never made much progress on the latter point. Unfortunately, de-frauded a lot of people she and her organization were supposedly assisting. In fact, some of the money Pink Cross raised went to Lubben’s second breast enhancement surgery.
Of course, as these lying, professional evangelicals tend to do Lubben toured around the US, spinning wild tales about the porn industry, her life, and her family. Her lies became so outrageous that even her politically and religiously conservative brother (among many other people) stepped forward to denounce her bullshit.
I already opened with what happened to her, but if you want more details about this sad and disturbing story, look up Michael’s Whiteacre’s docu The Devil and Shelley Lubben.
Marina Ann Hantzis AKA Sasha Grey
Not only do I love this woman because she is incredibly hot and talented (and not just when it comes to porn), but because she seems to be successful at nearly everything she does. It is also nice that since she was one of the most famous women to go from porn into the mainstream, rad fems cringe every time her name is said out loud.
Sasha Grey made some waves all over the place, and I’m sure made people spill gallons of seminal fluid when she burst onto the adult scene in the late 2000s. And rather than build up her reputation with some smaller studios which most performers do, Grey was spotted early on by one of the top producers and performers in the business.
I’m referring to one of the leading stars in the game, Rocco Siffredi, among other performers in an orgy scene. Always looking to stand out and clearly being into extreme sex, it was Grey who requested Siffredi punch her in the gut during the scene.
Talk about being hardcore in a hardcore scene, eh?
While she still maintained her girl-next-door look, Sasha definitely did a lot of alternative scenes with Belladona, among other industry legends. In one case, she even licked a toilet seat in one case, which made her practically a household name. She also attracted the ire of radical feminists and even Tyra Banks.
Over the years, she got even more work which, it would seem, paid even better like modeling for Maxim and co-starring in the high-end porn sequel Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge.
Side note: if you have not seen the original or the sequel, I highly recommend both.
With all of this extreme stuff being published, Grey also managed to grab the attention of even more viewers and critics, which led to her being referred to as the next Jenna Jameson. Not only that, but she won a dick ton of awards with the adult entertainment industry, not to mention winning accolades on tube sites and in men’s magazines.
It is a sad thing that the higher you rise in the adult business, the harder it is to transition into the mainstream. But like a phoenix who never died in the first place, Grey rose even higher after she stepped away from the skin business around the term of the last decade.
She technically isn’t the first to do so, Sasha Grey is accredited as being the first porn star (not just a mere performer) to get famous and then cross over into the mainstream.
While she was still making fap films and after, Grey got a load of acting offers, the biggest one being the Steven Soderbergh movie The Girlfriend Experience. Besides that film, she has been featured in several others, a few documentaries, and four music videos.
Using her oral skills – no, not those you horn dogs (!) – she has also got some work as a voice actor in a couple Saint’s Row games. Further, she contributed to several discographies for bands all over the wold like the British group Current 93and the Israeli ensemble Infected Mushrooms.
Over the years, she’s done even more work independently as a music artist, a DJ, and even more recently as a Twitch streamer. I could go on, but that is just the abbreviated version of this phenomenally talented former fap star.
John Holmes AKA Johnny Wadd
Some younger readers may not know who this guy is, but I’m sure the MILFs who follow me do.
Like Donny Long, this is a guy who had built up an impressive filmography. Part of this was because he was one of the epic performers from the golden age of porn who had a part in making the classics like The Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat.
Another reason is because he has an impressive member both in terms of length and girth, which almost makes me jealous.
Once again, to be fair and balanced, Holmes did do some good work raising money for Greenpeace to save whales from harpooning.
On the other side, he was also a heroin dealer for reasons I cannot understand. Not just any dealer but someone who sold drugs for the infamous Wonderland Gang, which got him into a sort of Breaking Bad situation.
(Stop reading for a second and guess where this is heading.)
Like most of these situations, go Holmes ended up contributing to a home invasion and accused of multiple murders. Despite being charged with four homicides, he was acquitted but continued to use smack while trying to rebuild his porn career in the eighties.
It’s amazing that he didn’t run into more legal trouble before this because his drug habit is rumored to affect his performance in some of his films. Worse, he was involved in stealing, credit card fraud, and even fiddling a k*ddy who he pimped out.
At some point, he caught HIV but refused to tell his scene partners with which he fucked (literally and figuratively) by having sex with them without protection.
In the spring of ’87, Holmes died of AIDS-related complications.
Moral of the story: don’t run with gangs, and drugs are mad. M’kay?
Jenna Marie Massoli AKA Jenna Jameson
Okay, sure, this one is a little bit of a cheat since she’s still putting out adult content, but her story is too good not to bring up. After all, as I pointed out in another blog, Ms. Jameson is one of the richest and most successful pornstars ever. Not only that, but she has also managed to rise out of less than ideal circumstances.
Like too many people out there, Jenna Jameson did have a shitty background that involved drug abuse, an eating disorder, and being gang r*ped.
Fortunately, she pulled herself out of the muck even after her asshole of a boyfriend cheated on her following all of that.
Jameson started to grab people’s attention by starring in softcore and later stripping and doing XXX features throughout the nineties. This is around the time that anal scenes became popular – which she refused to do – instead of making a name for herself as an oral expert.
As her brand took off, Jameson went from making $6,000 per scene to earning $60,000 for a day and half of the work (!) by the turn of the millennium. Circa 2007, Jameson sort of retired from filming and turned to entrepreneurial pursuits.
Her new cash cow, the website ClubJenna.com, became a platform to not only post arousing pictures and videos but give sex advice from industry pros. Posts included how to make people’s relationships better, erotic writings, and related sex-centered material.
The site expanded from there and became so popular that it was promoted by the then-emerging porn giant Vivid Entertainment.
Jenna has since done some webcam work, but also become a marketing genius, selling branded sex toys and marketing her autobiography.
On top of that, she’s been on the Howard Stern Show, been on some TV comedies, voice acted for one of the Grand Theft Auto games, and been interviewed by mainstream media.
You go, girl!
ThePornDude’s final words
If you liked this post but aren’t familiar with any of the performers mentioned, you almost certainly will be able to find all of their work on at least a few of these premium sites listed here.
Do you want to know more about the big movers and shakers in the adult industry? I write about them all of the time. For instance, you might like my epic list of the top fifty most popular performers in the industry.
Besides that, I do sometimes talk to porn performers, and in the coming weeks, I will be publishing some interviews I’ve done with already famous and up-and-coming porn stars. I can’t say exactly when but check this page on a daily basis.
I promise you won’t be disappointed.
