Sex trafficking survivor turns her trauma into pornography

JLaughing at the camera, her eyes wide with excitement, the little brunette leans forward on her forearms as she gracefully strokes her head to the side, her legs spaced behind her, and her hips curved at an angle to the camera. Softly ionizing, she lowers her eyelashes, slowly rubs her thumb on her lower lip, then looks straight into the camera with a fierceness that draws her audience in. And as the emoticons poured in and her chatroom audience grew, she was overcome with a deep sense of satisfaction. The man this girl met just three weeks after turning eighteenThe tenth Her birthday taught her exactly what to do and how to do it.

The ad on Craigslist promised $2,000 a week, but the person who placed the ad presented himself not as her potential boss but rather as her “mentor.” He hinted that she would make more than $2,000 a week if she was willing to put in the work.

According to him, there was more money to be made from webcams in online chat rooms than from filming porn scenes. He claimed that he was himself in the porn business, and thanks to his experience, she was able to channel her talent and invest her assets. Best of all, unlike porn stars, cam girls didn’t have to have sex with anyone – physically, anyway – in the real world. It was better than porn money without dealing with these guys. He made it seem like the opportunity of a lifetime.

I met her potential mentor/boss in person. He communicated in the language predators often use, suggesting confidence and success with a flashy car, a Gucci purse, and all the other expensive gadgets. It was like an Instagram highlight ball for a life full of cash. With this guy supporting her, she could be rich. It has been sold.

For a few months, filming went well. I thrived under the guidance of the man. They talked a lot. He paid her once a week – but always in person.

“It was all online, but I was going to meet this guy periodically because he was controlling my money — the money I made using the webcam would go directly to him, and he would pay me cash. I have no idea if I was getting paid the right amount,” Jane Wilde remembers. . “This guy, I really trusted him, and I felt he had the best intentions for me. But then I realized how wrong I was.”

Clear and confident, with an air of certainty that comes with experience, it’s hard to picture Jane Wilde today as that same naive girl. Wilde is now an award winning porn star and the 2022 AVN Nominee for Performance of the Year (Grand Porn Academy Award). But Wilde vividly remembers this young, unguarded version of herself – that promising and inexperienced girl, who is easy to exploit and seize for the sake of those very traits.

“I was manipulated, and I guess you could say I was abused by a man in his thirties who was groomed for sex, and fed with a bunch of lies and manipulative information,” says 24-year-old Wilde. “I consider myself a survivor of human trafficking.”

Wilde distinguishes between porn and webcam, wary of misconceptions that confuse human trafficking with porn.

‘It’s annoying to call what I was doing at 18 in sex because it really wasn’t. It’s easier to describe it when talking about it informally, but it was an unfortunate situation with someone who didn’t have good intentions,’ says Wilde. The webcam is my first experience of any kind of online sex work.”

The warning sign was how deeply she relied on this man. She was dependent on everything. This man was her mentor, manager, cashier, and boss. was controlling everything. She didn’t even know how much money she had made other than what he said. And when she was no longer the new face, Wilde’s relationship with her fake mentor faltered.

After several months of building her up with encouragement, praise, and, yes, training her how to do the job his way, the man became distant and less interested in her. The close relationship they had was fading away. Contact has steadily diminished – they’ve gone from talking a few times a week to only once every few weeks.

“I was so scared and hopeless that this person had planted in my mind the seed that I couldn’t be successful without him, so when he walked away from me I started to feel like I was drowning — as if I didn’t know what to do or how to succeed,” Wilde shares.

He also stopped paying her. When she finally reached this man she had come to trust and needed, he greeted her with a new personality: “He was a verbal abuser and a very intimidating person.”

Meanwhile, all those hours she spent at work left her alone when she desperately needed a support system. “I started realizing at some point that I don’t have any friends because I stopped talking to them. I just shoot on the web all the time,” she recalls.

Wilde, like many teenagers, still lives at home with her parents. “The part that bothers me the most about it is that it was happening under my parents’ noses.”

Filled with shyness, Wilde did not speak to anyone. I felt helpless and lonely. I didn’t know how to get out of it. I was so embarrassed, so I kept that to myself for much longer than I should.”

Wilde finally reached a breaking point and turned to another man for help, a man she knew she could trust: she told her father everything.

“I said, I’m in really bad shape now and I don’t know what to do. He controls the account and the money. And I don’t know how to get out of it. My dad said, you have to call [webcam] location and inform them of the situation.”

Following her father’s advice, Wilde contacted the camera company which behaved as it should and they immediately transferred the account from the mentor’s “studio” to her own. With the push of a button, the money you’ve earned comes straight to her.

This guy called me two weeks later, threatened me and told me I needed to call [the webcam company] and change it again.

Once Wilde had the money chains, her mentor called, “This guy called me two weeks later, threatened me, and told me I needed to call [the webcam company] And change it again.”

His threats terrified her. The camera company’s reaction has gone further than she had realized. “They closed his account. It was so scary, I didn’t really know what was going to happen. This guy who’s threatening me knows everything about me. I gave him my address, my social, everything. He can do anything he wants.”

This awareness came with another realization: “I didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t even know his real name.”

Wilde refused his attempts to call her, blocked his number and waited for his anger to not escalate into something worse. Fortunately, that did not happen.

A year after escaping from male control, Wilde got into traditional porn, working on sets with other artists and directors. But even this choice was dictated by previous experience.

“I didn’t want to be a failure — to feel like I failed at sex work. I felt like I needed to prove it to myself.” Now that she has moved forward and has come to understand that her accomplishments are her own, Wilde feels ready to confront the feelings of her past. “Now I need to go back and do something for myself which is to deal with the trauma of the situation.”

However, it was another four years before she could truly tell her story – and not just in this interview. “I didn’t talk about this frankly in detail with absolutely everything on the table. That’s why I wanted to turn it into a movie, into an art.”

Wilde turned her experiences into a feature film XXX, realizing there would be personal and creative risks. For this challenge, Wilde turned to longtime colleague Brie Mills, Adult Time’s chief creative officer.

Mills, described by some as a feminist producer/director, has revolutionized personal storytelling in the XXX space and is the perfect collaborator to sponsor the project. Mills believes that “to humanize sex work and humanize sex workers, we have to start by showing ourselves to people and telling our stories.”

Brie recalls her initial conversations with Wilde about the project, “She told me that she was at some point in her career where she wanted to use our medium to tell a true story and tell a story that would be representative of many sex workers’ experiences without necessarily being anti-or pro-porn, just being objective in Telling stories.”

Mills lit the project green after the first Zoom meeting. Together, the duo completed filming stars Over the summer and plans to release the movie on September 28The tenth. Exposing Wilde’s traumatic past in the form of an X-rated can, of course, be risky both professionally and personally.

“I don’t want people to pity me,” Wilde says. “I want them to understand that this is a very real thing going on and that we need to talk about it more.”

A lot of pornography revolves around catering to male fantasies. Would the porn audience respond to something like this? truly about male behavior?

“With this movie, I don’t just want to reach porn lovers. I want to reach as many people as possible so they fully understand the situation. Many people think porn is a business and they don’t understand the nuances,” Wilde explains.

She adds: “By definition, I am a victim of trafficking, abuse, whatever you want to call it. I want to frame [my story] Like a tale of tragedy that ends in victory. Porn has given me so much in life and that’s a positive. It gave me structure and direction.”

Wilde credits her experience in the adult entertainment industry with a renewed sense of pride, achievement, and independence. For Wilde, the issue is not sex in sex work, but how a society that marginalizes and criminalizes it creates the environment in which real exploitation takes place. Sex work was about income, but the stigma made it easy to hurt. The focus of sex trafficking for her should be on that second word – loss of control, loss of freedom, agency or income.

“I was shocked and shocked and had no idea what I was going to do. Porn gave me a way to make a name for myself and a platform to use for the rest of my life. It also gave me society. My experience is more common than people think.”

The vultures have always remained on the fringes of the entertainment industry, and porn is already on those fringes – the proverbial meeting place at Los Angeles Greyhound Station between young adults and those taking advantage of their gullibility. Of course, the Greyhound bus station is not the Internet. And even in the age of social media and women’s empowerment, these attitudes are now worse than ever.

“These girls don’t understand the consequences of what they’re doing. They don’t understand how dangerous sex work is, and I don’t know if at 18 you can even understand what sex work is. I couldn’t at the time,” Wilde says.

And while porn remains a positive part of her story, she also recognizes that another part of the complexity is that money in adults is generated by women, but even in the age of social media, many tools are still in the hands of men. Wilde sees that they still manage cam sites and subscription sites in the same way that old porn companies used to control video distribution. And of course, the sales approach, false promises, and money control that comes with these potential managers is still with us, too.

“They’re the same shady older men who run businesses, and they say, ‘Oh, I can make you a lot of money. You can make $1000 a week if you let me run your account. “

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