![]() At a convention in 2013, Leathers spoke with porn performer and producer Joanna Angel. When she got into the business, she was advised about Deen, too, she said. “That’s a bold thing to do.” Leathers started performing in porn not long after the press outed her as the sexting partner of then US congressman Anthony Weiner. “I was proud of her,” porn performer Sydney Leathers told me, after reading Stoya’s tweets. View image in fullscreen James Deen and Stoya at the Venice film festival in 2013. “I remember getting ready for my first gang bang, and I was talking to people – what should I know, I’ve never done this before, I was really nervous, do you have any tips? And two people were like: put James Deen on your ‘no’ list” – the performers she would not do scenes with. And some people had really good experiences with him, but that doesn’t mean anything.” Performers let each other know what they had heard about Deen, she said. Some years later, one of her close friends in the industry told her Deen had assaulted her. Back in 2010, Raphael had done her first scene in porn with James Deen. Finally, someone had put it out there.” The porn scene isn’t all that huge, and this was especially close to home, she told me. ![]() When the story broke, said Arabelle Raphael, a porn performer who told me she had followed it very closely, “It was a big relief. ![]() So what change has Stoya’s intervention made – and what remains? They reverberated, and now the public is hearing, perhaps as loudly as ever, about the particular structural problems the porn industry contends with, and the persistent and pernicious idea that sex workers are by definition unrapeable. That chorus of voices that followed Stoya’s shook the porn industry. That silence was filled almost immediately by other porn performers, some with allegations similar to Stoya’s, and about the same man, and saying that, despite what the reporters and critics and fans might have been wondering, yes, no matter what you see on screen, a porn performer has a right to her boundaries, on-set and off – and that yes, they believed her. A request for comment from Deen was not returned by the time of publication.) In what may have felt like Stoya’s silence, reporters, critics and fans wondered for her: what did this mean, this public rape story told in 55 words, involving two of the world’s most high-profile porn performers, who were once in a very public relationship with each other? (James Deen posted some tweets of his own, denying Stoya’s story. I just can’t nod and smile when people bring him up anymore.” That thing sucks.” And then: “James Deen held me down and fucked me while I said no, stop, used my safeword. On 28 November, she tweeted: “That thing where you log in to the internet for a second and see people idolizing the guy who raped you as a feminist. “I couldn’t bear the thought any more,” Stoya said, “that there might be something terrible happening to yet another woman at his hands, or more likely, at his cock, that she didn’t want, because I kept quiet. ![]() She thought of saying something after that good night’s rest. The filming was bringing up a lot – memories of her ex, and their work together, the things she hadn’t spoken in public about before. She had managed to distract herself to sleep one night with a book – the third of Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay – and again the next night. She spent her time awake rehearsing her role in the film: a woman who would be raped by someone that she knew. “There’s no room for anything else,” she said. Stoya couldn’t sleep in the converted attic room with the stark white wood floors where she stayed after 12-hour days on set, making a narrative, non-porn film that would keep her offline and occupied. Just one paparazzo waited for the internationally recognisable porn performer and writer at the airport, and even he had slunk off when the production assistant sent to meet her had told him, after he asked if this was Stoya, that it was not. After arriving in Serbia on 18 November to begin work on a film, she had been woken by nightmares.
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