Veronica Vain: 'Me Make Porn for the Money? Are You Serious?'

LOS ANGELES—Porn companies aspiring to land Paige Jennings, aka Veronica Vain, the sought-after Wall Street intern who reportedly quit to make porn, might want to take note of comments attributed to the striking redhead this weekend in a NY Post post in Claire Atkinson's column, "On the Money." While the article would likely never have seen the light of day without the recent publicity surrounding Jennings, it has nothing directly to do with porn, but addresses the 20-something's "heroine worship" of Lynn Tilton, the founder of Patriarch Partners. About Tilton, Jennings told the Post's Julie Earle-Levine, “She goes around with plunging V-necks, stilettos and attitude. She’s amazing. I want to be like her in porn. She runs Patriarch, a holding company managing 75 companies with more than $8 billion in revenues, including Midwestern oil companies, military helicopters, iconic American brand names.” While Jennings held Tilton up as a role model, she ironically found herself unable to emulate her ability to be herself. On the Wall Street of today, she said, “To be taken seriously, it seems women are supposed to wear frumpy clothes and makeup and a bad attitude to roll with the guys. It’s limiting and unfair. I salute the women who have made it anyway, such as Lynn Tilton, but I won’t be one of them. “She [Tilton] started in a different era in finance, when there was less red tape," added Jennings. "There’s a lot of red tape now, and so much competition. If I had a dollar for every kid with a Wharton degree, I’d be rich. It’s a much more crowded market, and although it’s intellectually stimulating, honestly, the work isn’t interesting enough. But for those of you who live and breathe finance, and you can make the next mortgage-backed security, go for it!” So it was perhaps in the context of both Jenning's and Tilton's definition of "rich" that Jennings commented to Earle-Levine on the subject of her attraction to porn, which is decidedly not financial. "Jennings says she didn’t swap finance for porn for the money," wrote  Earle-Levine. "She says a typical porn star, if successful, makes only about $100K a year before taxes, which she could easily pull as a first-year banking analyst." No, unlike last year's porn import phenom, Duke student Belle Knox, whose narrative was that she moved appreciatively into porn as a way to pay for egregiously high college tuition, Veronica Vain is consistent in her insistence that her motivation goes far beyond the merely monetary, dropping clues as to her personal/professional ambitions that could maybe possibly include a venture-capital fund, about which she joked to Earle-Levine, “I’m accepting investor applications." And with the article concluding, somewhat dramatically, "[Jennings] intends to shake up an industry that is currently dominated by a major player called MindGeek, which she says seems to have close to a monopoly on streaming and delivering porn on the Web." Photo: Paige Jennings/Veronica Vain