Wave of Performer Allegations of Abuse Rocks Adult Industry

A wave of accusations of consent violations has rocked the porn industry over the past week as allegation after allegation of grossly inappropriate, often violent, and universally noxious behavior on and off set has leveled several prominent men. Among them: performer-director Ryan Madison of Porn Fidelity, AVN Hall of Fame director Craven Moorehead, and Motley Models president Dave Rock—but the list of offenders may just be getting started.

It seems to have started on June 5, when performer Annabel Redd tweeted about a recently released scene from Kelly Madison Media, in which she’d performed with Ryan Madison: “do not watch my porn fidelity scene. that man violated my boundaries. he was not supposed to creampie me. he forcibly held me down while he did so. at first, i thought it was apart of the scene. then i realized he wasn’t stopping. he was not supposed to make me deepthroat.”

Redd told Vice’s Samantha Cole the Porn Fidelity scene had been shot when she was left alone with him at a house some three hours away from downtown L.A. 

Redd’s allegations were quickly followed by numerous replies and retweets mirroring her experience. The lists of violations are deeply upsetting to read, referring to choking girls to near unconsciousness, forcing them to vomit, giving drugs and alcohol to performers on set, holding a girl’s mouth shut to keep her from speaking, and outright rape.

do not watch my porn fidelity scene. that man violated my boundaries. he was not supposed to creampie me. he forcibly held me down while he did so. at first, i thought it was apart of the scene. then i realized he wasn’t stopping. he was not supposed to make me deepthroat.

— Annabel Redd // Birfday June 16 (@AnnabelRedd) June 5, 2020

Kelly Madison Media released a statement on June 8, saying, “Our company takes any allegation of physical, emotional, mental or sexual abuse against any female talent seriously.” The statement, however, unequivocally calls Redd’s allegations false. 

Next, performer Aria Lee came out with allegations against Craven Moorehead, who she said assaulted her twice in 2019, once on a Gamma Films set. Gamma Films has since cut ties with Moorehead.

Then, performer Maya Kendrick tweeted that Dave Rock coerced her into sex on several occasions in 2016, and was known to have done the same to others. Rock claimed in a statement that he’d “engaged in consensual sex” with these women. “I was foolish,” he wrote. “But to allege that these encounters were forced or that she was pressured in any way is categorically false.”

The allegations seem likely to continue rolling in, even as the industry grapples with when to schedule a tentative reopening of studio shoots and internal turmoil over the treatment of performers of color within its ranks. 

should i talk about how my first agent Dave from @MotleyModels fucked me in his model house 2x when I was 20 and told me I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone because *surprise* he was fucking most of us that lived there.

— Maya Kendrick (@mayakendrickx) June 6, 2020

The porn industry experienced a round of #MeToo-like reckoning in late 2015 and early 2016—before the larger #MeToo movement came to be—when performer Stoya tweeted that her former boyfriend and frequent on-camera partner, James Deen, had violated her consent many times. An outpouring of support came along with similar allegations from about a dozen other women in and around porn. But formal charges were never brought against Deen, who is still working.

This time, though, something feels different, say industry insiders. 

For one thing, the Free Speech Coalition has vowed to “formalize a process for receiving reports of sexual violence and consent violations on set, and escalating them to the companies or individuals who need to act on them” and to “publish guidelines for sexual violence prevention policies in adult film production.”

And so many allegations against Ryan Madison have surfaced that performer Ginger Banks has started a Change.org petition “demanding several Mindgeek-owned sites—specifically, Pornhub, Redtube, and YouPorn—remove the Porn Fidelity videos from their platforms,” Vice reported. It’s not clear if the petition is behind Pornhub’s recent removal of the Teen Fidelity and Porn Fidelity channels, but the fact that they’re gone feels like a victory.

Meanwhile, xHamster spokesperson Alex Hawkins told Vice that he found the allegations against Madison “very disturbing.” He said, “In the past, we’ve used either criminal complaint…or complaints from people who are recorded without their consent, as the basis for removing videos. This has been the industry standard, but as an industry and a company, it seems like we may need a new standard.”

That new standard may be another part of 2020’s seeming mission to upend old ways of doing business across much of American society. Performer Allie Eve Knox told Vice that the industry’s months-long shutdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the power dynamics that often kept performers silent about abuse and assault before. “Being blacklisted or denied bookings because you set your own boundaries and stuck to them is no longer the career-ending decision it used to be for performers,” wrote Samantha Cole.

Knox also believes that “the Black Lives Matter movement and protests in the last several weeks has fueled a general sense of power coming back to the people,” wrote Cole. “This time, I think they will see that we are holding the industry accountable—from the producers to the companies to the performers to the agents to the mother fucking industry media,” Knox told Vice. “Everyone is having a reckoning. 2020 is fucking kicking people’s ass and it’s time to get some things straight and fixed.”

#MeToo photo by Lum3n from Pexels