Posted on 05/28/2004 5:25:59 AM PDT by Aquinasfan
A Mormon Girl Gets Her Start in the Adult Movie Business
Jan. 23 — When 20-year-old Michelle saw the handsome Spaniard who would later become her fiancé, she thought it was love at first sight.
[WARNING: This article contains descriptions of sexual acts that some readers may find offensive.]
"The day we met, he said, 'You're going to be the mother of my children. I love you,'" she remembers. "You know what I mean? I never had that before. I never had a guy be so in love with me."
The couple met on the set of a porn film in a rented house in Prague in July 2001.
Michelle, the daughter of a retired Air Force captain and former bishop in the Mormon Church, was an up-and-coming starlet in the adult video world. She had had some setbacks in her first year in the business, but believed her career was turning around with the Prague trip, which would be her first starring role. Her co-star, 28-year-old Nacho Vidal, was already a well-established star.
The director had told Michelle that Vidal liked her work, and when the pair saw each other they immediately fell into each other's arms, kissing from one side of the house to the other.
"There's nothing bad about you," she told him admiringly as they prepared for the shoot. "You don't know me very well" he replied with a grin.
But when the director finally got the pair to settle down to the business at hand — filming a sex scene — the tone changed. Without any prompting, Vidal got rough during the sex, slapping Michelle's face violently from side to side, and choking her. [Pleased to meet you/Hope you guessed my name]
Afterward, she looked shaken, her face reddened and her eyes watery. But she insisted she was OK. "I look torn up — can you tell?," she asked an ABCNEWS producer who was following her progress for Primetime. Laughing and wiping her eye, she turned away and said without conviction, "I took a beating today, and it was great."
'Belladonna' Is Born
Michelle had gotten her start in the business at 18, when she came to Los Angeles from her home in Utah to look for work as a nude photograph model. When she failed to get modeling work, her agent encouraged her to try porn. She refused at first. "I always hated porn. I thought it was the most disgusting thing in the world," she told Primetime, which followed her career for more than two years.
But she finally agreed. Taking the name Belladonna, like the poisonous flower, she found herself preparing for what she thought would be a simple boy-girl sex scene. She was shocked when the director told her he wanted her to do anal sex — something she says she had never even thought about before. Worried she'd have to go through with it if she wanted to work again, she let him talk her into it. "I was kind of scared. I didn't know if I could say no," she remembers. "I didn't know any better, you know?"
After the session, she was shattered. "I wasn't ready for anal sex.... It was painful. But I can hide it really well." She had just turned 18, the legal age for participation in sexually explicit films.
Michelle went on more shoots over the next few months. Then her agent sent her on a job where she would have sex with male actors in prison outfits — 12 of them. Once again, she tried to back out, telling the director it was "sick," but once again she was talked into it. She had sex — all kinds — with the 12 men. "It was really hard because I really felt like a piece of meat ... in a lion's cage, 12 lions.... I had to do a lot of things I can't imagine anyone wanting to do." She was paid $4,000.
Afterward, she says, she couldn't stop crying. She packed her bags and went home to her family in Utah.
Glimpse of the Big Time
But within a year, she was back, even agreeing to promote the prison movie that had so upset her.
She began to feel that her career was picking up. She got a small part in a movie for VCA, one of the "high end" companies that produce big-budget films, and hoped it might lead to a contract. On the shoot, she met porn legend Ron Jeremy, who was making a cameo, and began to feel like she was fitting in. "The first second I walk in, this girl grabs my breast, and I'm like, Wow, you know, that's like the best welcome ... 'cause then you feel like, Oh, someone likes me, you know?"
Another company considered giving her a contract, but at a meeting, the owner, veteran porn star Ona Zee, sensed that Michelle was not emotionally ready to become an adult star. "There's a part of me that wants to say to you, 'Run for the hills, girl, do something else, because you can be something better,'" she told her.
At the high-end companies — which produce a small proportion of the thousands of adult titles released each year — performers often have contracts and can make six figures by shooting just eight to 10 movies a year. They can pick their own partners and condoms are generally required. Shot on film with elaborate, sets, costumes and plots, the movies can have budgets up to $250,000.
But Michelle did not get a studio contract, and ended up taking a job with a company known for "gonzo" porn — sex-only, amateur-looking productions shot on video. The company, Elegant Angel, was making a film in Prague and offered her a starring role, which she hoped would show the big studios that she could carry a film.
Love Blossoms in Prague
She was thrilled at the attention Vidal gave her during the week in Prague — but wary. "It's weird to have a guy love you that much. That almost scares me because I have a hard time trusting men," she told Primetime, explaining that her first boyfriend cheated on her repeatedly and ultimately left her for a stripper. Privately, Vidal had told Primetime he could never be with just one woman, and would be happy if Michelle's attraction did not lead anywhere.
She came back to Los Angeles by herself, so sore from the week's filming that she says she could hardly walk. But then she flew to Spain to visit Vidal, and their relationship seemed to be going places. She said he could keep having sex with other women, as long as he agreed to be "honest to me, loyal, and just respect me and tell me that I'm number one every day."
She even began hearing wedding bells, telling Primetime, "The second I get married, I won't having sex with men in this business any more."
Wedding Bells
By December 2001, Michelle and Vidal were engaged. As she proudly showed off her diamond ring, saying how pretty it was, Vidal joked in his Spanish accent, "I need to f—k so many girls for that ring."
The couple was in love, Michelle says, but they were fighting regularly. Vidal would sometimes get what he calls "Latino jealous" when he saw her talking to other men at clubs. Michelle told Primetime, "It's hard to be in a relationship with someone in porn."
By now, she was working steadily, even shooting for the same company she shot the prison gangbang for. "I guess now I've gotten past the whole feeling-bad-about-it thing. I'm like, 'OK, I did it and that was pretty damn rough of me' ... Like wow, you know?," she said with a laugh. "I can say that I've done pretty much everything there is to do, and I can walk away feeling a little proud about it, you know?"
The Primetime producers who had been following her noticed changes. At 18, she had said she would never use drugs, but now Primetime learned that she was sometimes high on marijuana during her scenes. She was working without condoms, though she said the risk of AIDS was never far from her mind — or her prayers. "The fans don't like to see condoms ... If I would have said I want to use condoms every time, I really wouldn't get any work," she explained. She contracted chlamydia, which can make you sterile.
And anal sex — which she had be talked into during her first shoot — was now her specialty. "Funny, isn't it? Something I didn't want to do and now I'm known best for it," she told Primetime. No longer a fresh face in the business, she found she had to agree to even riskier sex acts to earn the same money.
Ona Zee, the producer who had interviewed Michelle the previous year, noticed a difference, too. "I said to my husband, Our baby is all grown up and left home. She's no longer the adorable fresh-faced girl that I met ... Now she's really in the life ... Even in the pictures that I see of her, she's much harder, much tougher."
Behind the Smile
During interviews with Primetime, Michelle kept the happy smile she had always had — even when describing things that many people would find disturbing. However, her composure cracked when Diane Sawyer asked why she always smiled. Tears came to her eyes as she said, "Because I like to hide — hide everything, you know?" Then she began to cry, explaining that she hides her real emotions because she wants to show everyone how happy she is. "And I'm not happy ... I don't like myself at all," she said.
Michelle confessed she often felt physical revulsion during her scenes: "My whole entire body feels it when I'm doing it and ... I feel so — so gross." While pretending to be enjoying the sex, she said, she was in fact counting the minutes, telling herself, "Hey, I only have this much time left. Don't worry about it. Get the check. Gonna go deposit it in your bank." She admitted: "You get addicted to the money."
Like other performers Primetime spoke to, Michelle said that during shooting she often imagines herself outside her body. "I call it the 'other half,'" she said.
Bringing Home a Trophy
In January 2002, Michelle's Prague movie won an award at the Adult Video News awards in Las Vegas, considered the Oscars of the adult industry. Things were not going smoothly with Vidal that day — he complained that Michelle "don't do the ironing my clothes... I still 28 and I need my mother," and at the ceremony he openly checked out other women — but there were crowds of admiring fans for Michelle and she soaked up the attention.
After going on stage to pick the trophy, she was beaming, telling Primetime she had worked hard for it. "I think this is the very beginning of my career, like I've just begun," she said.
And at the 2003 AVN awards two weeks ago, Michelle was an even bigger winner, taking home awards for best supporting actress and three other categories.
Olympic boxers wear helmets. So you would support requiring that for professional boxers? And legislating changes to professional football to prevent the severe injuries that have occurred? And lastly, if mandatory condom use was established as making porn safe, would you not support banning porn?
What kind of modernist garbage is this statement?
Infantile 'garbage' of your own to so mischaracterize my post.
We can see the evil results of criminalizing vice all around us in the 'war on drugs', for one example.
-- Prohibitionism is a major sickness in this society.
Like a drug addict, she's a slave to sin. Her decision-making isn't truly free. True freedom is the ability to know, desire and seek the good.
Her greed for money and fame have so overcome her ability to make good decisions that she can't prevent herself from putting her entire life at risk.
As St. Augustine said, a man has as many masters as vices.
When a person has sunk to such depths, his life can generally only be saved through outside intervention. Therefore, it is the obligation of her family and society to save her from herself.
LOL!! Sounds like we might have been coworkers at one point.
We're people, not robots. We set up the standards but we recognize there are exceptions.
I'm in my 40s. I can dazzle an 18 year old with enough promises of a bright future to get her into bed with me. (No, I haven't tried, but I've seen it done.) I can do this because many 18 year olds don't know how heartless men can be. True, I might find one that does, but if I keep trying I will eventually find one that doesn't. Then I can use her up and throw her away, knowing that she has been immeasurably hurt but I have been satisfied.
That's the law of the jungle and a very ignoble way of thinking. Nobility demands that I remember what she doesn't know and not use that against her. (Actually, nobility demands that I have sex only with my wife, but I digress.) We don't have to create laws to enforce nobility, we just have to remember that we are men, and not trousered apes.
On another note, I have an individual choice too. If I buy the porn then I have still done what I can to hurt this girl, regardless of whether she was of the age of consent or not. She may have made a bad choice, but I have made a worse one.
Shalom.
There is no such point. By your reasoning, if someone asks me "Where's Joe?" (supposing that I actually killed him and dumped his body) or "Where's the good china?" (supposing that I actually stole and fenced it), and I replied "I don't know; do I have eyes in the back of my head?", then I am making the "point" that humans normally have eyes in the backs of their heads.
Let's try it and find out if it works first.
How was this evil unleashed? It wasn't the government who got people to start using drugs. To reduce this issue to a matter of not allowing the "market" to take its normal course is way too simplistic. People's addictions have caused all the crime, not the government.
This presumes the view that a date on a calander automatically creates a state of awareness that it can never create.
Now I will ask you directly. It would help the Michelles of the world greatly if everyone who watched this porn would simply stop. Who would it hurt?
Shalom.
The first principle of a legitimate state is the defense of the lives, liberties, and property of its citizens and non-citizen guests against force and fraud.
Blasphemy is an intrinsic evil, and should be criminalized. Historically, it has been.
Failing to adore the Eucharist can be a sin of omission, and is not an intrinsic evil. Promoting Judaism or Islam is not intrinsically evil because most of the adherents to these religions are serving the truth to the best of their abilities.
Pornography and abortion are examples of intrinsic evils because they are evil in every circumstance.
Staw man.
The word "fifth" brings to mind the two-word phrase I would use to describe you. The next word in the phrase is not, however, "person"....
There is bad psychology, but there is true psychology also.
Someone who is traumatized by a situation will often return to it for reasons that are very complex. It's the same reason that women will stay with abusive husbands, and children will stay with, and even defend, abusive parents.
There are lots of solutions to the problem, none of them easy. In this case it doesn't hurt to remind everyone that the purveyors and purchasers of porn are slimeballs, and we should try not to be slimeballs ourselves. Reduce the number of slimeballs, and you reduce the numbers of these tragedies.
Shalom.
You're using a legal technicality to avoid your own responsiblity. It isn't about what she is, it's about what you are. Don't let her become your excuse to do evil.
Shalom.
Er, no. "Unnatural" describes acts that violate the laws of nature (e.g. causing a neutral object to become positively charged without causing any other object(s) to acquire an equal negative charge). If sodomy were "unnatural", it would not happen and thus not be an issue.
Remind me never to call you "friend."
My responsibility to society is to defend the helpless, feed the hungry, nurse the sick, shelter the homeless, etc. That is everyone's responsibility. Otherwise it's not a society, it's a gathering.
I'm glad you found a rationale for your selfishness.
Shalom.
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