The studio sat above a sandwich shop in downtown Chico. A young woman climbing the stairs in, say, 2003 entered a room arranged to answer her doubts before she voiced them. Framed photographs showed the proprietor beside celebrities. A woman, his girlfriend, moved through the space doing ordinary tasks, and her presence said this place is safe, other women work here, nothing bad happens here. The proprietor called himself Donovan Philips. He was friendly. He did not pressure. He laid out the money, about $500 for a shoot, and he laid out the risks, and then he waited while the woman on the other side of the desk talked herself past her own hesitation. That was the method. He never needed force. He needed patience, a warm manner, and a college town that restocked its supply of nineteen-year-olds every September.
His legal name was Donny Pauling (b. about 1974), and over the following twenty years he became, in sequence, one of northern California’s more prolific amateur-porn producers, a nationally traveled anti-pornography speaker, a Catholic convert announced from a stage at Notre Dame, a convicted sex offender, a state prisoner, and a truck driver. Each identity was public. Each came with an audience. The constant across all of them was his skill at reading what a listener wanted and supplying it.
Pauling grew up in Redding, California, the son of a Pentecostal minister. The family moved often enough that he attended five high schools. In his own telling, the religion of his childhood consisted of prohibitions. No dances, no dates, no sleepovers. God appeared as a list of things forbidden. He watched members of his father’s congregations conduct themselves one way at church and another way at home, and the gap between performance and conduct became the organizing grievance of his young life. He found a pornographic magazine in the third grade. The material stayed with him, though by his account it did not govern him until adulthood.
As a high-school senior he moved in with an aunt in another city to take an advanced math class, and there he met Wendy, a Christian, whom he married. In 1997 he founded Pauling Technology Consulting. The couple brought a computer into their home, and Pauling later described nights of consumption while his wife slept or worked. His technical skill turned appetite into enterprise. At about twenty-four he bought a camera.
The business he built ran on the economics of licensing. He paid a woman roughly $500 for a shoot. The material could be licensed again and again and return several multiples of that figure. He sold to larger sites and supplied companies including Playboy. He estimated that he photographed more than 500 students at California State University, Chico, along with several faculty members, most of it solo nudity and softcore at the start. He advertised on Christian websites and forums, and he later said he regarded the users there as hypocrites, which made recruiting through their channels a private joke at their expense. He enjoyed telling members of his father’s church what he did for a living and then asking whether they consumed the product. The question collapsed the distance between the man behind the camera and the man behind the screen, and it let Pauling cast himself as the honest party in the transaction.
For about three years he ran the operation behind his wife’s back, presenting himself as a technology consultant while financing shoots from bonuses and savings. He had an affair with a performer. The end came by telephone. Pauling called Wendy from an adult-industry convention and told her what he had been doing. The marriage ended, she kept custody of their young son, and Pauling moved into his office. Secrecy had been an operating cost. With it gone, he grossed more than $50,000 in his first month as a full-time producer, and at the peak he claimed an income above half a million dollars a year, with individual days that brought in thousands.
The same period supplied the material he later used against the industry. Women began calling him after parents, employers, or boyfriends found the pictures. Some begged him to take material down that he no longer controlled, since licensed images had been copied across sites he did not own. One woman, by his account, threatened suicide. Another lost a job. Women were recognized in Chico bars and humiliated. Pauling could offer nothing. A decision made in an afternoon above a sandwich shop had become a permanent public record. In his speeches he returned again and again to one image, the light going out of a performer’s eyes. Women arrived alert and excited, he said, and went numb as the work escalated, and the cheerful performance the customer saw concealed crying and dissociation once the cameras stopped.
His exit ran through two events. The first was a Christian ministry called XXXchurch, founded by Craig Gross (b. 1975) and Mike Foster, which worked adult-industry conventions handing out Bibles stamped “Jesus Loves Porn Stars.” Pauling met them around 2002 and hated them. They kept treating him as a person rather than a target, year after year, and by his account this wore down a hostility toward Christianity that had been fixed since childhood. The second event was personal humiliation. Pauling had encouraged his fiancée to sleep with another man as part of what he called the game. She left him for that man. He described the injury to his ego as the first pain that let him recognize the pain he had caused others. In 2006, after engaging more seriously with XXXchurch at the Las Vegas convention, he turned down a Playboy offer reported at $4,000 a day for a new series and quit production. Two weeks later, sitting in his car, he surrendered his life to God. He compared the aftermath to detox. Conversion gave him a new account of his life. It restored nothing to the women in his archive.
What followed was a second career built from the wreckage of the first. Pauling enrolled in seminary classes, worked with XXXchurch, wrote online, spoke at “Porn and Pancakes” church breakfasts, and appeared in Christian media. In 2008 he stood on a stage at Yale beside Craig Gross for an ABC Nightline debate against porn performers including Ron Jeremy (b. 1953). His value on that stage was positional. He had run the business and could speak its language, and he now spoke the language of evangelical repentance, and no one else in the room held both vocabularies.
A note on the word pastor. Pauling was widely called a pastor, a preacher, or a pastor in training, and later interviews described him as an ex-pastor. The contemporary record establishes seminary enrollment and an itinerant speaking career. It does not document an ordination or a settled congregation. Anti-porn speaker is the accurate term.
His argument sharpened over the years. He stopped presenting pornography as a private addiction and began presenting production as commercial sexual exploitation. A producer, he argued, was a pimp by function. He recruited a woman, paid her for sexual performance, and resold access to her body. In a 2013 interview he ran the numbers, about $500 out for footage that returned more than $3,500. The consumer who paid nothing still fed the demand that paid the platforms. The argument placed him in company with feminist anti-pornography writers and trafficking activists as well as the evangelical circuit. He spoke at York University, at Notre Dame, at the 2014 Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation summit, and at churches and conferences across the United States, Canada, and Australia. He claimed his story had reached millions.
The recruitment skill traveled with him. At Chico State he had targeted young women new to a city and short of money and support, and he had used isolation and economic pressure where a cruder man might have used force. On the speaking circuit he read church audiences the same way. He knew what they wanted, which was sensational detail wrapped in moral warning, and he supplied it. The product changed. The salesmanship did not.
In March 2014, at a Notre Dame event, Pauling announced that he was entering the Catholic Church, and that Easter Vigil he was reported confirmed. The move gave his story a sacramental finish. The producer had confessed, converted, and been received into an ancient moral community. The arc was complete, and audiences on three continents had paid to hear it.
On December 1, 2014, he was arrested. A teenage relative who had lived under his care reported a sexual relationship of several years. Investigation produced allegations from other teenage girls in Shasta and Sutter counties, and by early 2015 prosecutors had filed roughly thirteen felony counts and a misdemeanor across two cases. The record from the plea and the reporting states that Pauling had ongoing oral and vaginal sex with one victim beginning around 2012, when she was fourteen, continuing into 2014. He committed lewd conduct with a second girl, sixteen. He massaged the genitals of a third, also sixteen. The first victim reported that Pauling told her that if she ever disclosed the relationship she should tell him first so he could kill himself, and that he was not like other child molesters because he loved her. There were allegations that he photographed her with other young girls.
The cases entangled a Sutter County sheriff’s captain, Lewis McElfresh Jr., the county jail commander and a friend of Pauling’s. Pauling claimed that McElfresh had invited him over and pressured him to have sex with McElfresh’s sixteen-year-old relative. McElfresh faced charges of his own and pleaded no contest to child endangerment, receiving five years of probation and sex-offender counseling, and no prison time. The friendship shows how far Pauling’s respectability reached. A man three years into a national ministry against sexual exploitation was socially embedded with the commander of a county jail, and the alleged conduct between the two households went on while both men held positions of public trust.
On October 15, 2015, Pauling entered no-contest pleas resolving the cases, four felony sex charges concerning two minors and a misdemeanor concerning a third, for six years in state prison, lifetime sex-offender registration, and parole. He represented himself at some appearances. At the November 12, 2015 sentencing, the judge called him a “lying and manipulative sexual predator” who had convinced himself he was in love with a sixteen-year-old, and added, “We don’t molest people we love.” Victims and their families said six years was too short. Under California rules he would serve at least half.
The crimes were committed during the ministry years. For most of a decade Pauling had stood before audiences explaining how adult men cultivate trust, normalize boundary violations, and convert apparent consent into exploitation, and through part of that decade he was doing those things to a fourteen-year-old in his own home. This does not falsify every observation he made from the stage. A compromised witness can testify accurately, and firsthand knowledge of recruitment was the one credential he possessed beyond dispute. Nor does it prove the conversion was theater from the start. People sincerely renounce one form of misconduct while concealing or growing another. What the case destroyed was the claim that his repentance certified his safety. The speaking platform had become one more environment where he received trust, access, and status while his conduct contradicted the man he performed.
The organizations that hosted him bear examination. Christian ministries run on testimony, and testimony converts disorder into narrative. The addict becomes the addiction speaker, the criminal the authority on crime, the pornographer the guide to purity. Such figures reach audiences that respectable clergy cannot, and the more dramatic the fall, the more valuable the rescue. XXXchurch and the wider circuit gave Pauling authority within months of his exit from the industry, on the strength of his past sins rather than any demonstrated record of present character, and few of the institutions that booked him had procedures for checking the difference. A corporation hiring a man for far less sensitive work might have run a background check and a probationary period. Churches accepted a story, because the story fit.
Pauling left prison and tried to build a life without a platform. By September 2019 he was writing online about depression, isolation, and suicidal thoughts, and about being told he would never have a platform again and needed to stay small. In August 2022 Luke Ford interviewed him under the title “From PK To Porner To Pastor To Convict To Truck Driver,” and he returned for a second program on the daily texture of life under sex-offender registration. He was driving a truck. The conversion formula that had organized his public life for a decade no longer had an ending it could reach.
In April 2023 he emailed the author of a long-running anti-porn blog, a man who had known him in ministry circles, asking that the names of certain young women be removed from an old post. The author complied, and after further contact raised concerns, cut him off. Faint traces of Pauling appear online as late as 2024. His ministry sites are gone. The domain donnypauling.com now hosts an adult-games site, with no sign that Pauling has any part in it. The address that once carried his escape story has been reabsorbed by the industry he described escaping.
Pauling belongs to a recurring American religious type, the transgressor whose market value comes from having crossed the boundary he now patrols. The type carries a structural risk that his case makes visible. Leaving pornography was an occupational change. The abilities that had made him rich in the industry, reading vulnerability, building intimacy on schedule, controlling a narrative, presenting himself as the one man who understood what others could not, moved with him from the studio to the sanctuary intact, and they remained in working order in his own house. Remorse and rehabilitation are different things. Religious fluency is not evidence of safety. A persuasive account of one’s sins can become a source of power over new victims, and institutions that believe in forgiveness still have to distinguish forgiveness from trust, trust from authority, and authority from access to the vulnerable.
The Moral Career of Donny Pauling: Reading a Life Through Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman (1922-1982) spent his career studying what people do in front of other people. His first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), argues that social life runs on performance. A man before an audience is a performer managing impressions, and he works in a front region, where the show happens, and retreats to a back region, where the props come down and the performer prepares. Goffman divides performers into the sincere, who believe their own act, and the cynical, who do not, and he notes that a man can travel between the two conditions, sometimes in a single afternoon. Stigma (1963) studies what happens when a performer carries information that could discredit him, and Asylums (1961) follows what Goffman calls the moral career, the sequence of changes a man’s self passes through as institutions take him up and put him down. A short early essay, “On Cooling the Mark Out” (1952), examines the con game and asks a question the rest of his work keeps answering: after the mark discovers the loss, who consoles him, and how?
Donny Pauling (b. about 1974) is a Goffman archive in one body. Over twenty-five years he ran three major performances from three front regions, a studio, a stage, and a courtroom-adjacent life of managed contrition, and he kept one back region through all of them, his home, which is where the state finally went looking. His case runs Goffman’s stigma sequence backward. The usual subject of Stigma is born with his mark or acquires it by accident and spends his life managing it. Pauling manufactured his first stigma on purpose, converted it into a paying credential, and then acquired a second stigma that no conversion can touch. The registry closed the account.
Begin in the studio above the sandwich shop in Chico. Goffman would inventory it as a front region built from standard materials. The setting: a downtown address, a business name, framed photographs of the proprietor beside celebrities, which Goffman calls sign-vehicles, objects that make claims the performer never has to speak aloud. The photographs said this man operates in a larger world than Chico, and a nineteen-year-old climbing those stairs could read the claim in the time it took to cross the room. The team: Goffman insists that most performances are staged by teams whose members cooperate to sustain a single definition of the situation, and Pauling’s girlfriend was a teammate whose role required no lines. A woman moving through the space at ease performed the proposition that women were at ease there. Her presence answered the visitor’s central question before the visitor asked it.
The performance’s genius was that it assigned the hard part to the audience. Pauling laid out the money and the risks and waited. Goffman’s con-game essay describes the structure. The con succeeds because the mark participates, because the mark’s own wants supply the persuasion, and the operator’s art consists of arranging the scene so the mark talks himself in. Pauling said as much in his later testimony. The women persuaded themselves. He supplied the room, the photographs, the teammate, the patience. The mark supplied the rest.
Goffman would then ask about audience segregation, the performer’s need to keep the spectators of one show from watching another. For three years Pauling ran two shows at once. Before his wife he performed a technology consultant. Before the models and the market he performed Donovan Philips. In Stigma’s vocabulary he was discreditable rather than discredited: the damaging information existed, and everything depended on controlling who held it. Goffman calls this passing, and he treats it as work, a daily labor of managing disclosure, monitoring who knows what, sorting the world into those before whom the secret must hold and those before whom it need not. The phone call from the convention ended the labor. Goffman notes that the discreditable sometimes disclose on their own initiative, since revelation, whatever it costs, ends the strain of information control. Pauling’s disclosure cost him the marriage and freed the business. He moved into the office, which is to say he moved into the front region and stopped maintaining a second one, and his first month without a back stage to service grossed more than $50,000.
Then the women started calling, and the con-game essay becomes the operative text. Goffman’s marks discover their losses after the operators are gone, and the con includes a final role, the cooler, the man left behind to console the mark, to define the loss as bearable, to keep the mark from the police by giving him a story he can live inside. The women who called Pauling after a parent or an employer found the pictures were marks discovering the full price of an afternoon. They wanted the loss reversed. Pauling could offer only definitions: the material was licensed, copies existed on sites he did not own, nothing could be recalled. He was a cooler with nothing to cool with, or a cooler who declined the role. One woman threatened suicide. Another lost a job. Goffman’s essay observes that a mark who cannot be cooled becomes a complainant, and the industry’s protection against complaint was structural. There was no one to complain to. The transaction had been legal, the consent documented, the images licensed. The con was not against the law. It was merely a con.
The conversion of 2006 opens the second performance, and here Stigma supplies the categories. Goffman describes two classes of people before whom a stigmatized man can stand without pretense: the own, who share his stigma, and the wise, normals whose work or history has made them privy and sympathetic. The XXXchurch men who worked the adult conventions in matching irreverence, handing out Bibles stamped “Jesus Loves Porn Stars,” were professional wise. Their method was Goffmanian to the letter. They refused the denunciatory performance Pauling expected, treated him as a person across repeated encounters, and thereby offered him something the industry could not, an audience before whom the information that discredited him elsewhere carried no charge. He hated them for years and then he didn’t.
What Pauling built with them reverses the usual trajectory of the stigmatized. Goffman notes that a stigmatized category generates professionals, spokesmen whose life story becomes stock in trade, and he adds a dry observation: such a man never escapes his stigma, since his career consists of representing it. The ex-producer on the church stage is this figure at full development. Pauling’s value on the Nightline stage at Yale in 2008, and at Notre Dame, and at the hundred churches between, came from the stigma. The testimony format required him to rehearse his discredit before every audience, to keep the spoiled identity polished and on display, because the spoiled identity was the credential. A clean man could not give the speech. Goffman’s question about sincere and cynical performers hangs over every appearance, and the frame’s discipline is to leave it hanging. Dramaturgy cannot see inside the performer, and it does not need to. What it can see is that the confession was a front-region routine, performed on schedule, for fees, before audiences whose response was known in advance, and that the routine generated what Goffman says successful performances generate: trust, deference, and access.
Access is the word to hold. The front region of the testimony years was the stage and the conference hall. The back region was a house in northern California where a girl of fourteen lived under his care. Goffman’s architecture describes the arrangement without strain. In the front region the performer embodies the standards his audience expects. In the back region the suppressed conduct appears, the performer steps out of character, and the audience is barred. The crimes ran from about 2012 into 2014, which means the back region operated through the Notre Dame announcement, through the Coalition summit, through the Catholic confirmation at the Easter Vigil. The two regions sat in the same life with full audience segregation, church crowds on one side, a child under instruction on the other, and the instruction the record preserves is a piece of back-region stagecraft: if she ever told anyone, she should tell him first, so he could kill himself. Even the threatened exit was scripted for effect on an audience of one.
December 1, 2014 is the date the regions collapsed. Goffman writes about performance disruptions, the moments when back-region information erupts into the front, and his examples are mostly small, a slip, a leak, an embarrassment the team scrambles to repair. An arrest is the disruption in its total form. The state walked into the back region and published it. Every prior front, the studio’s staged safety, the sanctuary’s staged repentance, was re-read in a morning as what Goffman says discovered performances become, evidence of cynicism reaching backward through the whole record. The judge at sentencing performed the re-reading for the public: a lying and manipulative sexual predator, and then the sentence that closed the testimony career as a genre, “We don’t molest people we love.”
Prison belongs to Asylums. Goffman’s total institution strips the entering self of its props, its wardrobe, its audiences, its name in the mouths of others, a process he calls mortification. For most inmates the losses are severe. For Pauling they were close to complete, since more than most men he had been made of performances, and the institution confiscated every stage at once. The moral career, in Goffman’s usage, is the self’s passage through such stations, and each station issues the man a new definition of who he is, which he can fight or absorb. The definition Pauling carried out of prison was printed on a registry.
The registry deserves a Goffman analysis of its own. Stigma devotes a chapter to information control, and its premise is that the discreditable man retains some command of his biography, deciding whom to tell, when, how much. Sex-offender registration is the state’s permanent seizure of that command. The registry is a stigma symbol administered by the government, searchable by any neighbor, employer, or stranger, renewed for life. Passing becomes a crime. Covering, Goffman’s softer strategy of keeping the known stigma from obtruding, becomes the only move left, and the moves available are small: a job with a minimal audience, a truthful account delivered before anyone can discover it, distance. Pauling drives a truck. Goffman might note the occupational logic without smiling. The cab of a truck is a front region with no audience, a place where a man discredited before every public can work a full day performing for no one.
The last documents are the terminal phase of the moral career, and they show Pauling being cooled out. By 2019 he wrote of depression, isolation, suicidal thought, and of being told he would never have a platform again and needed to stay small. Goffman’s essay predicted the scene in 1952. A man who loses a role must be offered a smaller one he can accept, and the people around him, meaning well or not, become his coolers, defining the loss as final and the reduced station as his portion. Stay small is cooling-out language, addressed to a mark whose lost stake was an identity. The 2022 interviews with Luke Ford, given from the far side of the loss, read in Goffman’s terms as something between a sad tale, the account Asylums says inmates build to make their fall narratable, and a last, chastened performance for the one audience still willing to book him, an interviewer whose format was the life he had already lost twice.
What the frame yields, finally, is a redistribution of attention, away from the puzzle of Pauling’s inner states, which dramaturgy brackets, and toward the audiences, which it illuminates. Goffman closes The Presentation of Self with the observation that performances succeed because audiences cooperate, extending tact, declining to probe, accepting the front as the man. The church crowds that gave Pauling standing ovations were teammates in his performance and did not know it. The ministries that booked him accepted a confession as a credential because their format needed the confession more than it needed the man checked. Goffman’s sociology contains no villains, only performers and audiences holding scenes together, and its application here ends on that cold note. Pauling gave the audiences the show they assembled to see. The back region was where he lived.
