The Sands Expo Convention Center in Las Vegas holds the Adult Entertainment Expo every January. The aisles fill with middle-aged men wearing lanyards and cameras, moving from booth to booth for autographs and photographs. In a far corner of the hall sat a table of anti-porn tracts under a pink banner. Most of the men who wandered that deep into the building looked at the banner and kept walking. The booth belonged to the Pink Cross Foundation. Its volunteers wore black T-shirts with a hot pink cross on the front. On some shirts, beneath the cross, ran a second line: “Ex-Porn Star.” A poster read “Porn Is Not Glamorous.” The woman who ran the booth, Shelley Lubben (1968-2019), had performed in hardcore films in the mid-1990s under the name Roxy. She had come back to the industry’s largest trade show to talk performers into leaving it.
Two hundred miles of desert highway and a decade of history separate that booth from the older image of the anti-pornography campaigner: the priest at a city council hearing, the prosecutor with a stack of magazines, the feminist theorist at a lectern. By the 2000s the movement’s face had changed. The person standing between the industry and the public was now, in the most visible cases, a former participant. She had an entry story, an exit story, an organization with a memorable name, and continuing contact with people still inside. Her previous work in the industry supplied the credential on which her fame rested.
The people who became known for helping others leave pornography came from several traditions that sometimes cooperated and sometimes fought: religious campaigns against obscenity, radical feminist opposition to pornography, evangelical outreach to sex workers, survivor-led ministries, anti-trafficking organizations, and campaigns against nonconsensual material on internet platforms. What connected them over time was the emergence of a recognizable public character, the rescue witness, and the two clearest examples were Lubben and Annie Lobert (b. 1967), founder of Hookers for Jesus. Their fame came entirely from their public campaigns to rescue sex workers.
They became familiar to audiences watching Christian television, documentaries, conference speeches, legislative testimony, and online video. Their names circulated among churches, anti-trafficking coalitions, adult-industry performers, and journalists covering the cultural politics of pornography. Each joined a personal exit story to an organization whose name did half the publicity work. Pink Cross and Hookers for Jesus functioned at once as brands, institutions, and stories.
The earliest organized American campaigns against pornography paid little attention to helping performers leave. Operation Yorkville, established in New York in 1962, became Morality in Media and then, in 2015, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. The changing names track a longer migration from the vocabulary of obscenity and morality to the vocabulary of exploitation. The public figures of that tradition were clergy, lawyers, prosecutors, and legislators.
A separate anti-pornography tradition grew inside feminism during the 1970s. Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media formed in San Francisco in 1977 after a conference on violence against women. Along with Women Against Pornography in New York and Women Against Violence Against Women in Los Angeles, it moved pornography toward the center of the feminist agenda through demonstrations, tours of adult-entertainment districts, and campaigns against violent or degrading images. These campaigns also split feminism into factions that have never reconciled, divided over censorship, free speech, labor, and the relation between images and violence. The movement’s spokesmen were writers and theorists: Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005), Catharine MacKinnon (b. 1946), Susan Brownmiller (1935-2025), Gloria Steinem (b. 1934), Robin Morgan (b. 1941), Adrienne Rich (1929-2012). Their institutional product was argument. They built conferences and ordinances, seldom shelters or job programs.
The prototype of the rescue witness appeared inside that feminist campaign. Linda Boreman (1949-2002), known professionally as Linda Lovelace, was already famous from Deep Throat, released in 1972. After the publication of her memoir Ordeal in 1980, in which she described her husband and manager Chuck Traynor (1937-2002) as violent and coercive, she became a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography movement. She appeared with Dworkin, MacKinnon, and Steinem, spoke at universities, and testified before government bodies. Her celebrity gave anti-pornography activists access to audiences that theory alone could not reach.
Her testimony is too inconsistent to serve as reliable proof of almost anything. Four autobiographical books published under her name gave divergent accounts of her sexuality, her participation in pornography, and her marriage. The first two presented her as an enthusiastic sexual adventurer. The later books described beatings, forced prostitution, rape, and performances compelled at gunpoint. The earlier books were shaped or written by other people, and claims in the later account were disputed by performers, filmmakers, and people who had known Boreman and Traynor.
Her historical importance survives those conflicts. Activists presented Boreman as the paradigmatic witness whose first-person account revealed what the finished film concealed. Her biography became testimony, publicity, and political argument at the same time, and she established the pattern in which one former performer’s story served as evidence about an entire industry for people who wanted that story.
Dworkin and MacKinnon tried to convert this testimony into law through the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance, which defined certain pornography as a practice of sex discrimination and created civil causes of action for coercion into performance, forcing pornography on a person, trafficking in covered materials, and assault caused by particular pornography. Minneapolis passed versions in late 1983; Mayor Donald Fraser (1924-2019) vetoed them. Indianapolis enacted a modified ordinance in 1984. The Seventh Circuit struck it down in American Booksellers Ass'n v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985), aff'd mem., 475 U.S. 1001 (1986), holding that the ordinance regulated expression by content and viewpoint; coercion and assault could be punished under laws of general application, while Indianapolis had attached liability to whether sexually explicit material expressed a forbidden view of women. The Supreme Court affirmed without opinion.
The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, the Meese Commission, developed at the same time from a different political tradition and published its two-volume report in 1986. Boreman testified before it and repeated her account of coercion. A federal commission had now adopted the former performer as a source of public knowledge about a private industry. But Boreman built no lasting organization. She remained a witness and speaker, and the practical work of assistance, where it existed, stayed scattered among churches, social workers, attorneys, therapists, and informal networks. The later movement would gather those functions around single founders.
Home video, cable, and the internet changed both pornography and the campaigns against it. Pornography grew more accessible while evangelical Christianity grew more media-fluent, with websites, recovery programs, testimony videos, and deliberately unconventional brands. The line between ministry, media production, and nonprofit promotion blurred.
XXXchurch, founded by Craig Gross and Mike Foster in 2002, became the national example. It called itself “the Number 1 Christian Porn Site,” launched at the AVN show in Las Vegas, and gave away accountability software that reported a user’s browsing to a designated partner. Its signature move was physical presence inside the industry’s commercial spaces. Gross and fellow pastor JR Mahon walked the Las Vegas convention floor handing out New Testaments stamped “Jesus loves porn stars,” with an ABC Nightline crew documenting the trip. At the show Gross stood in front of a tall sign in early-1970s lettering, telling a reporter, “we really just want to help people.” He toured colleges debating Ron Jeremy (b. 1953), the industry’s best-known male performer, sharing a twelve-passenger bus with Jeremy, his own wife, and his two young children. Jeremy, for his part, told CNN, “I like what Craig does, believe it or not.” The debates settled nothing and were never meant to. They put a pastor and a porn star on the same stage, and the stage was the point. Religious outreach would now happen inside the industry’s rooms rather than on the sidewalk outside with a megaphone.
Heather Veitch (b. 1974) extended the method through JC’s Girls. Veitch had worked as a stripper for four years before leaving the industry in 1999. She founded JC’s Girls on Good Friday in March 2005 at Sandals Church in Riverside, California, with the support of the California Southern Baptist Convention, and in January 2006 the organization took a booth at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo that drew heavy traffic and news coverage. At the booth her volunteers handed women Bibles wrapped in T-shirts printed “Holy Hotties.” The booth was dressed to match the exhibits around it, and the visual continuity generated coverage from London to India. The ministry supported women who wished to leave the industry without pressing the others to quit, a policy that drew fire from Veitch’s own religious flank. A Baptist minister from San Bernardino commended her zeal, asked how a woman could stay in the industry and keep a relationship with God, and cited the verse about serving two masters. Veitch answered, “Do we ask gluttons to stop eating too much before they come to church?” Even the industry’s parodists confirmed the model’s visibility: adherents of the Raëlian movement formed “Raël’s Girls,” copying the outreach format while encouraging sex workers to stay and enjoy the work.
JC’s Girls introduced most of the features that would define the survivor-rescuer. A former sex-industry participant led the organization and gave it her story. Outreach occurred in clubs and conventions. The name provoked, and the branding borrowed the industry’s own visual language. Websites and television turned local ministry into national story. What Veitch’s model lacked was infrastructure for the day after the conversation: housing, therapy, case management. Two women in Las Vegas and California were about to add it.
Annie Lobert came out of the Las Vegas escort economy. Born September 26, 1967, in Minneapolis, the daughter of Chet and Joanne Lobert, she graduated from Frederic High School in Wisconsin in 1986 and worked as a Las Vegas call girl for more than ten years, leaving after a near-fatal overdose and repeated beatings from pimps. This distinction shapes everything about her organization. Hookers for Jesus was never narrowly a program for women leaving pornographic film production. It addressed prostitution, escorting, stripping, and trafficking, with pornography folded into a broader conception of the commercial sex trade.
She founded Hookers for Jesus in 2005 as a survivor-led outreach, built around what she summarized as Hook, Hope, Help, and Heal: outreach, Jesus, housing, restoration. In 2007 she set up the Destiny House safe-house program through The Church at South Las Vegas, because, as she later put it in an interview, she had nowhere to bring the girls. The house changed the practical meaning of her work. Contact in a casino, hotel, club, or jail was only the first step. A woman leaving a controlling pimp might need secure housing, transportation, identification documents, medical care, therapy, legal help, and protection. An organization that could supply those things was doing something different from an organization that could supply a conversation.
Television made her a national figure. Investigation Discovery aired the three-part series Hookers: Saved on the Strip in 2010, following Lobert, who had sold her body in the city for over a decade, as she and her volunteers worked casino floors, nightclubs, and escort circuits that other organizations avoided, and as three women at Destiny House confronted their pimps, their court dates, and the problem of earning a legal living. The documentary form put the uncertain middle of an exit on screen, the part between the first conversation and the redemption story. Her memoir, Fallen: Out of the Sex Industry & Into the Arms of the Savior, followed in 2015. The status details of her life reinforced the brand: in 2009 she married Oz Fox (b. 1961), guitarist of the Christian metal band Stryper, a union of Vegas ministry and Sunset Strip religion that no publicist could have improved.
Her organization’s name did the same work as Veitch’s. Hookers for Jesus states the reversal in three words: former identity, new allegiance, target audience. Federal recognition eventually followed, and with it scrutiny. In 2020 the organization received a Department of Justice grant and drew criticism over its 2018 safe-house handbook, which described homosexuality as immoral and made attendance at weekly church services mandatory. The episode marked the boundary dispute of the whole movement in miniature: a survivor-led religious charity performing a social service that secular agencies had not performed, funded by a government constitutionally barred from establishing religion.
Hookers for Jesus remains active in 2026. It currently describes Destiny House and Dream House as separate residences offering no-charge transitional housing, with trauma-informed care, jail programs at the Clark County Detention Center, and Saturday Night Love outreach to the Strip hotels. The organization reports having served more than 15,000 women across twenty years of residential care, outreach, and case management. That figure is the organization’s own service count. It records contacts and assistance, without establishing how many contacts became departures, program completions, or durable independence.
Shelley Lubben built the parallel institution for pornography proper. Born May 18, 1968, in Pasadena, she performed in hardcore films in 1993 and 1994 under the name Roxy, battling drug and alcohol addiction during and after her years in the industry. In 2005 she began an aggressive online campaign, using social-networking sites to contact people in the sex industry, and in 2008 she established the Pink Cross Foundation, which concentrated on outreach and evangelism to performers and support for those wishing to leave. When she identified interested people, she sent care packages: religious literature, Bibles, Christian music, grocery and department-store gift cards. The gift card is the movement’s most concrete artifact. It answers the objection that testimony costs the witness nothing; groceries are a material offer, small enough to accept without commitment.
Lubben concentrated in one person the roles that earlier movements had distributed among many. She was the former performer giving testimony, the evangelist addressing churches, the founder raising money, the outreach worker messaging current performers, and the political witness in Sacramento. She supported a California legislator’s effort to tax the industry, describing to lawmakers the scenes she said she had experienced on hardcore sets. She spoke to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and she formed an alliance of convenience with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation over condom requirements on porn sets, an organization founded to protect gay men joining forces with a woman who had preached that Jesus saves homosexuals. “We didn't have much in common,” she told a reporter, aside from wanting health and safety laws enforced. Her accounts of the industry, infections, injuries, drug use, and the difficulty of finding straight work afterward were presented as her experience and her conclusions, and her speeches often moved between personal memory, claims about other performers, and statements about the industry at large without keeping the evidentiary lines distinct.
The industry quickly picked up there was something off about Lubben. Porners kept telling me she was not what she claimed, and they didn’t say that about the other crusaders who tried to to live by their principles. I kept hearing accounts of Lubben’s lewd and off-brand behavior at porn events, all in the name of outreach. In 2011 the industry advocate Michael Whiteacre made her the subject of a documentary, The Devil and Shelley Lubben, that disputed her account of her career. Some of the criticism came from women she had helped. A former associate complained to LA Weekly that when the performer Kacey Jordan received flowers, Lubben posted the picture online with an appeal for donations; every act of help, the associate said, became a fundraising occasion. The same article noted that a critic had parsed Pink Cross’s tax returns on YouTube and found little, and it quoted Crissy Moran of the rival outreach group Treasures drawing her own distinction: “We're not anti-porn. We are pro-women.”
Pink Cross closed in the mid-2010s. Lubben died on February 9, 2019, at the age of fifty. Google/Gemini report the death as a drug overdose. “Shelley Lubben died from an apparent accidental drug overdose. She passed away on February 9, 2019, at the age of 50 in Springville, California. Death Details: Date: February 9, 2019. Location: Springville, California. Circumstances: Found unresponsive by a friend in a trailer area; deputies reported no signs of foul play or suicide, pointing initially to an accidental overdose.” She was living in a trailer park. The organization did not survive its founder, but her recorded testimony did. Sermons, interviews, and reposted clips remained searchable and kept reaching new audiences, a structural feature of the digital rescue movement: the institution can die while the witness keeps speaking.
While Lubben focused on pornography, performers, and the behavior of consumers; Pink Cross was an outreach and transitional-support network, Lobert focused on prostitution, trafficking, hotels, and jails; Hookers for Jesus became a residential and case-management institution. Their common structure explains why both became famous. Each converted a former sex-industry identity into a claim of specialist knowledge. Each built an organization whose name told the story. Each placed personal testimony at the center of fundraising and outreach. Each became better known for the work of bringing others out than for the work she had once performed.
While clergy, lawyers, and organizers could be dismissed as people who had never set foot on a set or a casino floor, Lubben, Lobert, and Veitch could claim the industry’s language, its networks, its working arrangements, and its pressures as firsthand knowledge. The structure also suited television. A policy organization offers no protagonist. A founder with an entry story, an exit story, an organization, and continuing contact with people still inside offers a complete narrative arc, and that arc, entry, injury, conversion, return, ran through the memoirs, documentaries, sermons, and podcasts of the whole movement. Its usefulness to media says nothing about whether any single account was accurate or representative. It explains why founders became famous while caseworkers, therapists, shelter staff, and donors stayed invisible.
The role outlived its creators. In July 2019, Craig Gross handed leadership of XXXchurch to Brittni De La Mora, who had performed for years under the name Jenna Presley, and her husband, Pastor Rich De La Mora, saying he had heard the Lord tell him in prayer to give them the ministry. De La Mora traced her own conversion to the “Jesus loves porn stars” sign she had seen at an adult convention while still performing, which gave the succession the closed shape of a parable: the ministry’s outreach product returned as the ministry’s leader. Gross left to launch a venture called Christian Cannabis, a detail that says something about the entrepreneurial religious culture from which the movement came.
Joshua Broome became the visible male version of the survivor-preacher. Performing as Rocco Reed, he worked in pornography from 2006 to 2013, then became a Baptist pastor in Iowa, a speaker, and a podcast regular, describing a career that brought money and profound isolation. His significance is architectural rather than statistical, and it does not depend on promotional claims about how many films he made. The dominant rescue narrative had cast women as the recovered and men as consumers, producers, pimps, or pastors. Broome showed the same public structure could carry a man, and the podcast era gave him distribution that required no television network and no permanent organization.
While the character stabilized, the industry it addressed dissolved and reformed. Tube sites, webcams, and subscription platforms scattered production from studios into apartments. OnlyFans, founded in 2016, attached pornography to the creator economy: the performer became her own producer, marketer, and distributor, paid through subscriptions and tips. This broke the movement’s geography. There was no longer a set, a club, or a convention where outreach could find a large share of the population. Decentralization also failed to remove intermediaries; it replaced studios with platforms, payment processors, and recommendation systems, leaving the performer with more control over production and continued dependence on a company’s rules and its willingness to move her money. Meanwhile the tube sites concentrated distribution in a handful of firms. MindGeek, renamed Aylo in August 2023, aggregated professional, pirated, and user-uploaded material at a scale no studio had approached.
The platform era produced a new kind of rescue celebrity. Laila Mickelwait was never a performer. She had spent years at the anti-trafficking organization Exodus Cry when, in February 2020, she published an op-ed accusing Pornhub of hosting rape and child sexual-abuse material, launching the Traffickinghub campaign and a petition that gathered more than two million signatures from 192 countries. On December 4, 2020, Nicholas Kristof (b. 1959) published “The Children of Pornhub” in the New York Times after months of investigation, describing videos he said recorded assaults on unconscious women and girls; Pornhub denied the allegations, and Mastercard announced an investigation within days. Visa and Mastercard cut ties with the site, which then deleted roughly ten million videos, the material uploaded by unverified users, and restricted future uploads to verified accounts. Mickelwait credits Kristof’s article with breaking a year of corporate inaction; the card companies had expressed concern repeatedly, she said, and moved only under the pressure that followed the Times. The changes came from a convergence of survivor lawsuits, journalism, advocacy, investor pressure, and corporate self-protection, and no single actor can claim them. Mickelwait went on to found the Justice Defense Fund and published a book, Takedown, in 2024.
Her rise redefined the central act of rescue. For Lubben the act was a conversation at a booth; for Lobert, a bed in a house; for Mickelwait, the removal of a video and the severing of a payment rail. Digital permanence had complicated the classic exit story. A woman can stop producing pornography without withdrawing what exists; copies persist on tube sites, piracy networks, and private drives, and her name stays searchable. Leaving production and leaving circulation are separate processes, and the second can take years or fail. The photographs of the movement changed accordingly. Lubben was photographed at a booth inside the Sands. Mickelwait appears with screenshots, legal filings, and payment-company announcements. The site replaced the studio and the street as the location of intervention.
Every phase of this history generated its counter-tradition, and the objections repeat across fifty years. In the early 1980s the U.S. Prostitutes Collective picketed Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media, demanding the organization respect sex workers’ decisions and stop interfering with their livelihoods. In December 2020, performers pointed out that the Visa and Mastercard cutoff fell on the workers who depended on the platform, and sex-worker advocates noted that the campaign against Pornhub was run by organizations opposed to the industry as such, whatever its moderation practices. A 2022 study of unsolicited anti-trafficking text messages found that the workers receiving them often experienced the messages as irrelevant, stigmatizing, or indistinguishable from spam, and recommended outreach built around the recipient’s stated needs and consent. The dispute over who may speak for participants predates the internet, the trafficking statutes, and the convention ministries. Organizations like Hookers for Jesus partly answer it in their service language, which describes help for women who want to escape, placing willingness inside the program’s formal definition even where the surrounding publicity speaks of rescue.
The movement’s public record favors testimony over measurement. Organizations publish counts of contacts, gift bags, residents, petition signatures, and removed videos. Those figures record activity. Exit has no single definition: it may mean a weekend away, a permanent departure, a completed program, a removed video, or services accepted by a woman who stays. Without shared definitions and independent follow-up, the numbers from different organizations cannot be compared, and no one can say which model worked best. A first-person story requires no such apparatus. It fits a sermon, a documentary, a podcast, and a fundraising letter, which is why fame attached to the founders and never to the process.
The gallery, viewed whole, contains every variation on a single figure. Boreman, the famous performer whose contested testimony a movement adopted. Dworkin and MacKinnon, the theorists who tried to turn testimony into a cause of action. Gross, the pastor with the sign and the tour bus. Veitch, the former dancer with Bibles wrapped in T-shirts. Lubben, the former performer with a foundation and a booth in the far corner of the hall. Lobert, the survivor with a safe house and a metal guitarist for a husband. De La Mora and Broome, the survivor-preachers of the podcast era. Mickelwait, the campaigner with the petition and the payment processors. The industry moved from theaters to film sets to tube sites to subscription accounts, and rescue moved with it, from picket lines to booths to safe houses to content removal and corporate pressure. The most recognizable form remains the one Lubben and Lobert fixed in place: the former participant who returns with an organization, a first-person story, and an offer to the people still inside.
