A St. George woman who gained attention when she was legally allowed to wear a colander on her head for her Utah driver’s license photo dropped her request for a trial on a drunken driving charge Thursday and entered a plea in the case.
Jessica “Asia” Steinhauser, 42, had been scheduled for trial Friday morning in 5th District Court on the misdemeanor charge after she was allegedly found passed out on a couch at the Washington County School District’s offices, where she had taken her daughter for testing.
Defense attorney Douglas Terry said Steinhauser pleaded no contest to the charge and will serve house arrest, but she will receive no jail time.
Deputy County Attorney Rachelle Shumway said the DUI charge reflected the fact Steinhauser had a passenger younger than 16 in the vehicle.
Steinhauser is a former porn star who went by the name Asia Carrera and is now also known as Asia Lemmon, but Steinhauser is the name that appears on her license and in court records.
At the time she obtained her driver’s license in 2014, she wore a pasta strainer for the photo and asserted her religious right to do so when she initially met opposition from Division of Motor Vehicle employees.
Steinhauser told The Spectrum & Daily News at the time that she is an atheist who belongs to the satirical religious movement called Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Its members identify themselves as “Pastafarians” and Steinhauser is reportedly the only one in Utah who has obtained a colander-wearing license photo.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster website identifies a handful of other people around the world who have obtained similar licenses.
Steinhauser’s movie credits include 263 videos as a porn actress between 1994 and 2007, but she also appeared in an uncredited role as porn actress Sherry in the 1998 mainstream movie “The Big Lebowski.”
She moved to St. George in 2005 and has since retired from the film industry, but she appeared in the 2010 documentary “After Porn Ends,” which is about life after being a porn actor, and was ranked No. 5 among a magazine’s “The Top 50 Hottest Asian Porn Stars of All Time” list in 2011, according to her Wikipedia page.
She is also a member of Mensa, an international high-IQ society.
Steinhauser was arrested March 5 after a police officer responding to the situation at the school district’s office reported Steinhauser showed him the vehicle she had driven, that her “eyes appeared glassy” and had exhibited some involuntary twitching, and that she attempted to drive away.
The officer reported Steinhauser also had difficulty following his instructions as he tested her ability to balance and walk through sobriety tests outside the office building.
Steinhauser had a reported blood alcohol content of .254 percent – more than three times Utah’s .08 legal limit.
She was not wearing a pasta strainer when she left the courthouse Thursday.
She married nutritionist and author Don Lemmon on December 19, 2003.[2] The couple moved to St. George, Utah, where Carrera gave birth to her first child, daughter Catalina, on March 4, 2005.[2][28] Lemmon was killed in a car accident near Las Vegas on June 10, 2006. At the time, Carrera was almost eight months pregnant with their second child, son Devin.[29] Concerned about her livelihood and worries of not being able to support her two children on her own, Carrera began to solicit donations on her personal web site.[30][31] Eventually, Carrera got a message from an insurance company that a life insurance policy she had forgotten about did exist for her husband, and she was granted it after mandatory investigation.[31]
On May 13, 2007, she announced on her website that she had filed a request to legally change her son’s name from Donald Edward Lemmon III to Devin D’Artagnan Lemmon, in honor of Devin DeVasquez, the woman who had introduced Carrera to Lemmon. “Devin D’Artagnan Lemmon” had been what Carrera and Lemmon had originally planned to name their son, but after Lemmon’s death, Carrera named the boy after his father, a decision she regretted soon after. She explained that “He’s not Don, he never will be Don, and it made me want to start crying every time a random stranger would say, ‘Oh he’s so cute, what’s his name?'” The state made an error in changing the boy’s name, however, and he is legally named “Devin D’Artagnan Lemmon III.”[32]
On April 14, 2010, Carrera confessed on her blog that she became an alcoholic after Lemmon’s death, that she had joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and was in her third week of sobriety. She emphasized that she still did not believe in God, and that it is “actually not mandatory for joining AA.”[33] Carrera later gave birth to a boy she named Niko. On September 21, 2012, she wrote on her Facebook page that she gave him up for adoption.[34] On March 5, 2015, Carrera was charged with “driving under the influence with a child,” since her daughter was in the car with her, lodged at the Purgatory Correctional Facility and released on bail.[35][36][37]
She identified investor Warren Buffett as her hero on her website,[38] which Buffett was pleased to learn.
In 2006, Carrera was asked for commentary by The Spectrum, a St. George, Utah-area newspaper, on the local case of Susan Russell, who was charged with 15 counts of third-degree felony distribution of pornographic material. Russell allegedly sold pornographic materials and sex toys from a back room in her Earrings and More store, potentially violating the “community standards” of the Mormon-dominated town per the Supreme Court case Miller v. California. Carrera opined:
“I deliberately moved to St. George with my husband so we could raise our kids in a conservative atmosphere, in a low-crime, family-friendly state. I do appreciate that the laws are there, and will make it harder for my kids to get into trouble when they get older.”
However, she also said,
“Do I have a problem with porn being sold here? No, not per se. I have no problem with porn at all. Trust me, they don’t exploit women, and watching porn has never been scientifically shown to lead to any increase in crime rates, be it rape, pedophilia, or any other sexual crimes.”
Nevertheless, she reiterated that the community’s conservatism was the reason she moved there, and that she had no plans to challenge it.
The most heartbreaking scene in the documentary After Porn Ends, about the post-porn lives of 12 adult stars, may be when Asia Carrera talks about her membership in the high-IQ society Mensa. She explains that Mensa links to all its members’ websites, but that they wouldn’t link to hers because… well, because it was a porn site. Eventually, though, the society did feature her in an issue of its magazine devoted to Mensa celebrities—a big moment for her, she says.
Which, to me, just seems incredibly sad. This after all, is Asia Carrera, a woman who ran away from home at 17 and pulled herself together to become a successful businesswoman and a world-famous name and face. Yet, despite all of that, what she wants is validation from some random group of self-declared smart people. For someone like her to need the approval of someone like them is an apocalyptic admission of neediness that’s depressing to think about.
The natural conclusion to leap to, of course, is that the neediness and the porn career are inextricably intertwined: that Carrera entered porn because she needed to be loved, and/or is so unsure of herself because she’s ashamed of her porn career.
There’s certainly a fair bit of evidence in After Porn Ends, available on iTunes now and on DVD later this month, to support such suspicions. A number of the former performers link their entry into the industry to child sexual abuse and/or to drug addiction. And nearly all of them talk about the bitter stigma of being in the adult industry. Houston lost her job selling real estate when a client recognized her. Randy West—who otherwise seems fairly happy with his career—talks bitterly about the fact that most charities won’t allow adult stars to donate to them. Even more poignantly, he suggests that his career in the adult industry made it hard for him to form normal relationships, and thus may be responsible for the fact that he never married and has no children.
One expert talking head argues overdramatically that being an adult star cuts you off from all personal ties. Given the way many of the ex-stars talk about their families and spouses and kids, he’s obviously making a gross generalization. But at the same time, it’s clear that if you’re a former adult performer a lot of people are going to judge you—and you can see how, living with that, having Mensa declare you worthy might pack a certain punch.
