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REPORT: A few years ago, Bree Olson was on top of the world. She was a Penthouse pet and the star of hundreds of adult movies. She’d made headlines for being one of Charlie Sheen’s live-in “goddesses” (though the relationship ended, as most of Sheen’s relationships do). When she retired in 2011, her success in porn led her to achieve the type of elusive mainstream success that most porn stars aspire to, with supporting roles in films like The Human Centipede 3 and her very own webseries.
In most respects, Olson has had the career that most porn girls dream about. Which is why it came as something of a surprise when she posted the following admonition to aspiring porn stars on Twitter:
The note has since been retweeted by a number of adult performers past and present. Many applauded Olson’s message:
But it also generated some controversy, particularly among sex workers who said Olson was just speaking from her own experience.
In an email to the Daily Dot, Olson said she was inspired to write the note earlier this week, after yet another young woman asked if she should go into the porn industry. “At least once a week I’ll have a teenage girl ask for my advice on it and my answer remains the same—I tell them not to,” she told the Daily Dot.
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Although Olson insists that she has no problem with the porn industry itself, and that her experiences there were largely positive, she says that the worst part about doing porn is the discrimination that women face after they leave the industry. For instance, she says that once she reached out to an underwear company that had sponsored one of her YouTube projects by sending a polite email expressing interest in modeling for them. She thought she might have a shot, as she described the company as “chill” and very “open.”
“In many of their photos on their Instagram their models are even topless,” she said.
Yet the company responded by telling her that they didn’t think she was a good fit because her Instagram was too “inappropriate”—despite the fact that she is fully clothed in the vast majority of her photos.
“They don’t like that I did porn. That’s it,” she said. “I can give you so many examples. Almost daily. But it happens all the time.”
Olson’s right—sex workers are frequently the target of discrimination, even long after they’ve left the industry. Even in an age where porn and sex work are considered “mainstream,” a number of teachers have been fired from their jobs after their porn pasts were discovered, such as Stacie Halas, a California teacher who was fired by the Oxnard School Board after it was discovered that she’d performed in 11 hardcore sex scenes.
The former porn star Gauge was outed at and subsequently fired from a job as a surgical technician, despite the fact that she was at the top of her class. For years afterward, she was unable to get work, forcing her to return to the industry.
