Luke Ford

REPORT: Late last year, when several women accused adult star James Deen of rape and sexual assault, it seemed the porn industry’s golden boy had fallen. The details of the disturbing allegations made international news. Two major porn studios blacklisted him. He lost his advice columnist gig at The Frisky. A columnist at the Observer wrote that his “career seems effectively over.”

But it isn’t. Nearly four months after the allegations first surfaced, Deen’s career appears to be doing just fine. Fans are searching for his scenes just as often as they did before the accusations, and studios are releasing just as many movies featuring him, according to data obtained by Vocativ.

On November 28 of 2015, Deen’s ex-girlfriend Stoya took to Twitter to accuse him of rape. In the days that followed, several other women came forward with stories of sexual assault, abuse, boundary violations and excessive roughness, both on and off set. The following month, searches for “James Deen” on xHamster, a major porn website, more than tripled from the month before, leaping from 338 to 1,083 searches, according to data provided by the site.

That spike appears to be an anomaly, perhaps in response to the media frenzy around Deen. In January, that number dropped by more than half to 559 searches—but last month, it was back to the three-hundred range, just as it was in September, October and November.

Deen, who owns his own production company, James Deen Productions, is getting just as many outside gigs as before, according to a representative. “James is continuing to perform in scenes for other companies the same amount as he was before,” said Howard Bragman, chairman of Fifteen Minutes Public Relations, which represents Deen, in an email. When asked about companies like Kink and Evil Angel, which cut ties with the performer in response to the allegations, Bragman said, “Any defections were made up by new partnerships and his business is growing as it has been for a number of years.”

More.

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.

READ MORE:

• Bree Olson’s untold story

• Charlie Sheen’s ex, former porn star Bree Olson, speaks out about his HIV positive status

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.