Giggling to the camera, eyes wide with excitement, the petite brunette leans forward on her forearms as she cocks her head coquettishly to the side, her legs splayed out behind her and the curve of her hips angled for the camera. With a soft moan she lowers her lashes, rubbing her thumb slowly along her bottom lip, then looks directly into the camera with a fierceness that draws her audience in. As the tokens poured in and her chat room audience grew, she was overcome with a deep sense of satisfaction. The man this girl had met just three weeks after her 18th birthday had taught her exactly what to do and how to do it.
The ad on Craigslist promised $2,000 a week, but the person who placed the ad presented himself not as her prospective boss but as her “mentor.” He implied she’d make much more than $2,000 a week if she was willing to put in the work.
According to him, there was more money to be made in online chat rooms webcamming than there was in filming porn scenes. He claimed that he himself had been in porn, and with his expertise she could channel her talent and monetize her assets. Best of all, unlike porn stars, cam girls didn’t have to fuck anyone—physically, anyway—in the real world. It was better than porn money without dealing with those porn people. He made it sound like the opportunity of a lifetime.
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She met her prospective mentor/boss in person. He communicated in the language predators often use, signaling trust and success with a flashy car, Gucci wallet, and all the other recognizably expensive accoutrements. It was like an Instagram highlight reel of a life flush with cash. With this man backing her, she could be rich. She was sold.
For a few months, camming went well. She flourished under the man’s guidance. They talked often. Once a week he paid her—but always in person.
“It was all online, but I would meet up with this person periodically because he controlled my money—the money I earned doing webcam would go directly to him, and he would pay me cash. I have no idea if I was being paid the right amount,” recalls Jane Wilde. “This guy, I really trusted him, and I felt like he had the best of intentions for me. But then I realized how wrong I was.”
Articulate and confident, with an air of sureness that comes with experience, it’s difficult to envision the Jane Wilde of today as that same naive girl. Wilde is now an award-winning porn star and the 2022 AVN nominee for Female Performer of the Year (the porn Oscars’ grand prize). But Wilde remembers clearly this younger unguarded version of herself—that hopeful, inexperienced girl, so easily exploited and preyed upon for those very traits.
“I was manipulated, and I guess you could say abused by a man in his thirties and groomed to do sex work, being fed a bunch of lies and manipulative information,” says the now 24-year-old Wilde. “I consider myself to be a trafficking survivor.”
Wilde makes a distinction between porn and webcamming, cautious of the misconceptions that conflate human trafficking with porn.
“It sucks to even call what I was doing at 18 sex work because it really wasn’t. It’s just easier to describe that way when talking about it in a casual sense, but it was an unfortunate situation with someone that didn’t have good intentions. Webcamming was my first foray into any type of online sex work,” says Wilde.
A warning sign was how heavily she relied on this man. She was dependent in every way. This man was her mentor, her manager, her paymaster, and the boss. He controlled everything. She didn’t even know how much money she earned outside of what he disclosed. And, when she was no longer the fresh-faced ingénue, the relationship Wilde had with her fake mentor faltered.
After, several months of building her up with encouragement and praise, and, yes, training her how to do the job his way, the man became distant and less interested in her. The close relationship they once had was evaporating. The contact steadily diminished—they went from talking several times a week to only once every few weeks.
“I felt very scared and desperate because this person had planted the seed in my mind that I couldn’t be successful without him, so when he was pulling away I started to feel like I was drowning—like I didn’t know what to do or how to succeed,” shares Wilde.
He’d also stopped paying her. When she finally reached this man that she’d grown to trust and need, he greeted her with a new personality: “He was verbally abusive and a very scary person.”
Meanwhile, all those hours she’d spent working had left her all alone when she needed a support system the most. “I started to realize at some point that I didn’t have any friends because I’d stopped talking to them. I just webcammed all the time,” she remembers.
Wilde, like many teens, still lived at home with her parents. “The part that bothers me the most about it is that it was all happening right under my parents’ noses.”
Filled with shame, Wilde spoke to no one. She felt helpless and alone. “I didn’t know how to get out of it. I was very embarrassed, so I kept that to myself a lot longer than I should’ve.”
Wilde finally reached her breaking point and turned to a different man for help, one she knew she could trust: she told her dad everything.
“I said, I’m in a very bad state right now and I don’t know what to do. He controls the account and money. and I don’t know how to get out of it. My dad said, you need to contact the [webcam] site and tell them the situation.”
Following her dad’s advice, Wilde contacted the cam company who behaved as they should and immediately switched the account from the mentor’s “studio” to her own. With the flick of a digital switch, the money she earned came directly to her.
Once Wilde had the purse strings, her mentor came calling, “I was contacted two weeks later by this guy, threatening me, telling me I needed to contact [the webcam company] and change it back.”
His threats terrified her. The reaction of the cam company had gone further than she realized. “They’d closed his account. It was so scary, and I genuinely didn’t know what was going to happen. This person threatening me knew everything about me. I’d given him my address, my social, everything. He could do anything he wanted.”
This awareness came with another realization: “I knew nothing about him. I didn’t even know his real name.”
Wilde refused his attempts to contact her, blocking his number and waiting out his rage hoping it wouldn’t escalate into something worse. Thankfully, it didn’t.
A year after escaping the man’s control, Wilde entered traditional porn, working on sets with other performers and directors. But even this choice was dictated by the earlier experience.
“I didn’t want to be a failure—to feel like I failed at sex work. I felt like I needed to prove it to myself.” And, now having moved forward and reached an understanding that her accomplishments are her own, Wilde feels ready to face the emotions of her past. “Now I need to go back and do something for myself which is to actually deal with the trauma of the situation.”
However, it would be another four years before she was really able to tell her story—and not just in this interview. “I haven’t talked about this openly in detail with everything on the table ever. That’s why I wanted to turn it into a movie, to art.”
Turning her experiences into a XXX feature film, Wilde understood that there would be both personal and creative risks. And for this challenge, Wilde turned to long-time colleague Bree Mills, the chief creative director at Adult Time.
Mills, touted by some as a feminist producer/director, has revolutionized personalized storytelling in the XXX space and is the perfect collaborator to nurture the project. Mills believes that “to humanize sex work and humanize sex workers we have to start by showing ourselves to people and exposing our stories.”
Recalling her initial conversations with Wilde about the project, Bree says, “She’d told me she was at a point in her career where she wanted to use our medium to tell a real story and to tell a story that would be representative of many sex workers’ experiences without necessarily being anti or pro-porn, just being objective in the storytelling.”
Mills green-lit the project after their first Zoom meeting. Together the duo completed filming on STARS over the summer and plan to release the film September 28th. Showcasing Wilde’s traumatic past in an X-rated format could, of course, be professionally—and personally—risky.
“I don’t want people to pity me,” Wilde reflects. “I want them to understand this is a very real thing that happens and that we need to talk about it more.”
So much of porn is about catering to male fantasies. Will porn audiences respond to something this real about male behavior?
“With this film, I don’t want to just reach fans of pornography. I want to reach as many people as possible for them to fully understand the situation. So many people think that porn is trafficking and they don’t understand the nuances,” explains Wilde.
She adds, “By definition I am a victim of trafficking, abuse, whatever you want to call it. I want to frame [my story] as a tale of tragedy that ends in triumph. Porn has given me a lot in life that is positive. It gave me structure and direction.”
Wilde credits her experiences in the adult entertainment industry with a renewed sense of pride, accomplishment, and independence. To Wilde, the issue is not the sex in sex work, but how a society that marginalizes and criminalizes it creates this environment where the real exploitation happens. Sex work was about income but the stigma of it left her easy to victimize. The emphasis on sex trafficking to her should be on that second word—the loss of control, the loss of freedom, agency or income.
“I was traumatized, in shock and had no idea what I would do. Porn gave me a way of making a name for myself and a platform to use for the rest of my life. It also gave me a community. My experience is more common than people think,” she maintains.
Vultures have always lingered at the edges of the entertainment industry, and porn is already at those edges—the proverbial meeting spot at the Los Angeles Greyhound station between the young and those who profit from their naivety. Of course, the Greyhound bus station is not the internet. And, even in an era of social media and female empowerment, these situations are now worse than ever.
“These girls don’t understand the consequences of what they’re doing. They don’t understand the severity of what sex work is, and I don’t know if at 18 you can even grasp what sex work is. I couldn’t at the time,” says Wilde.
And, while porn remains a positive part of her story, she also understands that another part of the complexity is that the money in adult is generated by women but, even in the age of social media, so many tools remain in the hands of the men. Wilde sees they still run the cam sites and the subscription sites in the same way the old-line porn companies used to control video distribution. And, of course, the sales approach, the fake promises, the control of money that comes with those would-be managers is also still with us.
“It’s the same shady older men running the companies saying, ‘Oh I could make you so much money. You could make $1000 a week if you let me run your account.’”
