When Ashley Fires publicly revealed why she’s refused to work with one of porn’s most popular leading men, she expected things to change; she hoped it would lead to better, safer working environments. Instead the adult actress experienced the depressing reality of why most survivors keep quiet. After going public with sexual assault accusations against James Deen, Fires was ostracized, taunted and even bullied by some of the colleagues she’d happily worked alongside for years.
“The reason I put him on my ‘no list’ was because he almost raped me,” Fires previously told The Daily Beast. “I was getting out of the shower of the communal bathroom at Kink, I reach for my towel to dry off, and he comes up from behind me and pushes himself and his erection into my butt,” she continued. “He pushes me against the sink and starts grabbing on me and I was like, ‘No, no, no James, no,’ and he released me from his grasp, and says, ‘You know, later if you want to fuck around I’m in room whatever-it-was. I was like, ‘Fuck you.’ I didn’t even know this guy, he was so out of line and entitled with my body.”
She was the third woman to accuse Deen of sexual assault. Soon, the allegation consumed her identity.
“At first I didn’t want to go on set, I did not want to perform, I couldn’t. I took substantial time away from being in front of the camera and turned to producing, directing. I couldn’t put myself out there, I couldn’t be vulnerable for a little while because I’d been so vulnerable with that whole thing,” recalls Fires in a new interview with The Daily Beast. “So I took a little break and then I got back into it. I still do relevancy tours where I go to LA and do a couple of scenes to get my name out there but it’s not like it was. I was working a lot and my rates were really high and I was always nominated, so yeah, I was kind of at a high point in my career. It was naïve. I thought there would be change, that there would be value afterwards, that people would engage differently, and look at consent and on-set behavior.”
Three out of every four sexual assaults go unreported, according to the criminal justice system statistics cited by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). Twenty percent of victims cite “fear of retaliation” as the reason they don’t report it. A RAINN survey of the sexual violence crimes reported to police from 2005-2010 revealed that of those who do report, over 50 percent do so to protect and/or prevent further escalations and crimes by the perpetrator.
“After being blamed for my own sexual assault, after being bullied by James Deen to stop talking about it, after all of that, the patriarchal rape culture that perpetuates inequality was so in my face that it alerted me to a call of action,” says Fires. “I was disenfranchised. I was hurt. I had a lot of healing to do. It definitely made me angry enough to want to make impactful change when I wasn’t seeing anything happen within the adult industry. It was very frustrating because nobody seemed to care.”
Since then, Ashley Fires has become the harbinger of change—a dedicated advocate for sex workers, fighting for equality at a legally-enforceable level. “I became a lobbyist and started up SWOP [Sex Workers Outreach Project] New Hampshire, and we’re working in coalition with other organizations for legislation that will help decriminalize sex work,” reveals Fires.
“We need to try to make some form of sex workers’ work safer. If sex workers were seen as human beings with rights, we wouldn’t have seen what happened [with James Deen] in 2015. We wouldn’t have seen people blaming victims, people lashing out and defending an alleged rapist,” says Fires. “We wouldn’t have seen this if sex workers were not stigmatized and stereotyped and morally and ethically shunned in society and treated as less than.”
Though it was four years ago when she first spoke out, encouraging numerous other women to share their own similar experiences with Deen, Fires feels it’s just as relevant and important today as it was then: “I never stopped talking about it, and I never will stop talking about it. I’m always going to talk about this because this matters. Every couple of years there should be a new article about James Deen. If people don’t know about it, it’s just this tongue-in-cheek taboo thing and nobody cares and we’re just like these not-real subhuman-type sex dolls.”
Despite the impact it’s had on her career, Fires doesn’t regret sharing her own encounter but does lament the role she played in rallying other women. “There were a few women who’d reached out to me privately before going public,” says Fires. “I knew I wasn’t responsible in a way but I felt I shouldn’t have urged these women, and said things like, ‘We’re stronger together, we have strength in numbers’ and ‘The more people who come forward, the more they’ll believe us.’ I said things like that to them.”
Most of the nearly dozen women who went public struggled under the scrutiny, fighting for their own identities and careers, along with the stigma of being mainly known as a Deen accuser.
“People I had worked with for years no longer wanted to work with me because they thought I might be a problem for them on set,” says Fires. “Now when I go on a set there are #MeToo jokes. I did a scene last December and the director put his hand on me and said, ‘Is this okay? Are you going to tell people? Are you going to #MeToo me?’ It’s things like that. Little things like ‘careful with this one,’ ‘Is this consensual, Ashley? Is this okay?’ and people make jokes about it.”
Frustrated with the lack of accountability, Fires blames American politics and white male privilege for injustices modern women continue to endure. “Women don’t want to speak up because they’ll be labeled as difficult; their opportunities dry up if they speak out about any unsafe work environment or on-set assault. Women are punished for speaking the truth yet this white male privilege guy James Deen can just go on like no big deal,” says Fires. “I really think it’s because of the unique reality we are living in right now, this normalization. You have Trump—look at how many women have gone public? Yeah, no big deal. He can just grab ‘em by the pussy, and it’s on tape, but no big deal, whatever, let’s reward the guy, make him president.”
That same attitude of rewarding bad behavior is reflected in the porn industry’s 2020 AVN and XBIZ Award nominations, says Fires, where Deen is nominated for 14 awards total. “It’s a boy’s club, business as usual,” offers Fires. “I think he’s back. More and more people are like, ‘Oh poor James Deen, he’s such a nice guy.’ People are like, ‘Why don’t you like him? He’s so nice,” and I’m like, ‘Well, rapists don’t rape everyone…’”
One of Deen’s XBIZ nominations is for a scene starring Fires. It was a startling discovery for the actress, seeing her name associated with Deen in that capacity.
“Someone said I was nominated so I looked up my name and there it was, ‘Best Gonzo Release,’ and I saw my name ‘Ashley Fires, Analized.’ At first it made me sick. I don’t want to be associated with that. It was like, ‘Oh, let’s rewrite history to make it look like Ashley works with James Deen. Who does that?” asks Fires. “It’s pretty much assumed the awards are based on that year’s releases, so why would a scene from three years ago be billed from his company and make it look like we worked together? It’s very misleading. I have never been in a scene directed by James Deen in my 17 years as a performer. I don’t know what that’s about but he’s pawning off second-hand content like it’s his work.”
Though James Deen is billed as the movie’s director on multiple sales sites, he claims to have no knowledge of the directorial credit, writing: “I bought a bunch of content and I know she was in some of the scenes. My guess is it was one of those.” He added that he hasn’t directed anything for Analized in quite awhile, and therefore these sites should “not be listing me as a director since that is wildly inaccurate.”
“This is one of the only industries where the women make more than the men, and may quite possibly be the foundation of the industry. The women are the stakeholders but they don’t seem to matter as much as this one modern male porn actor, and it’s so frustrating,” says Fires. “It’s the prevalence of rape culture being normalized and it reverberates everywhere, even in porn. And it’s not just normalized, these guys are actually getting rewarded.”
