On a particularly dreary day in 2015, Heather Vahn checked her Instagram. “I was very bored or very single, and I came across all the messages,” she recalls.
Her inbox had been bombarded with dozens of DMs from “Thomas,” a Czech model with chiseled features and a few thousand followers. He’d been messaging her for a whole year, with no response. “He doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” says Vahn. “Now, I look at the way other girls are talking about his pushiness… I have a lot of insight into that.”
Vahn is seated across from me at The Daily Beast’s office in Manhattan. She appears emotionally drained, breaking down in tears several times during the course of our conversation. The popular adult actress, 31, is here to discuss the horrific cycle of psychological and physical abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of Tommy Wood, a rising adult film star who recently had a feature role in the AVN award-winning Drive, and whom AVN, the adult industry’s premier trade magazine, recently branded a “fresh face.”
A little over a week ago, on March 8, Vahn tweeted out graphic images of her bruised body to her 84,000-plus followers, accompanied by a message: “this wasn’t consensual. this happened as a result of wanting to ‘talk out’ an incident and he wanted to sleep and talk in the morning. When I said no we talk now – this was my punishment. THIS MAN IS IN PORN NOW.”
While the #MeToo movement has led to a number of changes within Hollywood and other industries, it has yet to make a mark on the adult world, where alleged serial abusers not only work freely but win heaps of awards. James Deen, arguably the biggest male star in porn, has been accused of sexual assault by over a dozen women but recently took home several porn “Oscars.” And Markus Dupree, who’s been accused of abuse by several of the adult industry’s biggest female stars, including the late August Ames prior to her suicide, was just this month made an “Exclusive Contract Star” by the adult film studio Brazzers. This astonishing lack of accountability has made it difficult for even porn’s biggest female stars to speak out.
For Vahn, it was the Dupree news that inspired her to post about her own alleged abuse. She was browsing Twitter and came across a fellow performer’s tweet about Ames’ abuse allegations against Dupree (“It felt like rape,” Ames said). “It was like whoa, because I’d worked with Markus and never had a problem with him. It triggered me.”
Vahn reluctantly agreed to give Wood a shot in 2015, and the two soon began a full-blown relationship, with the adult star staying at the male model’s home in New Jersey. But there were some early warning signs, she says. “He started finding things in me he didn’t agree with, and tearing at my intelligence,” she remembers. “He would say I’m ‘so stupid’ because I didn’t know how to do my taxes, things like that.”
She says she became “very subservient” to him. “I was docile… it took me years to even try to defend myself.”
“The abuse started small. It started with shoving in the house, and then he did this move where he puts his hand over my mouth… then he began putting one hand on my mouth while the other hand went around my throat,” she says, visibly trembling. “And I would go limp, because I’m not a fighter like that. He’s 6-foot-1, and dominant, and scary, and I’m only 5-foot-3.”
They got into regular arguments over Wood’s rampant infidelity, she says, as girls across the world began messaging Vahn on Instagram saying they’d slept with him. “The cheating thing started getting to a place where I was getting upset often. He didn’t like that, so the physical stuff started happening more and more. There was slapping, a lot of choking, and holding me down with his body weight,” Vahn tells me. (The Daily Beast reviewed messages from numerous women saying they’d slept with Wood; one woman even expressed alarm, saying he sneakily removed his condom during sex.)
Wood proposed that the couple engage in threesomes, Vahn says, to “help bring them closer together.” She says she wasn’t into the idea but gave in to satisfy his urges. Women began visiting their home almost daily to have sex with Wood while Vahn says she hung out in the other room. “How did we get here?” she’d ask herself. “I didn’t like it. I only like to be with one person, outside of my work.”
That soon escalated to sex-party orgies. Again, Vahn says she agreed because it made Wood happy. “Those were not necessarily consensual. They were, because I did those things, but I did it under pressure. Do this or I’ll leave you. It was emotionally horrific, and so exhausting,” she says.
“I would get drunk to deal with the sex, because we were swinging, and he was trading me to other couples. I didn’t like being passed around like a commodity,” she continues, tearing up. “Being wasted made things go by. I didn’t like to be present.”
At one of these orgies, she says she felt she was pushed far beyond her breaking point. Vahn remembers standing by the doorway smoking a joint while Wood was engaging in group sex. A woman beckoned her to the bed. When she stayed still, Wood got angry. “Heather, didn’t you hear her? Come into the bed,” she recalls him telling her. “I gave him daggers for eyes, because ‘no’ means ‘no’ for me. But he crossed the line that day,” she says. “Four guys had sex with me, and I don’t know where my head was at. My eyes stayed closed and I was very limp a lot, and people didn’t like that.”
“I feel that I was gang-raped,” she confesses through tears. “And it’s tough to say, because I walked into the room. It’s consensual and non-consensual at the same time. It’s a loose thing. He’ll say, you agreed to be there, because you did this for us. But I did it against every fiber of my being.”
During the drive home, Vahn says she wanted to talk about what had just happened but Wood refused, saying he was tired. “I couldn’t go to anybody else,” she says. “Who am I supposed to talk to besides my partner, who’s the only person who knows what I’m going through?”
When they got home, Wood said he was going to bed. But Vahn wanted to go over what happened that night, and how uncomfortable and violated it made her feel.
“I was standing in the doorway of our bedroom and he got out of the bed, grabbed my head, and began jerking it around. I’m having the thought of, ‘I’m going to die… he’s going to snap my neck.’ And—it’s so stupid—I was worried about him. I was thinking, ‘He’s going to make a mistake, and if I die he’s going to go to jail,’” she tearfully recalls.
“So he did that and went back into the bedroom. But he could hear me crying into the couch in the other room, and so he’d march back in and say, ‘Shut up! I’m trying to sleep!’ He started hitting me with pillows, and then he began grabbing my head and smacking it against the floor. I looked into his eyes and saw vacancy there. I’m like, ‘What are you doing? I love you, why are you doing this? I don’t understand.’”
“He let go of me, and went back into the bedroom. I started crying quietly into the pillow again, and I could hear his footsteps coming toward me, so I braced myself. And I could feel blows over and over again in the same place. And then it was over.”
Vahn took photos of her bruised and battered body afterward (these were the ones she posted to Twitter). There were other violent episodes, she recalls, including an incident where Wood got physical with her in an East Village apartment. “He put me in a suitcase,” Vahn says. The Daily Beast observed a number of domestic violence incident reports Vahn filed against Wood, as well as nearly 100 photos of bruises, cuts, and gashes she says were caused by him.
In a rambling response to The Daily Beast, Wood didn’t deny that he abused Vahn but said “if in anytime I were ever to inflict harm or violence to any individual it would only be out of self-defense.” He says that Vahn “stalked” him, “vandalized” his belongings, and would “hit, scratch, punch and throw various items at me,” calling theirs a “toxic relationship.” As for the sex parties, he says she “would continuously break down” and that “it was pretty obvious that she wasn’t the right person to explore that type of lifestyle with.”
According to Vahn, Wood pressured her into signing a document stating that he never hit or harmed her—and then took her to his bank and had them notarize it. “This was an attempt by him to silence me after beating my ass,” she says. (The Daily Beast reviewed audio of Wood admitting to hitting Vahn while pressuring her to sign the document; Wood denies that he pressured her to sign it, calling it a typical “domestic relationship agreement.”)
In the days since Vahn posted the photos of her bruised body to Twitter, Wood has engaged in an online Twitter campaign against her, posting choppily edited videos and emails revealing sensitive personal information, including her email address. “He’s been doxxing me for like… days now,” she says.
Then there’s the so-called disclaimer video. “Thomas recently posted a video of me on his Twitter, of me in my bathtub, saying, ‘This man has never hit me.’ That video was made under duress,” she argues. “He said, ‘Say what I want or I’m never coming home.’ And I said whatever he wanted me to say, because I wanted him to come home. And it was hard. And it was shitty to make those videos. You can see it in my eyes, like, why the fuck am I doing this? It’s like a hostage video. I’m clearly under duress.” (Wood says Vahn made those videos “on her own will.”)
Vahn isn’t the only performer in the adult industry to have issues with Wood. He’s earned a reputation among women in porn for pressuring and harassing them on Instagram to shoot adult scenes with him (Wood mainly shoots amateur content but has recently transitioned into studio porn).
“He asked me to shoot content with him for OnlyFans at the end of January when I was in L.A. I had a bad gut feeling so I just told him I was too busy. He was SUPER pushy and aggressive and didn’t want to take no for an answer,” says Sydney Leathers. “[He] kept insisting I had time because he’d ‘only need two hours.’ Seeing Heather’s post definitely validated the weird feeling I had about him.”
“There are several known abusers still working in the business, sadly, so I just feel like it’s important to call people out on this shit,” she adds.
Another prominent adult star, Bunny Colby, says Vahn told her of Wood’s alleged abuse around the time it happened, in 2017. “Last year, I started to see him on Twitter shooting content with people, and then I put two and two together,” she says. Since Wood belonged to a legitimate porn agency, 101 Modeling, he had what Colby calls “this veil of reputability, because this is a guy who only shoots content and doesn’t shoot pro scenes, really.” (When The Daily Beast reached out to 101 Modeling about Wood, the agency simply said: “We have removed Tommy Wood from our site and no longer represent him. We hope that the situation finds the proper ending.”)
Wood sent many, many DMs to Colby via Instagram pressuring her to shoot with him. “I never responded to him. It was a series of DMs,” she says. “I know tons of people on Twitter have complained, whether using his name or not, that he’s very insistent on shooting content and will not take no for an answer, even if it’s directly given.”
One prominent adult star, who declined to be named out of fear of retaliation, called Wood “creepy” and says Vahn texted her photos and videos of Wood’s alleged abuse years ago. “He bullied me in real life to have sex with him when I didn’t want to. I did say OK after he kept asking (I had spent the night) but this unfortunately is behavior that I didn’t recognize at the time as being wildly inappropriate (rape culture) behavior,” she says. “Then later on, he asked me numerous times to shoot content. I always said no.” (Wood denies being “creepy” to performers, but says “being direct can be viewed wrongly and misinterpreted,” so he’s since become “more gentle and polite.”)
Despite Wood’s online smear campaign, Vahn says she feels heartened by the positive response to her post and is glad to be speaking out. She knows that those in the industry who do can be branded “difficult” but says she feels it’s an important step to help move the culture forward.
“Things need to change,” she says.
Vahn is also in a much better place now. On March 9, she wrote, “Hey everyone, I woke up today and my Twitter is blown up wow… I have been holding back for a long time. I feared judgement [sic] & humiliation. I’m a shy-type, ya know… on the contrary, you have my back? thank you.”
