<p><strong><em>Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault.</strong></em></p>
On June 5, the porn actress Annabel Redd shared a warning to her 79,000-strong Twitter following: “do not watch my porn fidelity scene. that man violated my boundaries.”
She proceeded to accuse her scene partner, Ryan Madison, of finishing inside of her (a “creampie,” in adult-industry parlance) without her consent and violently choking her until she couldn’t breathe. Madison has considerable industry power; with his wife, he runs a successful XXX production company, Kelly Madison Productions, which includes the brands Porn Fidelity and Teen Fidelity, and also directs the lion’s share of his scenes. But Redd’s message managed to permeate porn’s wall of silence, inspiring dozens of other performers to come forward with their own Madison horror stories.
The Daily Beast interviewed 10 of these women, who accuse the 43-year-old Madison of a range of violations, from coercion and brutal corporal abuse to sexual assault.
Kinsley Karter was ecstatic when Ryan Madison came calling last year.
“I was really excited when they reached out on Twitter, because Porn Fidelity was one of the top companies on Pornhub, and I really needed the exposure at the time,” she recalls.
Karter, who was 21 and had only been acting in adult movies for a year, had no idea how far away the shooting location was until she ordered her Lyft. Like many of the women who went on the record for this article, she describes taking a ride-share nearly two hours from Los Angeles to the Madison mansion in Corona, California.
Things got even murkier when she arrived, she says. “There was absolutely no clarification with whether I’d be OK with things like choking or rough sex. There’s usually some type of communication before, but there was absolutely none at all,” she says.
They began with a blowjob scene and he was rough—“so rough that my whole salad came up,” she remembers. “I was sitting there covered in puke, so he rushed to the shower, turned it on, and I was in there for 10 minutes just crying because I couldn’t believe what was happening. I thought, ‘Wow, I woke up excited as hell to be here and now I’m stuck with this man alone in the middle of nowhere.’ I truly did feel like I was in a horror movie.”
Then came the sex portion, which was even rougher. Karter says she sensed that something wasn’t right—as if her body was being torn to pieces. Then, he asked “Are you ready for me to cum in you?” She was confused; there’s typically at least “some discussion” before a cum shot sequence.
She reluctantly said yes, she says, because she didn’t want to break character—and didn’t think he’d actually follow through with it—and he came inside of her, twice.
“I was disgusted,” she remembers. “And when I got up from the bed, I could barely walk. I just cried in the Lyft all the way home. Then, I went to the bathroom when I got home and realized that there was blood everywhere on the toilet seat. He had ripped me apart. I was bleeding for the next two days, and it was difficult to pee or sit down. He definitely has to be my worst experience in porn.”
Karter says she felt she couldn’t speak up then because she was new and not established in the industry. “At the end of the day, no one else was on my side or knew what went on except for me and him. The main reason I’m speaking out now is because I didn’t have any warning, and I want to warn other girls about him,” she says.
Like Karter, Lexi Lore was young—only 19—and new to porn, having been in the biz less than three months when she booked a scene with Madison.
The scene was rough—more agonizing than any she’d experienced before—but it’s what followed that really traumatized her, she says. “After the scene, he asked me if I wanted to have sex with him. I told him, ‘No, my Uber is six minutes away.’”
Madison wouldn’t listen, she says. “He grabbed me, took me to his couch, and had sex with me.” Lore says she froze in terror. “I was afraid to tell him ‘no’ because if I said ‘no,’ I was afraid he’d just keep going, and it would make the situation a lot worse. I had already said ‘no’ once and he didn’t listen. I didn’t want to have sex with the guy. Most guys take ‘no’ as ‘no,’ usually.”
Lore says her experience with Madison has, like many in the industry, haunted her. She wonders why, given his reputation as a predator, agents kept sending their young, vulnerable female clients into harm’s way.
“Ryan Madison is so well-known as a rapist in the industry,” she says. “But there are still agents who want to make money by sending girls to Ryan Madison’s house without warning them that they’re sending them to a rapist’s house. It needs to stop. Agents need to band together and agree to not send girls to him. This is something that we need to collectively stand against.”
Jane Wilde was also 19 and “brand new to the industry” when she shot with Madison in March 2018, having only acted in adult films for a month.
She describes arriving at a house filled with women—including Madison’s wife and business partner, Kelly, a 52-year-old adult-industry vet. “Immediately I was greeted by the woman preparing the paperwork, a PA who was a woman, the makeup artist was a woman, they had a hairstylist who was a woman, and his wife greeted me,” Wilde recalls. “They had all women on set, so I felt empowered. It really made me put my guard down. Then I left the house of women. And that’s when it started to get very predatory.”
Many of the women The Daily Beast spoke to accuse Madison of introducing the young female talent to his wife, who also occasionally does hair and makeup and/or handles their paperwork, to create a false sense of security that immediately evaporates when they’re transported to his home, five minutes down the road, where he shoots his scenes. (The Madisons did not respond to multiple emails, phone calls, and DMs requesting comment for this report.)
“It’s a strange dynamic when a guy is trying to hurt women and is using his wife to make him seem more trustworthy,” says Wilde.
During the scene, which he also directed, she says he choked her aggressively with his penis until she couldn’t breathe, even though she was given no heads-up that it would be a rough scene. Like many of the other women who have come forward against Madison, she also accuses him of pressuring her into doing a creampie—which she says was sprung on her in the middle of the scene so that she couldn’t say no or else risk not getting paid.
“I said OK to so many things I wasn’t OK with because I wanted it all to be over,” she remembers. “I thought, ‘I’ll get paid and it will make this experience be worth it in some way, even though it’s awful.’ If I don’t get paid for what I’ve already went through, I’d be so devastated.”
She adds, “He didn’t even have the decency to give me the opportunity to consent. He just took it. He basically said, ‘You’re my property now because I’m paying you to do this, so I can just use your body however I want to get off.’ That is what made me feel violated the most.”
Afterward, Wilde sprinted to the bathroom and burst into tears. “I had been holding in my tears from the very beginning, and I didn’t break in order to finish the scene,” she says. “I finished the scene, called my agent, and he said, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I’m going to need to have a talk with him because he’s done this to other girls, and it’s not OK.’ And I thought, ‘Why did you send me here if you knew he’d done this to other girls?’ I’m still shocked about that to this day.”
Wilde’s agent at the time was John O’Byrne from East Coast Talent—the same man who, two years later, sent his client Annabel Redd to Madison. (O’Byrne did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
“He doesn’t care. Ryan Madison is an evil, piece-of-shit rapist. But John O’Byrne from East Coast Talent is just as complicit in the rape of so many girls,” says Wilde. “You’re sending your girls to do scenes with a rapist just to get your fucking cut.”
Apparently, Madison’s behavior is well-known among porn’s agents. “We haven’t sent girls to him for about two and a half years,” one of the adult industry’s top agents told The Daily Beast. “The girls can feel very isolated out there, way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, and he got increasingly rougher and increasingly intoxicated. That was a big problem. He offered one of our girls—who was not 21 yet—alcohol and drugs, and told her not to tell me.”
“The thing is, everybody knows it. I’ve mentioned it to other agents before. But some are still willing to take the risk.”
Monica Sage was 19 and green when she shot with Madison two years back. After the long ride out to the Madisons’ home, she was introduced to wife Kelly, who interviewed her for their website, as well as the makeup artist. She says the pre-sex portion—including shooting “pretty girls,” or the promotional photos used to market the scene—was fun, but that Madison’s “entire demeanor changed” once they were alone.
“He just went from looking at me as this beautiful woman to looking at me as if I was prey. It was very disturbing,” she says.
It was an anal scene, and Sage politely told him to “go slow and be careful” when they began so that she could warm up.
“He didn’t. He shoved himself inside my ass immediately and ripped me open. Within seconds there was blood everywhere—you can see the blood in the scene,” she says. (The blood is indeed visible in their scene.) “It was all over my thighs, all over his dick. He didn’t stop. He proceeded to fuck me even harder, and I just remembered being so scared and so uncomfortable, and in so much pain. But again the only thing that ran through my head was that he was either going to hurt me if I tried to walk off set or that I was going to be blacklisted, or that I wasn’t going to be paid. I was also in shock.”
When Sage excused herself to go to the bathroom to cry, she returned to tell him she was extremely sore and to be more gentle, she says. He didn’t listen—and proceeded to violate her for another 45 minutes straight.
“No one deserves to be exposed to the abuse I and many other women have had to endure from Ryan Madison,” she says. “I had an anal injury for weeks afterwards.”
Amber Addis says she suffered a similar fate. She was 19 and on her third shoot. When she got there, she was introduced to Kelly Madison, who chatted her up while doing her hair and makeup.
“She spoke to me about how much she enjoyed running a porn company that was started by women so people feel more comfortable on set,” says Addis. “It’s almost like you’re being groomed to get your guard down, because as soon as her husband arrives, she just disappears. And then it’s just the two of you.”
Once Madison left, she was plied with weed and alcohol. Then the abuse began. “He started pulling and dragging me across the room by my hair,” she says. “We didn’t cut at all—he didn’t let me cut—and there was one position where I was laying on my back, he was choking me, and the choking lasted for a really long time. I could feel myself start to fade out, and so I started squeezing his arm to let him know that I was going to pass out, and I kept squeezing and squeezing for what seemed like an eternity, and then he finally let up.”
“It was so painful, because this was an hour and a half of rough sex without any lubrication whatsoever—and he didn’t stop. At the end, he dragged me onto the bed, and I was shrieking and screaming from pain,” she continues. “I had tears in my eyes, and was desperately trying to hold them back on-camera to not make it look bad.”
As soon as the scene finished, she “bolted out of the room into the bathroom, locked myself in there, and I was bleeding really badly. There was a tear inside of me that I could feel. I bled for two days straight afterwards and didn’t leave my bed.”
“This is a pattern,” she concludes. “He’s a serial abuser. And I think what pushed a lot of girls to come out is how similar our experiences were.”
Arabelle Raphael’s Ryan Madison story stands out for a few reasons. First, she was 27, so a bit older than his usual targets, though she was still by no means considered a “mainstream” performer. And it involves a wildly racist scenario between the white Madison and Iranian Raphael.
“I’m not white, and I was put in a nonconsensual race scene. They said it was a ‘stoner movie,’ and I got out there and he said, ‘Hey, you’re in a belly-dancing outfit,’” she recalls. “And then he’s putting on a turban and black kohl around his eyes, and was talking about how we should have AK-47s to make it more ‘authentic’-looking. Basically just saying fucked-up shit about my ethnicity right in front of me.”
Madison offered her a shot on five occasions, and she kept saying no, she says. “This dude was trying to get me wasted,” she says. “Then we’re at the end of the scene, and he’s like, ‘I’m gonna cum inside you,’ and I’m like, ‘No. You don’t pull that in the middle of a scene, on-camera. This is something you discuss before.’”
“So I’m trying to say no, he’s pressuring me, and I’m not feeling comfortable because I’m on-camera and he’s pressuring me, and he cums inside me—after I’ve said ‘no’ multiple times.”
It took Raphael a long time to realize, “Oh, I said ‘no’ multiple times and this person came inside me anyway, ignoring me.”
The majority of the women I spoke to described being offered drugs or alcohol prior to shooting (including Alex Harper and Bella Rolland, the latter also alleging Madison pretended to be recording their scene in order to have sex with her without the cameras rolling) or pressured, coerced, or forced by Madison into a creampie—like Gracie May Green and Khloe Kapri.
“It became very apparent that he was going to cum in me—whether I wanted him to or not,” says Kapri, who was 19 when she shot with Madison in 2017. “It’s his thing. I know at least 10 girls where the same thing’s happened to them but they don’t feel comfortable speaking out until they’re better established in the industry.”
According to Kapri, the production stoppage due to COVID-19 has inspired many women in adult films, no longer beholden to the trappings of the industry, to speak out.
“It was an overall environment where girls didn’t want to lose work, but now that we’re in a production hold, it was a nothing-to-lose situation,” she says. “So there’s been a great show of solidarity among performers because we’re not afraid about losing work.”
She pauses. “But as much as I’m so glad things are finally being done, I do worry about the environment performers are going to be put in when work resumes and people are going to be afraid of losing work over standing up and believing other women in the industry.”
