Vienna Rose had had enough. “It’s time for Vienna Rose to die,” she tweeted on March 19th. “I’m done with porn.” She didn’t want to be part of an industry where “the most vile people are rewarded,” and urged all 18-year-olds in adult to “get the fuck out now while there’s still time.”
A few hours later, I received a direct message from Rose. When we connected by phone, she told me that a pair of stories I’d written—one about adult star Heather Vahn’s horrifying abuse allegations against rising adult actor Tommy Wood, the other exploring how XXX content has gotten rougher due to MindGeek’s control over the means of porn production and distribution—helped her arrive at the decision.
“I’d been wanting to say my piece for a while and didn’t know how to go about it,” she says. “I think it’s very dangerous to put this narrative out there to women, young women especially, that sex work is this huge money-making thing. I feel like we feed that to women, that you’ll come in here and start making lots of money, but because porn is so oversaturated that is genuinely not the case anymore.”
According to Rose, when she joined the porn industry in August 2017, the standard rate for a boy-girl scene was $1,000. One year later, the price went down to $800. Now, there are women doing scenes for as low as $500-600. “Top performers are the minority. The majority, actresses like me, will only work four times a month,” she explains. “I made between $5,000 to $8,000 on a busy month, and on a slow month it would be between $3,000 to $5,000. In a year, I made at most about $80,000—and that’s not even factoring in the things we have to pay for, like hair, makeup, and agent’s fees, which are usually 18-20 percent.”
She also bemoaned the way agents lure impressionable young women into porn by browsing their Instagram, finding a hot young woman, and sending them a message like, Do you want to come out to L.A. and make $10,000 month?
“To me, that’s baiting,” she says. “Young women should not be recruited into porn.”
Rose, who is 20, was one of those young women. After viewing the docuseries Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, she googled “how to get into porn.” It took her to a site called SexyJobs.com, where she filled out a resume. Before long, her phone was ringing off the hook with “weirdos wanting me to do privates, strip clubs, all sorts of people.” She soon received a call from John Stevens, one of the subjects of Hot Girls Wanted. He convinced the then 18-year-old to fly from her small town in rural Oklahoma to Hollywood.
“I’d never even been on a plane. I remember sitting on the plane the whole time terrified, thinking I’d made a huge mistake,” she recalls. “ I didn’t have any money, was leaving everything I knew, and knew that when everyone in my hometown found out, there would be no going back.”
It wasn’t just Hot Girls Wanted that had inspired Rose, a former Miss Oklahoma contestant, to join the adult industry. “I’ve always been very sexual—and very curious. I was also very shy when I was young,” she says. “So I was putting myself in dangerous situations to explore my sexuality, like meeting with guys off Craigslist to fulfill certain things. I thought I’d eventually get an STD or get killed, so figured I should explore these things in a controlled environment, and if I can make money doing it, then why not.”
But when Rose moved out to L.A., she learned that the porn life was, well, not as glamorous as she’d hoped. She was thrown into a two-bedroom apartment housing ten aspiring adult actresses; meanwhile, Stevens didn’t prove to be much of an agent, so work was scarce. “He brings girls out there and does nothing for them. There was one point where I was just eating eggs or rice, because that’s all that I could afford,” she remembers. “Then I got really sick, because there were all these people in the house and I wasn’t eating properly. After that, I got out of there.”
After crashing with a non-industry friend in Laguna Beach, Rose looked into fulfilling her lifelong dream of joining the Marines (her brother is currently serving in the military).
“I was talking to a Marine recruiter because I thought I was done with porn, and was ready to join,” Rose says. “I quit smoking weed, got into amazing shape. And then my Marine recruiter called to ask me about my tattoos, and my tattoo on the back of my neck is out of regulation, so he told me to get it removed. I got a consultation for it and they told me it would cost $2,400 and take about a year. So I went back into porn to make enough money.”
Rose soon found herself being recruited by Dave Rock, the owner of adult agency Motley Models. But her signing, she says, came with a catch. He and his girlfriend, the adult actress Scarlett Sage, were looking for a “pet.” “He said, ‘Scarlett and I are looking for a pet. If you would be interested in doing something for us, we could make sure that you would succeed.’ It was basically a quid pro quo,” Rose claims. “I had to think it over because I hadn’t fucked anybody to get ahead yet, and really didn’t want to take that route, plus he didn’t really explain what the terms were. But I wanted to join the Marines, and wanted to get away from all this, so I did what I had to.” (Rock did not respond to requests for comment.)
Rose alleges that she arrived to their first “meeting” at their home, and Sage was in a robe. After requesting she give her a massage, she says Sage then ordered her to perform oral sex on her. It was an early sign of what she calls Sage’s “controlling” behavior—bossing her around, making her do chores, and generally treating her as their house pet. On top of that, she says Dave would constantly criticize her body and compare her unfavorably to other adult performers on his roster.
Things came to a head one evening. “[Sage] told me to come upstairs with her, we took a bath together, and then she put these cat ears on me, which I thought was kind of weird. Then she called Dave in. And when we had sex, that’s when things got very odd,” says Rose. “[Sage] took her dog’s leash and put it around my neck, and in my mind, everything changed. Some people would probably say that’s not that big of a deal but with the way she had been treating me, it solidified that they didn’t see me as a human being. They saw me as a sex toy, and I started feeling very gross. It became this very degrading sort of experience for me.”
At around the one-year mark, in April of 2019, she left Motley Models and signed with East Coast Talent. “[Dave] would build me up to beat me back down. I had to get away, because I felt like I was in an abusive relationship with my agent.”
Her professional situation improved with new representation but she still isn’t happy with both her standing in the industry, and the way she’s been treated, so Rose has decided to call it quits.
“I’m definitely quitting porn. I’m at the end of my rope,” she tells me. “From the moment I’ve gotten into porn, I’ve been told: ‘Maybe if you just went to the gym and toned up you’d be getting more work.’ Well I’ve been doing that. I’m just depressed all the time, have a horrible eating disorder and body dysmorphia. Maybe these are things I had before I got into porn but they were heavily exacerbated by porn.”
“If you aren’t a top performer, everyone tells you there’s something wrong with your body, and it’s almost a requirement to change yourself surgically,” Rose continues. “There’s a list of things that I want to change about myself, and I don’t think that’s healthy.”
For now, she’ll continue to produce adult content on her OnlyFans account and via camming—in order to save enough money to get that pesky neck tattoo removed and join the Marines.
“I want to make a difference in this world,” says Rose. “I’ve never given up on my dream of being in the military. I want to be a Marine because, in my mind, it’s go hard or go home. I have respect for every branch of the military but the Marines seems like more of a challenge. So I’m just going to keep working, stack my money, get this tattoo removed, and then join the military—and go to school. I got sidetracked and caught up in performing, because I’ve always loved performing.”
She pauses. “I don’t think I’m good at a lot of things…but I’m really good at sex.”
