On Jan. 4 of last year, adult director Kevin Moore shared a cache of photos and screenshots of text messages to Twitter. The images concerned his late wife, the 23-year-old porn star August Ames, and appeared to suggest that her recent suicide was linked to a horrifying experience she’d had weeks earlier filming with Markus Dupree.
“[Dupree] was way too rough with me. He was dragging me around and choked me with my panties, slamming my head down on the table and was just WAY too rough and the scene didn’t even call for it,” Ames texted Moore, adding, “I froze and didn’t say no or stop. I just wanted it to be over. I was looking at the sound guy with ‘help me’ eyes and he was looking back at me with ‘I’m sorry’ eyes… It felt like rape but I was in a ‘fuck it’ mood and I was just pissed and wanted to get paid for the bullshit I went through.”
The photos showed Ames’ arms and legs covered in bruises, which she said were inflicted by Dupree. A few months later, author Jon Ronson (So You Think You’ve Been Publicly Shamed) and journalist Lina Misitzis investigated Ames’ tragic end in the podcast The Last Days of August and got hold of the footage of Ames’ scene with Dupree.
“When Lina and I watched the Las Vegas video [with Dupree], and watched August sign out at the end, you can’t shake the feeling that that’s the moment it begins,” Ronson told The Daily Beast. “It obviously triggered in her things that she’d experienced as a child, and she just looked so upset in that moment, and it’s really hard to shake that feeling. I’m not going to say that’s the reason she died, but that was the beginning of the end.”
Ames’ experience with Dupree, a 32-year-old Russian adult star with a reputation for roughness and boundary-crossing, struck a chord with a number of other women in the adult industry who voiced their concerns on Twitter, including Nicole Aniston.
“Many women have accusations against [Dupree], yet our industry continues to allow him as a performer,” said Alana Evans, head of the Adult Performers Actors Guild (APAG).
For Paige Jennings, who performed under the stage name Veronica Vain, Ames’ story cut like a knife.
“I definitely don’t like Markus Dupree,” Jennings told me. “The whole thing with August—I had a similar experience.” (Dupree did not respond to requests for comment.)
The first time Jennings, who is now 29, shot with Dupree, the problems started almost immediately, she said.
“Markus Dupree was offering me drugs that had a label in Russian during our shoot, saying, ‘Hey, this will make you cum better, baby,’ and he wasn’t telling me what it was and was just telling me to take it,” recalled Jennings. “That was super sketch.”
During the scene, Jennings said she remembers being stunned by Dupree’s apparent inability to respect her boundaries.
“I worked with him and he wouldn’t listen. I would tell him, ‘I don’t like it this way, can you do it that way?’” Jennings told me. “He kept trying to finger me in a way that was supposed to make me squirt, but it was making it harder because it was really rough. It felt like he was trying to pull my ovaries out. I kept telling him to stop, and he would not listen. I had no problem squirting in porn, but I couldn’t with him because he was just hurting me.”
While Jennings maintains that Dupree “never raped me,” she said he violated her boundaries and consent, and that it was the most excruciating experience she’d had in porn.
Months later, in May 2016, Jennings’ agent booked her to shoot with Dupree a second time. Although she harbored major reservations, she said, her agent pressured her into accepting the gig, saying a failure to do so would earn her a bad reputation.
When Jennings arrived on set, she said she requested to see Dupree’s STD results—a standard ask of an on-screen partner.
“He pulls out his phone and I look at the test, and under syphilis it said he was positive but not active,” she said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing in your spare time, but I don’t feel comfortable having bareback sex with you.’ It was really hard for me because I knew it was going to be a problem. So I said, ‘We can either use a condom or I just texted Mr. Pete, he’s 30 minutes away, and I can work with him, and he’s tested.’ And their response was, ‘No, we can’t have Mr. Pete because he’s already on another scene on this DVD.’ It was the stupidest excuse ever.”
She continued: “They were screaming at me, and then my agent got on the phone and said I didn’t know how antibodies worked, and I said, ‘You don’t know how risk management works. I don’t want to take this risk, sorry.’ It was just this huge thing, and I left the set crying because I couldn’t believe it was this hard to stand my ground with these fucking people. It was not nice, and I was not the one being unreasonable here. Plus, he’d already offered me drugs. He’s super sketch.”
Markus Dupree accepts the award for Male Entertainer of the Year during the 2018 AVN Awards at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on Jan. 27, 2018, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Ethan Miller/Getty“After that Markus Dupree scene, I walked off that set crying and thought, ‘I don’t need this anymore.’”
Despite his reputation, Dupree’s star has continued to rise in the adult world. He was nominated for Male Performer of the Year at this year’s AVN Awards (porn’s version of the Oscars) and in March was named Brazzers’ new contract star.
“Why aren’t we talking about Markus Dupree?” Jennings asked. “Why is he winning so many awards?”
Jennings had a rather unique path to porn.
After graduating with a degree in finance from Fordham University, she landed a coveted internship at Lazard, an investment bank and asset management firm based in New York City. After eight months on the job, however, she said she grew tired of all the bureaucracy and began looking into other industries.
“I looked at porn and thought, ‘Oh, this is so outdated and I can really disrupt this,’” she recalled.
It wasn’t too big a leap—Jennings had already been experimenting sexually and had stripped to help pay her way through college—but she was initially interested in finding an analyst job in porn. When that was hard to come by, she submitted an audition for The Sex Factor, a reality competition show where eight men and eight women vie to become a porn star. A producer on the series suggested she create a Twitter account and post some sexy photos of herself to create buzz. So Jennings decided to tweet out a topless photo of herself—taken in the bathroom at Lazard’s Midtown Manhattan office—accompanied by the caption: “I just left a job on Wall Street for a porn career because I can’t stop masturbating at work.”
Paige Jennings (who went by Veronica Vain) attends the 2016 AVN Awards at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on Jan. 23, 2016, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Ethan Miller/Getty“I had already put in my two weeks,” she clarified. “The thing is, I sent the pictures from the company WiFi because I lived in a studio apartment that didn’t have a big enough mirror, and so I was using the bathroom mirror at Lazard. And when I uploaded it from their WiFi, the IT guys could see that. So by that Monday I posted it, and on Friday they fired me. But I was already leaving.”
Jennings’ stunt soon went viral—with coverage in BroBible, the New York Post, and Business Insider—and the adult industry naturally came calling. After performing in some 40 adult films, she walked away following the episode with Dupree.
In the years since, she’s been working on revolutionizing the porn industry through her startup Vuli, a sort of one-stop VOD shop for adult consumers that she hopes will become the Amazon of porn.
“My goal is to have everything that’s professional under one brand that is sold a la carte, and eventually I’ll have an Amazon Prime subscription model as well,” she said. “I’m not trying to ride the new wave of trends but impact the industry, because nobody gets royalties in porn. People are in porn for a year or two, they get out, and they have nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, their image is sold for the rest of their lives and they never see any of that money. Vuli is not only trying to create a good experience for the consumer but to revolutionize paying royalties in all of porn.”
Jennings said she witnessed firsthand how the adult industry can screw over its talent, from the lack of royalties to predatory agents who “take a percentage of the girl’s money and also take a booking fee from the producers, so they get paid from both ends.”
There’s also the issue of the content itself. Jennings said that unlike other sites, Vuli’s content will not include exploitative material catering to creeps.
“There’s a proliferation of little-girl porn, where they take an 18-year-old girl with braces and no boobs, and I outright refuse to sell that,” she told me. “They know who’s watching it, and I think it’s gross that they’re trying to fulfill that fantasy. I want to filter out the seedy stuff and make it more mainstream. That’s why I named it ‘Vuli’ and not ‘Porn Prime.’”
Vuli feels like a culmination of everything Jennings has been working toward for the last five years, from developing a system of analytics to help streamline things at Lazard to her experience in front of the camera. Her ultimate aim is to modernize the adult industry and protect performers so that no one else has to endure what she did.
“I’m definitely not just trying to get rich,” she said. “I think there’s a big hole for something that’s truly mainstream. I want it to be more accessible, and feel if the site is less seedy, then maybe people will start treating porn stars like people.”
