By M.H. Cavanaugh
Christian Action League
September 26, 2014
DURHAM – In February of this year, the Christian Action League reported about a Duke University freshman who had been covertly earning her way through school as a porn star. When a fellow classmate, a male friend, revealed her identity and double life at a fraternity party, Miriam Weeks, aka adult film personality, Belle Knox, would discover that her secret was out, and consequentially she would become the center of a national media blitz.
Weeks would vigorously defend her experience with porn on television broadcasts like The View and Piers Morgan Live as “empowering”…”exciting”….”wonderful”… something that brought her “unimaginable joy”…something that made her “completely in control of her sexuality.” She became the poster child for the way feminists women could allegedly sell their bodies and still be feminists. She became a celebrated advocate for the sex industry.
Nevertheless, Lifesitenews.com is now reporting that Weeks recently did a series of interviews for an upcoming documentary and is saying something much different about her experience in the adult film industry than she was previously saying.
In an article by Jonathan Van Maren, titled, Porn is Super-Empowering: Just Ask the Duke University Porn Star, Weeks is quoted as saying, “A lot of s**t in my life has been ruined because of sex.” She adds, “The sex industry has a way of making you very cynical and very bitter…In a way I’ve started to become kind of a bit bitter and cynical…It teaches you to be street smart and not to trust people…I’m so used to being on the lookout for scammers, people who are going to try to pimp me out or traffic me. I think my experiences have aged me. I don’t have the mind of an eighteen-year-old. I have the emotional baggage of someone much, much older than me.”
Van Maren describes Weeks presence in the interview with “a far-away look.” He says the young woman who actually looks younger than eighteen years of age has eyes that “look somehow old.”
“Porn stars deceive about their experience in the porn industry; because that’s the way you make money,” said Dr. Mark Creech, executive director of the Christian Action League.
“But often when they turn off the cameras, they break down. They vomit off the set. Most of them are doing drugs and alcohol to get through,” he said.
The Pink Cross Foundation, a faith-based group that focuses on reaching out to adult sex industry workers, offering them emotional, financial and transitional support, provides some alarming statistics about performers in the porn business. They site, (1) the average life expectancy of a porn star is 36.2 years, (2) 67 porn stars have committed suicide, (3) 66% of porn performers have Herpes, a non-curable disease (4) 2,396 cases of Chlamydia and 1,389 cases of Gonorrhea have been reported among performers within the last ten years, (5) over 100 heterosexual and homosexual performers have died from AIDS, (6) 36 porn stars died from HIV, suicide, homicide and drugs between 2007 and 2010.
Van Maren contends the notion of “empowerment” and “control” once consistently touted by Weeks is really a myth. Referencing Weeks, he writes:
“The porn industry has many ways of coercing the human beings they market into doing what they want. For one shoot, Miriam recalls almost tearfully, her agent wouldn’t tell her who she had to ‘work with.’ When she arrived at the set, she realized he was fifty years old. She wanted to leave, but then she’d have to pay a 300 dollar ‘kill fee,’ the director would have been furious, and, she says, she could never have worked for that company again. So she did it.
“‘I felt like crying during the entire scene and afterwards. I was really, really upset,’ Miriam says tearfully to the camera, looking nothing more than the hurting 18-year-old girl she is. ‘I just thought of my Mom, who was always there for me and always protected me…I think about my Mom a lot when I do porn scenes. Just how sad she would be that her little daughter was doing this.’”
Shelly Lubben, ex-porn star and president of the Pink Cross Foundation has currently posted on the organization’s website a video, blurring out all nudity, of a performance by Weeks showing her being seriously choked, slapped, humiliated, verbally degraded and abused.
The video with its story line reveals the Duke University student in pain, distraught, haggard and in tears. It notes that although the porn actress has said what took place in the scene was “consensual” and she was “role-playing,” she has since said that “some” of the other women in the business “may not have been acting during the filming of their abuse and degradation.”
“Infamous Duke University porn star Belle Knox claims all over the media that she feels ‘empowered’ by performing in porn,” says The Pink Cross on their website. “But this video shows you otherwise where she is seen crying, hitting and shoving the male porn star and looks ANYTHING BUT EMPOWERED. She is lying just like all of the other porn stars do.”
Van Maren notes the recent heart-breaking interviews of the Duke University porn actress actually reveal “a hurting 18-year-old girl being used by an industry that takes girls like her, exploits their insecurities, promises them empowerment, and then subjects them to abuse and degradation until they can’t handle it anymore.”
Van Maren concludes, “A new day, a new human sacrifice at the altar of Eros.
Pray for Miriam Weeks.