Porn star James Deen is under fire from two (now three–see update below) fellow adult film performers who claim the actor physically abused them, with one of the actresses claiming Deen raped her.
On Saturday, Stoya, an adult performer and an ex-girlfriend of Deen’s, accused the actor of raping her in two posts on her Twitter feed.
“That thing where you log in to the internet for a second and see people idolizing the guy who raped you as a feminist. That thing sucks,” the actress posted in the first tweet.
In her second post, Stoya said Deen “held me down and f–ked me while I said no, stop, used my safeword.”
On Monday, porn actress Tori Lux penned a short essay for the Daily Beast in which she claimed that she too was physically assaulted by Deen.
“In June of 2011, while shooting at a major porn studio, I was assaulted by James Deen,” Lux wrote. She said that after wrapping work on a recent porn shoot, in which Deen was not participating, “he began to antagonize me.”
“I hadn’t even had time to dress myself when he said, with a smirk on his face, ‘Tori Lux, would you like to sniff my testicles?’ ‘Nope,’ I replied in a neutral tone,” the actress continued.“’I’ll repeat myself: Tori Lux, would you like to sniff my testicles?’ he asked, more aggressively this time. I replied with a firm ‘No,’ in order to establish my boundary—which James then disregarded by grabbing me by the throat and shoving me down onto a mattress on the floor.”
Lux then accused Deen of pinning her down and striking her in the face with an open palm “five or six times” and “forcing my face into his crotch several times” before the actor eventually let her go.
Stoya’s revelation on Saturday prompted another of Deen’s ex-girlfriends, porn star Joanna Angel, to blast the actor in her own Tweet.
“He’s dead on the inside and dead to me. He’s literally the worst person I’ve ever met. That’s all I’ll say for now,” Angel wrote, adding the hashtag #solidaritywithstoya.
In statements posted to his own Twitter page, Deen dismissed the abuse accusations as “false and defamatory.”
“There have been some egregious claims made against me on social media,” the actor wrote in the first of three messages. “I want to assure my friends, fans and colleagues that these allegations are both false and defamatory. I respect women and I know and respect limits both professionally and privately.”
In the wake of the allegations, women’s lifestyle website The Frisky said it would no longer publish Deen’s WWJDD (What Would James Deen Do?) sex advice column.
In a story announcing the decision to stop publishing Deen’s column, The Frisky’s Amelia McDonnell-Parry wrote that she liked Deen and enjoyed working with him, especially “his emphasis on communication, honesty, and most of all CONSENT.”
“That he has been accused of violating Stoya’s consent, that women I respect have since contacted me directly to say that they know of others to whom he has done the same thing? Well, I’m f—ing heartsick over it. This makes it impossible for me to work with him any further, to give him a forum for giving advice that he is accused of not following himself,” McDonnell-Parry explained.
Deen, 29, is one of the biggest names in porn and is a two-time AVN Male Performer of the Year Award winner. He is often referred to as porn’s wholesome “boy next door.”
UPDATE: Another porn actress, Ashley Fires, has accused James Deen of sexual assault, and two porn production companies have suspended their relationship with the embattled porn star.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Fires said Deen is the only performer she will never work with, and she recounted an incident in which he allegedly “almost raped” her.
“Later on that night, I was getting out of the shower of the communal bathroom at Kink, I reach for my towel to dry off, and he comes up from behind me and pushes himself and his erection into my butt,” Fires told the outlet. “He pushes me against the sink and starts grabbing on me and I was like, ‘No, no, no James, no,’ and he released me from his grasp, and says, ‘You know, later if you want to f–k around I’m in room whatever-it-was. I was like, ‘F–k you.’ I didn’t even know this guy, he was so out of line and entitled with my body.”
Vocativ reports that porn company Evil Angel has decided to suspend its partnership with Deen, while BDSM porn company Kink.com has outright ended its relationship with the embattled performer.