Brittni started shooting porn practically as soon as she was legal, at the age of 18. One day, while working as a dancer at a local strip club in Santa Barbara, where she was attending college, she was approached by two men who asked her if she wanted to act in “romance movies.”
Brittni wasn’t under any illusions about what she was being asked to do. She had begun stripping while she was still underage, and to her, porn was an easy and logical next step. She agreed to go with the two men to L.A. to film a porn scene the following day.
“I felt so loved that day,” she recalls in a testimonial video. “I was putting on hair and makeup. I was told that I was beautiful, I was going to be a star. They sent my pictures to an adult agency that I was with for about two years. The rest is pretty much history.”
In a post-internet world where porn had become mainstream, and porn stars were becoming as celebrated as Hollywood actors, Brittni saw porn as her ticket to fame and fortune.
Her career took off. In 2006, she came in second place on Jenna’s American Sex Star, a reality TV show hosted by porn legend Jenna Jameson. In 2010, Maxim magazine named her one of the top 12 hottest porn stars in the world.
Over the space of her seven-year career, Brittni acted in what she says was literally “hundreds” of porn scenes, and was nominated for numerous industry awards.
But all was not as it seemed. Underneath the confident, devil-may-care exterior of the hardened porn star was a tormented soul searching for peace.
It wasn’t long before porn took its toll. “Not only does [porn] leave you feeling drained, but I had to start finding ways to be able to do the scenes, because I was so robotic,” she says. “I was like a rubber Barbie doll. I had no emotions. I was plastic.”
Like many in the industry, Brittni turned to alcohol and drugs – first cocaine, and then heroin – “to numb my pain, to get me through.” This in turn led to other destructive behaviors, like “cutting” and several failed suicide attempts.
At one point, after reaching rock bottom, she took a year off from shooting porn. During that space of time she underwent a tentative conversion to Christianity under the influence of her grandparents, and cleaned up with the help of addiction recovery groups.
But Brittni wasn’t prepared to give up her work as a porn star, and instead attempted to forge a strange truce between her new Christian faith and her day job: preaching Christianity during appearances on the raunchy Howard Stern Show or to fellow actors in porn films that she herself was starring in, while volunteering at worthy causes in her spare time. To those who criticized the contradiction in her life, she would point to Jesus' treatment of Mary Magdelene and the Bible’s strictures against judging.
Eventually, however, something had to give.
A crucial turning point came when she encountered missionaries with XXXChurch, a radically unconventional Christian group that, as part of its ministry, sends its staff to porn conventions. There they set up booths where they hand out Bibles emblazoned with the slogan, “Jesus loves porn stars” and offer to do makeup and hair for the actors and actresses while talking to them about Christianity.
Finally, last November, Brittni gathered the courage to leave the industry once and for all. She shot her last porn scene, and has since found a job with a limousine company. She hasn't looked back.
In a letter to XXXChurch since leaving, Brittni thanks Rachel Collins, a XXXChurch staffer who she came to know and admire during her time in the industry. “I don’t know if she realizes how she impacted me or not,” says Brittni. “But her being so kind and nonjudgmental always felt so good.
“I never felt love in my life and was looking for it in all the wrong places,” she says. “It felt great to speak to a woman as beautiful as Rachel who would tell me that I was her favorite, and to just have a regular non-porn girl talk. Please tell her that I thank her from the bottom of my heart.”
When asked what she would say to other girls who are tempted by the allurement of the porn industry, Brittni minces no words. She recalls feeling “empty” and “hopeless” and living in a “hole of self-pity” where she couldn’t care if she lived or died: “The feeling that nobody loves me except for these fans, who I’m actually kind of really disgusted by, because they see me in my most personal moments.”
“I believe as women we are worth it, we are worth love,” she says. “And we are worth real love, and they’re not going to get that from the industry.”
“It’s not worth it,” she adds. “I would give it all back.”
In the testimonial video produced by XXXChurch, Brittni says that it has been a “long seven-year journey of porn, prostitution, stripping, drugs, alcohol, and several failed suicide attempts.”
“But,” she says with a smile on her face, “I made it.”