KANSAS CITY, MO, August 24, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) — Hardcore porn star ‘Angela Aspen’ appeared to have it all. She worked for famous porn companies, acting in over 40 triple-X rated movies, a few of them high-budget. She was nominated for various “new starlet” awards. In fact, she was one of the top googled porn stars of 2009.
Angela was to all appearances enjoying fame and fortune while living a carefree life in the fast lane.
But underneath all the glitter, glamor, and sexual charisma was a broken and desperate woman named Jessica Neely who hated herself and everything she had become. Jessica found herself turning to drugs and alcohol to numb her ever-growing pain and to end the isolation and loneliness she experienced in a world where people only used her because she was willing to sell her body for money. The only place where she saw her road ending was suicide, which she attempted on several occasions.
“I no longer had friends. I didn’t have my family. Money is what I would have in one hand, and a bottle of alcohol in the other when I went to bed. Pornography took everything [away],” she said in a newly released video by Fight The New Drug.
“I would pop as many pills as I could get my hands on, and then just drink and drink and drink, trying to overdose.”
Jessica had never imagined her life would have turned out this way. She grew up in a small town in Colorado as a preacher’s daughter and learned to love the ways of the Lord. She worked as a youth minister and promoted abstinence in local schools with her church group, telling kids that “there's so much more to live for than sex.” She had a clear vision of living a godly life as a woman of deep faith.
“I was constantly trying to better the world, be a better person, change lives,” she said.
But everything changed for Jessica when one day, in her early twenties, she became a victim of rape. The traumatic experience left her feeling dirty, worthless, and totally unlovable.
“My whole dream of life was gone. Everything that I wanted to grow up to be died on the pavement,” she said.
Jessica abandoned her Christian ideals to the wind. After making a few poor choices she one day found herself, just months after she was raped, standing before the open doors of the porn industry.
“I went from that to a party and this guy owned this website,” she said. “The model had flaked and I was like, ‘sign me up.’ I didn’t call myself a porn star because I didn’t know what I was doing, I had just lost my virginity, I didn’t know up from down. But quickly people coached. And I was booked. I was $400. I now had the reality that I had a price tag on my body.”
The sex was usually harsh and violent, but Jessica viewed it as a punishment she deserved.
“If my sex was painful — the harder and crazier it was — it was kind of like, the more you beat me up, the more you slap my face, the more violent you are to me, like maybe I deserve this,” she said.
But Jessica’s newfound fame and money outweighed the violence and pain she experienced.
“I knew that fame happened when I would go out in public and get recognized … I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ this guy said, ‘Hi, Angela’, at the gas station, and I thought, ‘This is it, I’ve arrived,’” she said.
But being constantly used sexually for the pleasure of others and never being valued for her own sake filled Jessica with emptiness and despair. The fame and money were beginning to become worthless in her eyes. Deep down inside she hated being used by men.
“I remember hating when clients would say, ‘I love you Angela.’ I’m like, ‘Please, anything but that. You can do anything to my body, but do not say that you love me.’”
By 2011 Jessica was running a high-end escort agency where she trafficked girls from all across the United States. She hit rock-bottom in 2013 when one day federal agents told her that they had enough evidence to put her behind bars for 30 years.
“That night, everything in my entire life changed,” she told LifeSiteNews in an interview by phone. “If I was desperate before, I was more desperate now.”
“I hated who I had become. I hated money. It was killing me,” she said in the video.
Having no true friends and no one in the industry who actually cared for her, she decided to take a chance and make the most important phone call of her life.
“In the end, I called my parents and said, ‘I really messed up,’ she said.
Jessica’s parents opened their arms to her, and with their help and the help of a pastor, she exited the industry and began to rebuild her life. She checked into the Refuge for Women, a faith-based program for sexually exploited women seeking healing and restoration.
“The program was definitely spirit-filled,” she told LifeSiteNews. “I gave my heart to God right away. You might call it ‘foxhole’ religion: ‘Lord, if you save me from this I’ll…”
Jessica credits God for pulling her up out of the pit.
“Every moment of my day is a blessing, and every moment is like a little miracle in which God shines through. I acknowledge him in all of my ways. He’s absolutely everything to me,” she said.
Jessica’s parents encouraged her on the journey all the way.
“Through recovery, my parents have been there. When I traded in porn, I got my family back. Now we talk every single day,” she said in the video.
Jessica, now 34 years old, works delivering pizza. She is now out of the world of fantasy and living a real life and dreaming real dreams.
“There is nothing worth the life I chose. Now that I’m out of the industry, I want to be a wife, and I want to be a mother. And one thing that I really want…is to be a friend.”
Jessica is now an anti-pornography activist, working with Fight the New Drug to tell her story about her painful experiences in the pornography business.
“I want the truth to be known about porn,” she said in the video.
Jessica will tell anyone who feels that the porn industry might be an option because of something they did or something that happened to them: “Do not throw your life away over it.”
She would tell men who are addicted to porn: “Lust is something that is never going to be satisfied. It is a trap that makes you resent your wife. My job was to make you hate your wife. Lust is a monster that can never be satisfied. The very end-road of an all-consuming addiction is a guaranteed death. You are going to loose everything.”
Robbie Tripp, Director of Content Marketing for Fight the New Drug, told LifeSiteNews that Jessica’s story is important because it “goes to show that the myth of 'she chose that life' or 'she likes it' is simply not true.”
“People don't necessarily see that the majority of porn stars enter the industry out of what they feel is a necessity, and sometimes just plain naivety. In Jessica's case, it was a traumatic rape experience that led her into the industry.”
Tripp said the high volume of porn stars leaving the industry with horror stories of “abuse, neglect, and coercion” they suffered while doing porn should change society's opinion about the industry, but nothing seems to be able to tarnish the “glamorous facade that the industry works hard to maintain.”
Porn will only end when the demand for porn dries up. Until this happens, Tripp says, everyone who purchases anything pornographic is “directly supporting” the terrible things that happened to Jessica and will continue to happen to countless others involved in the porn industry.
“The porn industry is full of drugs, violence, abuse, prostitution, and even human trafficking. Porn is inseparably linked to these terrible things in our society, and those who consume it are directly supporting the demand for it to continue,” he said.
Editor’s Note: Jessica can be reached through Facebook here.