LAS VEGAS — This week, mainstream media coverage of the complex post-porn story of former adult performer Jenni Lee, currently living precariously in tunnels under the Las Vegas strip, became the latest example of a concerning upsurge of “pornsploitation.”
Pornsploitation occurs when online media sources, especially tabloids, often U.K.-based, and news sites and aggregators run coverage of “porn stars” or “the porn industry” in an exploitative, stigmatizing and often harmful manner.
The cynical goal is to reap the extra attention that sex-related articles automatically generate, while adopting a morally superior and "concerned" attitude about the people, often young women, whose story they run.
Other mainstream outlets invariably follows suit, joining and amplifying the pornsploitation, and making it legitimate fodder for those waging the War on Porn from religiously motivated lobbies and public office.
Now the Jenni Lee story joins the recent Mia Khalifa story as yet another loop through the pornsploitation cycle.
The unearthing of Lee's story began with a documentary produced last year by a Dutch news program about the “people who live under the tunnels” in Las Vegas. "Underground societies" is a staple of investigative journalism, with pieces on so-called "mole people" who live under Paris popping up every few years.
During the Dutch documentary, there’s a brief interview with a 36-year-old woman identified as “Stephanie” in a tunnel where she built a makeshift living space.
Journalist: What was your job before you entered here.
Stephanie: I used to be in pornography.
Journalist: As an actress?
Stephanie: Uh-huh.
Journalist: Were you successful as a porn actress?
Stephanie: Oh, yeah, a little too successful maybe. I actually got very famous. I should still be top 100 on… some list somewhere.
Journalist: Really?
Stephanie: I used to be so hot...
The rest of the interview, which shows Stephanie as engaged but also evasive, avoiding eye contact most of the time, reveals someone deeply resigned to her distance from conventional society. “People are more accepting here under the ground,” she tells the journalist. Although there is no running water, she explains, “those hardships build camaraderie — I feel you end up making more genuine friends.”
Stephanie concludes by telling the interviewer that “people are amazingly adaptive creatures. You get used to whatever gets put on your plate, whether you like it or not.”
The Bottom Feeders Find the Tunnel Dweller
"Breaking: Bottom Feeders Find Tunnel Dweller"
Last Tuesday, controversial U.K. tabloid The Daily Mail — which routinely stigmatizes the poor, refugees, and other down-on-their-luck groups and specializes in manufactured moral outrage — ran a pornsploitation story excerpting the Dutch interview under the bulky headline “'I used to be so hot': Ex-porn star Jenni Lee, 37, is discovered living destitute in the tunnels under Las Vegas — but insists she's happier with the homeless because they are more accepting and 'genuine friends'”
The tabloid then revealed this troubled woman’s legal name and her hometown, her current Pornhub ranking (#119), and published several bikini pictures of Stephanie’s days as Jenni Lee (around 2005-2009, or 2015, depending on sources), salaciously contrasted with her current life in the Vegas tunnels.
The Daily Mail even created a pornsploitation video called “Ex-porn star living under tunnels of Las Vegas,” where they used a horror movie font to highlight the homeless woman’s “rotted teeth.”
The following day, the Daily Mail’s competitor, The Daily Mirror, jumped on the story adding a 2014 report on the tunnels and the “meth heads” who lived there.
Someone in the U.K. started a Justgiving.com fundraiser on behalf of Lee, with a picture of the performer during her modeling days, though it is unclear who that person is, how they are connected with Lee or how the money raised will be used. As of this writing they had gathered £40 of the £50,000 they are asking.
Today, U.S. tabloid Daily News jumped on the pornsploitation pile-up with the incredibly insensitive headline “She goes to X-tremes: Former porn star Jenni Lee now living in Las Vegas underground tunnels.”
Stephanie, who is now 37, was not reached for comment by any of these outlets, who profit from the views generated by the bikini pictures they run with the salacious story.
She may still live under the casinos, luxury hotels and bottle-service pool parties of Vegas, among her “comrades-in-hardship.”
It is unclear what the London-New York-cyberspace media outlets echoing the story, and exploiting someone who once worked in the adult industry, are doing to report on the hardships of marginalized civilians living in the greater Las Vegas area.
Jenni Lee, during a Naughty America shoot