Lana Rhoades breaks down crying in the middle of her own podcast. She and her co-hosts are talking about the kind of porn where men urinate inside women and force themselves down their throats. Her friends tell her not to cry, and she says she can't help it. She wipes her face and keeps going, because she wants people to know what actually gets filmed.
She describes one scene where the girl was really sobbing. The guy was too big for her and too rough, and he kept slapping her and asking if she liked it. Lana says you could see in the girl's eyes that she didn't want to be there, and that she was probably doing it for the money, or because an agent told her it was this or nothing. Lana has friends who were choked on set until they passed out. She has seen scenes shot in Europe where men punched their fists into a girl's ass, and she believes those women will live with the damage for the rest of their lives. She considers herself lucky that she got out without any.
Her co-hosts take it further. One says boys who learn about porn in sex ed grow up less likely to see women as objects. Another claims that investigators find exactly this kind of porn in the search histories of serial killers and rapists. All of them admit they still watch porn. They just want it to be ethical.
Lana knows this world from the inside. At 16 she was in juvenile detention after her boyfriend was caught robbing houses, and she got her GED behind bars. At 19 she shot her first scene, and eight months later she was out of the industry. Her first agent wouldn't let her see a doctor when she got hurt on the job. She signed away the rights to every scene, which is why all of them are still online, with 345 million views and nothing going to her. For three years straight she was the most searched name on Pornhub.
In January 2022, two weeks after her son Milo was born, she told her 16.8 million Instagram followers that she had dropped 35 pounds and launched an NFT collection. CryptoSis was 6,069 cartoon versions of herself, and it raised about $1.8 million. Within weeks, according to YouTube investigator Coffeezilla, around $1.5 million in ethereum had been moved out of the project, and NFTs that once sold for about $1,500 had fallen to roughly $15. When people called it a rug pull, she called the YouTubers sickos, said she had never scammed anyone and didn't need to, and deleted her Twitter. Milo's father is reportedly an NBA player she has never named. Today she calls herself asexual and says the whole porn industry should be illegal.
The most searched woman in porn history cried over what the industry does to women, and her own fans accused her of walking away with their money. Is Lana Rhoades the industry's biggest victim, or one of its best students?