Haters of anti-porn activist Shelley Lubben milked the symbolism for all it was worth.
Earlier this month, she appeared at an L.A. Animal Rescue event in Hollywood, Porn Stars for Puppies. Pooches were being put up for adoption for $250 apiece. A small group of demonstrators showed up with T-shirts that read "Shelley Lubben Treats Porn Stars Like Animals."
Lubben, a onetime porn star in Los Angeles turned fundamentalist Christian who is now married and raising two girls in exurban Bakersfield, has become the U.S. adult-video industry’s highest-profile critic. She says she "rescues" girls who have been used and abandoned by the business.
Some of those women say it’s Lubben who used them — for publicity and fundraising.
The chief porn critic has taken her cause to Dr. Drew and Howard Stern and appeared in a new documentary, After Porn Ends. At a time when the adult-entertainment business is battling efforts to force performers to use condoms, she represents bad press all the way. Even the gay-run AIDS Healthcare Foundation has enlisted the Bible-quoting mother’s help in its campaign to force prophylactics on porn sets in L.A.
If you count her own experience as a porn star, she’s a credible critic and a real thorn in the side of a multibillion-dollar business at a time when it’s battling threats to its bottom line due to file-sharing, on top of a dire economy.
Some, however, question the veracity of nearly every claim Lubben has made about triple-X entertainment, including her recollections of her own time on the set and her contentions that young women in the industry are often troubled people who are coerced into extreme, hard-core activities and drug use they didn’t sign up for.
"Pornographers are recruiters, and that’s sex trafficking," Lubben said of her no-compromise philosophy, in one interview with L.A. Weekly. "The premise of this industry is all illegal."
The industry’s supporters have targeted her, ambushing her at events like the puppy rescue and posting a series of videos in attempts to denounce and discredit the 44-year-old, who founded the anti-porn Pink Cross Foundation in 2008.
"The porn industry is going to aim their guns at anyone that goes against them," says Tiffany Leeper, president of Girls Against Porn and a supporter of Lubben’s. "I get death threats. Shelley gets death threats."
At L.A. Animal Rescue on Fairfax Avenue, longtime Lubben critic and onetime soft-porn producer Michael Whiteacre, a supporter of the industry lobbying group known as the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), was with a gaggle of adult performers and a cameraman. Whiteacre’s thin bio on IMDb shows his only two recent directing gigs were public service announcements for FSC in 2010.
After Lubben’s husband, Garrett Lubben, confronted him, Whiteacre nearly spit out his rage:
"You’re a piece of sh—!" Whiteacre told Lubben, adding that he thinks wife Shelley is "a diseased animal."
Yeah, it was ugly.
To his credit, Lubben’s husband, an ex–military man from Bakersfield, used restraint. The Lubbens say this is what you get when you attack a multibillion-dollar industry: a backlash featuring YouTube videos, street confrontations and a stream of ex–porn stars insisting that Lubben is a fraud.
But Lubben believes no young woman should endure what she says she did in the 1990s — contracting herpes and HPV on-set that led to serious medical complications, including miscarriage. Porn-related STDs, she says, "led to me having cervical cancer and having my cervix removed. I lost several babies."
Her goal is to rescue girls from the industry, and she claims that since 2007 she has helped more than 100 women recover after they left porn. "I’ve probably let 25 or more porn stars into my home. I cooked for them. I loved them."
But some of the women who have dealt with Pink Cross describe it as a means for Lubben to take in donations and get famous. Some have questioned how she spends the relatively modest money — $142,000 in revenue in 2010 — that Pink Cross raises.
Former performer April Garris is one. Garris says, dismissively, that after she was contacted by Lubben to join Pink Cross, and quit a job to go to work for Lubben’s group, "One of the first things she showed me how to do was her laundry."
Lubben acknowledges that dealing with former adult performers can sometimes be messy, but, she asks, "Where do you go to school to learn to take on a multibillion-dollar industry?"
The question is whether she’s a true Christian prophet for reform, as she has called herself, or a middle-aged postporn diva with a bad memory and a self-serving mission to grab the spotlight and some spare change.
"Porn destroyed my life," Lubben, who now has the buoyant, bottle-blond hair of a politician, once wrote. Perhaps. But it also has resurrected her.
this is only the begining of the story posted on http://www.laweekly.com/2012-06-14/news/Shelley-Lubben-porn-rescue-pink-cross/
Looks like Shelley’s house of cards are starting to fall. Smoke and mirrors can only fool people for just so long.
“relatively modest money — $142,000 in revenue in 2010”? I wish I could make $140,000 in tax free revenue crying about how the porn industry made me a “victim”… Porn made me do drugs. Porn gave me STDs. Porn made me shoplift. Porn made me smack my momma. As Chinese/English handbook says… Sum ting wong… like an erection lasting more then 4 hours… like a commercial during family time talking about an erection lasting more than 4 hours… like those obnoxious AHF billboards with a giant condom painted the colors of a lifesaver’s candy for kids to look and, imagining a giant candy coated cock is inside it.
In addition to seconding most of the issues I’ve raised about the “Rebel Prophet,” the article’s highlights include:
1) a vindication of Guy DiSilva and the other cast members of ‘Roxy: A Gangbang Fantasy’ — after I engineered a confrontation between DiSilva and his accuser, Lubben backed down from her disgusting claim of on-set rape (somewhere, Darrah Ford is pounding her stupid head against a wall);
2) a vindication of Michelle Avanti, in that the supposedly recovered Lubben DRANK ALCOHOL in front of the writer, and did not deny she shared pills with Avanti; and
3) AHF dictator Michael Weinstein affirming that they’ve distanced themselves from Lubben because she is a lightening rod for loud criticism led by yours truly. 🙂
I put the writer, Dennis Romero, in touch with Avanti, April Garris, Sierra Sinn and Shelley’s own brother, and they (along with Nina Hartley and others) all affirm or go beyond their assertions about Lubben from my videos and their own prior public statements.
Romero’s editorial bent is to very begrudgingly point out Lubben’s flaws and many contradictions — but there are so many, they are simply impossible to deny and eventually they overwhelm the profile. He omits some of the most damning visuals — her eight-foot staff video, the photo of her getting her chest signed outside a bar’s toilet by Ron Jeremy — but in the end she’s left all but alone to proclaim her own holiness. In fact, the only people who speak in defense of the Lubbens are one fellow anti-porn fanatic and another low end porn wash-out who got out of the industry without Lubben but now thinks what Lubben’s doing is “positive.”
Not ONE current performer and not ONE ex-performer formerly affiliated with Lubben had anything positive to say about her.
I like Dennis Romero, and respect him as a journalist — despite the fact that the piece (like much of his other work) almost drips with the view that the adult industry is a cesspool of exploitative scumbags who victimize young “girls.” His piece seems to cry, sure Lubben is a liar with bizarre “religious” beliefs, no real accomplishments and warped sense of self, but isn’t it a shame because she might just be right about a few things. Unfortunately, like Lubben, he cannot come up with any convincing evidence to support this conclusion.
By way of example: he goes out of his way to elicit “admissions” from performers that the industry is no Xanadu, apparently to soften the blow of their criticisms of Lubben — for example, Sierra Sinn is permitted to say that Lubben exaggerates a lot, but only after Romero comments, “Lubben is right about the pressure — but only to a degree.” That is a distortion of Sinn’s position, which was not a universal statement about adult production, but instead about two specific people with whom she had a personal conflict, one of whom is long out of the business.
Similarly, Romero remarks that Guy DiSilva “is a porn star with a reputation for being relatively mellow” — but relative to what? The writer tells us it’s in relation to the other “muscle boys and dirt bags.”
Nina Hartley is permitted to maintain she’s never been abused on a set, but only after she cedes the point that there exist “shady” pushy producers who “take advantage.”
I am allowed to debunk Lubben’s “Shocking Footage of Women Abused on the Porn Set” video (the only YouTube video whose title Romero provides the reader; no anti-Lubben videos are named) but only after he reminds readers of something he told them earlier in the piece — that I directed two PSAs for the industry’s trade association in 2010. (FSC’s Diane Duke later confirms that the group has had no part in my Lubben exposés and protests.)
I provided Mr. Romero the titles of every scene Lubben used in her detestable video, and offered to provide him with links to each. So, while it’s not untrue for him to write that I “insist” that Lubben’s video, though “billed as secret, behind-the-scenes footage the industry does not want you to see… [in reality contains] scenes the industry released and wants you to buy,” his phrasing misses the point that I also proved the point as a matter of historical fact.
Still, desperate its contextual failings, he quoted the anti-Lubben army accurately and I consider the piece to be fair. I’d say, 75% negative toward Lubben and 25% positive. Perhaps the most revealing commentary is that attention whore Lubben has not posted the piece to her Facebook page.
Oh, and I released episode 3 of The Devil and Shelley Lubben as a tie-in to the LA Weekly piece:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vA8ee4Y0gc
To slubben:
Honey, I Shrunk Your Ministry!
Nice picture of Micheal !! just one thing, loose the purse…other than that Yell away at them!
God Dammit! I need to start my own religion or non-profit foundation or something!…
Can I keep all my money tax free, if I minsiter to all the female pornstars? My religion is diffrent from her’s.
Rick — LOL! It’s not a purse, it’s the bag I had the anti-Lubben t-shirts in. I slung it over my shoulder for a minute and, naturally, that’s when they snapped the picture. I think the pic looks less like me yelling and more like me bursting into song. Maybe something from Bakersfield: The Musical.
As for starting your own ministry — you certainly couldn’t do worse, be more of a laughing stock or more despised than Lubben. Set up a 501(c)(3) and I’ll send you its first donation.