LOS ANGELES – Dealing with stalkers and the emotional impact of being a sex worker were the key topics of today’s lineup for Pineapple Summit 2020, presented by Pineapple Support.
The event, which was part of a two-day program streamed live on Pornhub, featured a number of adult performers and mental health experts, including fetish performer Jet Setting Jasmine. She spoke about her experience with a stalker who thrived on making violent threats and trolling her and her friends on social media, ultimately outing her to her mainstream job and to her clients whom she served as a therapist.
“It was three or four years ago and [the stalker] did a compilation on a disk of all my explicit material that was on my Twitter and images from my Instagram and sent it to my therapy standard boards,” she recalled. “Then sent it to my employer, which at the time was a large government agency and they sent it to a secretary of that agency, to the Congress person in our state, to my supervisor at the time and thankfully to a lot of people in my life that already knew I was in the adult industry in some capacity.”
The incident echoed those of others whose jobs were also jeopardized and even had their lives threatened by stalkers.
Gay adult performer Josh Moore recalled a former partner who turned violent and was bent on ruining his career with malicious social media postings and later stealing his identity.
Moushumi Ghose, a licensed marriage and family therapist with Pineapple Support, said stalkers are typically antisocial and deeply unhappy and can be unpredictable.
“Some people are extremely jealous and they have an impulse disorder and are extremely unhappy,” she said. “They are a sociopaths and have things missing in their lives and they want you to feel their tremendous pain.”
Ironically, Dr. Amie Harwick, a colleague and friend to Ghose and many at Pineapple Support—in whose memory the Pineapple Summit was dedicated—was killed in February by a former lover who stalked her before murdering her at her West Hollywood home.
Although violence from stalkers is rare, Ghose recommended taking threats seriously and being vigilant about one’s routine and personal security.
For Jasmine, her stalking incident led her to embrace the adult industry and become more dedicated to creating content and building her persona as a fetish artist.
“So this idea of someone being out there with so much information on me was very nerve-wracking, but that person set me free because I just dove into adult,” she explained.
For performer Brandon Areana, dealing with a crazed stalker wasn’t easy, as she decided to fight back and exchange caustic messages with her stalker, but it only made things worse.
“So I decided to start ignoring it and it got worse and worse,” she recalled. “She started calling me names, trolling me everywhere, but after a while she wasn’t getting a rise out of me and it was no longer fun for her and she moved on.”
The summit also focused on mental health and wellness, as therapist Rachael Wells shared her tips for dealing with trauma and negativity.
"A lot of times when we feel deep pain, we say we can’t handle this deep pain, I’m just going to die, but in reality, we can handle trauma and abuse,” she said. “We have to do the opposite of what our reactive and impulsive fearful self wants us to do. We have to tap our higher self to do that.”
Wells recommended doing and appreciating the things that make us feel good, whether it’s reading a book, enjoying the sunshine, or other things that benefit us.
“Whatever it is that’s happened to us, it’s happened. There’s nothing we can do about that,” she said. “In time we have to expose ourselves to safe and loving environments where we can be our authentic selves. Though we’re thinking, 'My friends have left me, people are ghosting me, my family won’t talk to me and there’s COVID.' But there are places where we can feel safe. There’s a park, a bookstore, a place where we can feel good.”
Besides presentations from mental health experts, the event was closed out by a session with several adult performers that included adult superstar Asa Akira, who led the discussion about the ups and downs of the adult industry and the misconceptions about it.
“People think that porn is something that’s done to us and that it’s done to fuel our drug addiction, or something,” she said. “It’s like we’re victims and that we’re having things done to us. But to me it’s more like women have it harder than cis men.”
For trans performer Natassia Dreams, being trans in the industry is in itself a major challenge when it comes to dealing with fans.
“People don’t understand we’re playing a role on camera. There’s this misconception that we want to pin them down and fuck their ass and take control of them. So there’s a lot of education that needs to happen. It’s a burden.”
As for advice to newcomers, Akira encourages them to be genuine and be themselves: “My advice is to be your true self and keep in mind you’re representing sex workers and we’re already marginalized enough.”
