Jessica Dee walked into Platinum X Pictures’ headquarters for the first time as a director rather than talent on a sweltering Monday afternoon earlier this week.
The third performer diagnosed HIV-positive in the adult industry’s current health crisis, she was accompanied by her agent, Dick Nasty, and her fiance, Shane D.
They headed straight for the office of co-owner Jewel De’Nyle, who last week hired her to work behind the camera.
The atmosphere was warm and upbeat, with jokes and laughter and a palpable sense of camaraderie and excitement.
Dee is small and slender, with pale skin and a perfect heart-shaped face dominated by large blue eyes. When she cheerfully changed into the Platinum X tank top De’Nyle presented her with, she revealed firm natural breasts.
She joked about now being able to get tattoos or piercings, or even a tit job, things she deliberately avoided while in front of the camera.
The 25-year-old Czech actress will begin shooting Throat Yogurt, her first Platinum X movie—ten scenes, all oral—in June.
“This is Day 1,” said De’Nyle, as she prepared to initiate Dee into the intricacies of pre-production paperwork. “She’s going to learn first-hand today how it goes.”
But before that she took time to talk with AVN.com in her fluent, Czech-accented English.
In March, Dee worked with Darren James, who is believed to have initiated the HIV outbreak, in a scene for Evasive Angles. It was a double anal insertion with James and Mark Anthony, followed by ejaculation inside her vagina.
She said that when she heard James had tested positive right after she worked with him, “Okay, I was panicked.”
“When you get the news,” she continued, “I think everybody has to panic, the first few minutes, or hours, or maybe all day. That’s a normal thing. I got through two weeks just waiting for tests. Every day you wake up and you don’t know what’s coming. Obviously now it’s better because I know I’m positive.
“I talked to many people and I know my life is not over. How I got through with everything, it’s just because of my boyfriend. I have to say thank you for him, that he’s still with me. Because you definitely need somebody. You can’t go through it by yourself.”
She met Shane D., an African-American adult actor, when they worked together on a set just two months ago. They will be married on Saturday.
She said he helped her deal with her initial despair by telling her, “‘Don’t worry, your mom needs you. You have a lot of friends here.’ That’s true. I’ve got so many people around me. I’m really happy that people are here for me. Nobody has turned his back.”
De’Nyle too spent a lot of time with her during the difficult weeks before she was diagnosed. “I think she needed another woman to be there,” she said, “another talent.”
Dee said she has been constantly in touch with her family in the Czech Republic. “My mom knows,” she said, “and obviously she knows that I am in this industry. When you go into this industry you know that HIV is here. You just don’t think that it can happen to you. You don’t think, ‘Oh, it will be me.’
“I just hope that I’m the last girl, I just hope so. Because I know how the girls feel. It’s really hard. Yesterday I was really homesick. So I guess it’s time to work, for me, so that I can forget everything.”
Dee first came to the U. S. four years ago. She had never worked as talent in Europe, so her first time in front of the camera was in Los Angeles. For the next couple of years she would come to Porn Valley to work in three-month segments, then return to Europe.
“I was working every day, two scenes a day,” she recalled. “People knew I had to go back to Czech, so I was kind of busy.”
Nasty said that since he’s been her agent she appeared in about 90 titles, and she estimates she did at least that many before she hooked up with him.
When Nasty met her, he recalled, she barely spoke a word of English. “In three months she went from one or two words to speaking like she does now.”
De’Nyle said she had originally planned to shoot Throat Yogurt herself, “but I think it would be the perfect thing to start her out with.”
“I know exactly what I want,” Dee said. “I want exactly what I gave before to my scenes.”
“She’ll be grabbin’ girls by the back of the head—‘Do it like this!’” De’Nyle joked. “That’s why she’s here. She’s paid her dues. She’s one of the nasty girls in the business. She’s a girl after my own heart.”
De’Nyle plans to have her direct every month.
“I’m going to be with her on set on her first few movies,” she said, “to train her and teach her and let her just do her thing from then on. Because being in front of the camera is one thing, but when you step behind it it’s a whole other world. I’m confident that she’ll be able to handle it. She’s a quick learner. I don’t think it’s going to be that hard for her to figure out.”
“I don’t think so either,” Dee said. ‘If you want to, you learn quick, and I want to.”
She pointed out that she is used to dealing with female talent because she had operated an agency in the Czech Republic. “I did that with my best girlfriend,” she said, “but now I will leave the agency just for her, because I’m staying here.”
“She’s got a job to do and a husband to keep,” De’Nyle said. “There’s no slack for this girl now.”
Throat Yogurt will be released September 16.
Jessica Dee’s home on the Web is www.jessicadeexxx.com
