This is the cover story of the March issue of AVN magazine.
LOS ANGELES—Cheerleader Kait calls it “a fresh new start.”
Everything changed for the reigning AVN Best New Starlet less than two weeks after winning the coveted award when an electrical fire ripped through her house in Tampa, Fla.
“It was really bad,” Kait tells AVN. “Everything is just so wet and damaged and destroyed. … But nothing like that can stop me. If anything, it just pushed me further into the right direction.”
Facing a massive clean-up and a lot of uncertainty, she considered canceling her business trip to LA in early February before deciding that it was important to stick to her plans.
“I just think the universe kind of just put it into perspective,” Kait says. “This is where I’m supposed to be. It’s easy to fall into the negatives, but I’m just really trying to stay positive on the upside of this. So that’s where I would like to focus my brain.”
It’s that kind of fierce optimism that has defined Cheerleader Kait’s brand during her ascent to the AVN Awards Show stage on Jan. 24, when she accepted the adult industry’s most prestigious honor for a new female performer.
Wearing dark jeans, white sneakers and a sleeveless, brown top with her long blonde hair down around her shoulders, Kait is nibbling on a poke bowl during the lunch rush at this upscale LA eatery. It’s Thursday, Feb. 5 and the former college cheerleader from Nashville just stepped off a cross-country flight—a few days after the most traumatic experience of her life. She even hauled her suitcase to our interview.
“I was wearing a hard hat and gloves yesterday, going through all the soot and pulling out anything I could,” Kait tells me.
On the afternoon of the fire, Kait was preparing to do a live stream with her close friend Ali, who had only been at her place for about 10 minutes when they noticed black smoke coming from upstairs.
Then the fire alarm went off and she called 911, grabbed a couple items and ran outside without even putting on shoes.
“Thankfully, I was home 20 minutes before it started and I was able to call 911 right away,” Kait recalls. “My friend grabbed my dog. I grabbed my dog’s leash instead of my purse, which was so silly.
“It lasted like 30 minutes and then it seemed like it went out—but it didn’t. It started up again.
“The firefighters were in the house and then they came back out because it was too dangerous. They had some men with singed ears; their ears got burned.”
On the evening of Feb. 5, Kait recorded a heartfelt video from her hotel room in LA for her OnlyFans subscribers, holding back tears as she explained what happened and sharing photos of the sobering aftermath.
“I’ve never been through something that scary,” she told her fans, adding that she thought it started in the attic.
She lost virtually all of her belongings, including family heirlooms and her entire wardrobe, but remains undeterred.
“At the end of the day, it was all material,” Kait tells me. “Some memories, of course, but I can make new ones and I can find new things. The most important thing is that I’m safe. My friends are safe that were with me at the time, and my dog is. He got rushed over to the sitter’s, so I’m just very thankful.
“I can’t salvage anything, so it’s just a new start. It’s just like a new chapter in my life. I literally cannot be more excited to see where it goes.”
Now she intends to stay in LA for at least the next three months, diving back into her work and settling in to the city.
“I’m going to bring my dog and just do the whole LA thing,” Kait continues. “There’s just so many creators and opportunities out here. I was already planning on being out here, but I was planning on a lot of flights back and forth. And honestly, I think the universe is like, why are you doing that? That doesn’t make sense. Go out there and live it out. I feel like I started my career, but this is a huge launch into something.
“I’m still figuring out exactly what my goals are and everything. There’s so much negative, but there’s also so much positive that’s happening with this, and it’s almost like it’s delivering… I love just starting over with a new plan of attack.”
Cheerleader Kait admits she never expected to be where she is today— weighing numerous new opportunities that include high-profile collabs, studio bookings and multiple media requests.
Gifted with immense physical talent to go with her magnetic personality, Kait made an impact from the beginning of her mainstream porn career, throwing down in enthusiastic boy/girl outings and more than a few anal scenes for studio heavyweights such as Jules Jordan, Mike Adriano, Blacked, Tushy, Bang!, Team Skeet, Reality Kings and Brazzers, among dozens of others.
It was Brazzers that landed her first mainstream shoot, casting her opposite contract stud Scott Nails in a scene titled “Wanna Fuck Around, Let’s Fuck Around!” that came out in late July 2024.
Directed by Lea Lexis, ZZ leans into Kait’s passion for fitness in the comical yoga-themed scenario—she even grabs onto a set of hanging straps for ball-draining rounds of cowgirl and reverse cowgirl anal with Nails.
“Since it was her first mainstream one, there’s always a certain energy around that,” Nails, the 2025 AVN Hall of Fame inductee, tells AVN. “She came in focused and professional. Mainstream sets can feel very different—bigger crew, more pressure, more moving parts—and she handled it like a champ.
“She took direction well and didn’t let nerves take over. That’s not something everyone can do their first time. You could tell she wanted to deliver and take it seriously and that work ethic shows on camera. It didn’t feel like ‘first scene.’ It felt polished.”
Lea Lexis agrees.
“I absolutely remember Cheerleader Kait’s first scene,” Lexis tells AVN. “She was very nervous that day. In a previous phone call she told us she enjoys doing flexible positions and with her name being ‘Cheerleader’ we wanted to emphasize that.
“It’s a tricky thing to balance though while trying to calm the nerves of a first scene, but she was absolutely lovely throughout the entire shoot. Her eagerness to please is pretty big and mixed with her bubbly personality it’s impossible not to love her.”
Just ask Jules Jordan, the Hall of Fame mogul whom Kait made a big impression on in a pair of sensational scenes during the awards eligibility period.
Jordan himself drilled Kait along with veteran deal-closer Zac Wild in her electric first DP that appears in DP Masters 10, receiving a 2026 AVN nomination for Best Double-Penetration Sex Scene.
“Cheerleader Kait had trusted us to film a rare studio scene with her early in her career,” Jordan explains to AVN. “She had experimented with anal so I had a feeling she would thoroughly enjoy a DP scene and she loved every minute of it, as did myself and Zac.
“To have such a natural beauty doing hardcore anal is a match made in heaven. Her name really fits her with her very athletic body and perfect face.”
Jordan continues, “Kait had such a natural reaction during the scene, which made it obvious that she wasn’t acting. We look forward to working with her again in the near future.”
Zac Wild, an eight-year industry veteran who has won the AVN Award for Best Anal Sex Scene the past two years in a row, tells AVN he’d done a content collab with Kait prior to that DP, but tag-teaming her with Jordan was a whole new ballgame.
“It was quite remarkable to be able to work with her on the pro set,” Wild says. “It’s such an honor to be able to work with Jules as it is and then to work with somebody who totally wants to work with both of us is the trifecta come to life. She definitely loves her job and loves sex. It was written all over her face.
“When we got going it was like she had been doing this for years. She was having a blast, playing to the camera and hungry for more.”
Wild continues, “She’s definitely one of those performers who’s made such a huge impact in a year or two. When she got nominated she reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, I don’t know how to go about advertising myself and getting my fans to vote.’ I told her you’re already doing fantastic, I wouldn’t change anything you’re doing. Just keep putting out that great positivity.”
Not bad for a girl who tells AVN she’s been prone to “impostor syndrome” and was surprised to even be nominated—let alone win.
“It just kind of blew my mind. My bubble popped. I don’t know, I just can’t wrap my head around it,” Kait says. “That’s been the hard part, too, is wrapping my head around it. I’m getting a lot of buzz everywhere, which is incredible. My email is blowing up, my Twitter…
“I have an incredible collab tomorrow with some girls I’ve really been looking forward to working with and they reached out to me, so I’m really very excited and I feel like this is just the beginning.
“I haven’t even started doing podcasts. I have a couple lined up and I am just ready. The house is in Florida and it’s just done. I am here and I’m just so ready to get started. Literally, whatever I can get into with different avenues.”
A native of what she calls a “ridiculously small town” in Tennessee, Kait tells me that everyone knows everyone where she grew up.
“I’m related to half the people and the other half of the people know my dad,” she jokes. “The town is suffocating—and I love it, that’s my home—but that’s not my future and I knew that in college.
“So I was applying to as many scholarships as I could. I’m just thankful… I worked really, really hard. I had multiple jobs.”
Kait continues, “I literally come from nothing. My parents did the very best they could. My mom worked for like this much over minimum wage. My dad was in and out of jobs with injuries. He’s a construction worker, so that was always kind of hard growing up.”
She tells me that “cheerleading took over my whole life” during her high school years.
“Whatever I do, I do it well,” Kait says. “I put my heart and soul into stuff. I’m a perfectionist. I’m a go-getter. I enjoyed it.
“I’m just a cheerful, happy person. So I guess when picking out my name it just felt really natural and also I was trying to think, what are the guys are into? So I just went with it and I think it’s so cool. I think that it kind of helps me stand out.”
Kait says that now she wants to help her parents as much as she can.
“My parents just always wanted me to do better for myself than they could,” she adds. “And I thought that they did everything they could, but I just feel so good to be in this position now and I can’t wait to give back to them.
“They just have supported me so much. I know that’s not common, so I feel incredibly blessed. They don’t know all my details, but they know enough and I feel really supported.”
Kait began her adult content journey during the summer of 2020 after losing her job as a server at Buffalo Wild Wings in Florida due to COVID.
“I was just really bored,” she confesses. “I’ve always been a very horny, very sexual person. I was sexting guys. Then I started having a little fun on Reddit. That’s where it really all started. I was like I’m already doing this. Let’s just have a little fun.
“And then from there, guys were like, ‘What’s your OnlyFans? Just start an OnlyFans.’ And around the same time I was in the car listening to the ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast, and they had spoken about it and I was like, no, no, no. I was like, I can’t do that. That’s too much, too far.”
“Then I spent the week with my family and I came back down [to Tampa] and I was like, OK, maybe I’ll try this? But I’m a college girl. I have a scholarship. I have a lot to lose. But also, there’s just something pulling me in this direction. I just enjoy it so much. I legit have fun sexting men and being a flirt and being complimented and feeling sexy. I love that whole aspect.”
She wore a mask for her first two-plus years as a creator.
“I was really terrified of potentially losing my scholarship, so I thought this would be a good way to start, to do both. And it was nice, my bills were getting covered, school was getting paid for, everything was working really well,” Kait explains.
“I was just having fun with it. I was living my life.”
Another big moment came when she attended the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo for the first time in January 2023 at Resorts World Las Vegas, meeting numerous creators whom she admired such as NakedBakers.
“From there, I just literally fell in love with all of it,” Kait remembers. “I just felt like it was so much of a community. There were so many smiles. It was such a fun atmosphere. And I just felt a sense of belonging that I didn’t quite feel anywhere else.
“Even going through school, I’m kind of like, I don’t know what I want to do. Do I want to do something in the health field? I like fitness. Do I want to do something in the fitness field? Nothing was really like, this is what I want to do.
“As crazy as it is, this is my passion. This is my purpose. And I love that. And I’m not shy about it at all.”
It was while she was at the AVN Expo in 2023 that Kait also met AVN Hall of Fame superstar and entrepreneur, Riley Reid, for the first time in person.
The two already had been building a business relationship online—Reid says Kait would sometimes buy her Instagram shout-out promos that she was doing to help creators build their followings.
Suffice it to say that they hit it off and Reid took Kait under her wing.
“Riley Reid was a huge help,” Kait tells AVN. “She really helped a lot with my branding and guidance.”
Soon they did a couple of collabs, including a three-way with a male creator during which Kait took off her mask for the first time for the pop-shot.
“She found a rock star kind of guy and we brought him over to the Airbnb and we ended up shooting a scene together,” Kait says, adding that it was Reid who suggested that Kait get a maskless facial.
“So Riley was the one that got to take my mask off and do the whole reveal and then I had a nice big cumshot running down my face,” Kait says with a laugh. “And that was an incredible moment. As she’s lifting the mask off I literally felt like the weight on my chest was just gone.
“I finally stepped into the shoes of the person that I was trying to be. I just didn’t even know it.”
Reid, who won the 2016 AVN Female Performer of the Year trophy along with six others that year, tells AVN that she was honored that Kait wanted her to be part of such a special collab.
“She’s been doing amazing and it’s been beautiful to watch her mature and really fill into the space,” Reid says.
“There’s always a risk to get into this realm and I always want to be able to support girls when I can. So she was investing in me while investing in herself and I appreciated that she saw growth within me.”
Riley continues, “I was so happy to see her win Best New Starlet. It was so thrilling to see her go from being this faceless creator buying promos from me to see her on the stage giving a speech. I was just blown away and it makes me feel proud. It was so powerful to see her growth and confidence.”
Reid also helped Kait during the week of the fire, gifting her a bunch of clothing, including a few memorable pieces that she wore earlier in her career.
In addition to Riley’s mentorship, Kait also consulted with her longtime agent Mark Spiegler during her transition to mainstream performing.
“She called me at the very beginning and I hooked her up with companies,” Spiegler, who has represented 10 of the past 13 AVN Female Performer of the Year winners, tells AVN.
Kait for the past year-and-a-half also has worked closely with The Model Service, which is managed by Brazzers contract performer/director Ricky Johnson on a pro-bono basis.
“She’s amazing,” Johnson tells AVN. “Everybody is always asking about Kait.
“She’s a super hard worker who wants to be on set. She’s got a great head on her shoulders. And she’ll probably be Female Performer of the Year in the future if that’s what she wants—she’s a phenomenal performer. I’m excited for her to continue to blow up.”
Mike Adriano, the seasoned performer, director and studio owner, knows Kait’s performing prowess as well as anyone, doing the honors with her in 2024 for his website TrueAnal and then hooking up again in 2025 for his AnalOnly imprint.
“Cheerleader Kait is definitely one of my favorite performers to shoot, especially when it comes to anal scenes,” Adriano tells AVN. “She has crazy sex appeal and is always delivering great performances. She’s the caliber of performer who makes any scene you put her in better. I’m hoping I’ll have the privilege to collab with her for many more scenes to come.
“She’s definitely a big-time fan favorite.”
Photograhy by @ohrangutang
