CHATSWORTH, Calif. — In an interview with The Guardian, Stoya broke her silence on the sexual assault allegations she levied against ex-boyfriend and adult film star James Deen via Twitter last Saturday.
Although Deen has denied any wrongdoing, eight other women have come out in the wake of Stoya's tweet, including Ashley Fires and Joanna Angel. Companies like Kink and Doc Johnson have also severed business relations with Deen, who resigned from the Adult Performers Advocacy Committee (APAC).
“I couldn’t bear the thought any more,” Stoya said, “that there might be something terrible happening to yet another woman at his hands, or more likely, at his cock, that she didn’t want, because I kept quiet. I just … I couldn’t, I couldn’t.”
Stoya told The Guardian that she chose Twitter as her means of communication “because that’s where the record needed to be updated."
On Saturday, she tweeted, “That thing where you log in to the Internet for a second and see people idolizing the guy who raped you as a feminist. That thing sucks." She followed that tweet with: “James Deen held me down and fucked me while I said no, stop, used my safeword. I just can’t nod and smile when people bring him up anymore.”
Whenever she saw fans on Twitter and Tumblr praising her relationship with Deen, Stoya said, "James and Stoya #relationshipgoals! That frightens me. That’s also something I don’t have any more control over than I have over what happened after I posted that tweet.”
“If I don’t say it now, then, when am I?" she added. "Am I just going to carry it around for the rest of my life and keep it secret? Because secrets aren’t really a thing that I do.”
“If you hold someone down and fuck them while they say ‘no’ and ‘stop’ and use their fucking safeword, that is rape," Stoya explained. "But when it first happened, I felt numb. And I went to work the next day. And I went to work the day after that. And I did a scene with him two days after, maybe three days after, I’m not sure. Then I felt like I’d been violated by someone I trusted.”
“It took me months and months and months,” she said, “over a year of months to be able to be able to call it what it was — which was rape.”
APAC vice-president Conner Habib also spoke to The Guardian. “I think about how much it took her to disclose that, and disclose it online,” he said, "and I thought, what’s going to happen with this story? How is it going to affect my community? When something like this happens in the porn community, it ends up affecting everybody.”
“People say: ‘Fuck like a porn star,’” he continued, “I say, OK: do you want to fuck for like, eight hours, with five people standing around us with lights on our testicles?”
“Writers need to get their mind around sex work in a compassionate, thoughtful and wise way before reporting on it,” he concluded, “when something like this happens, we feel preyed upon. We as performers should not have to somehow overcome it — it’s not our responsibility and it’s not our duty.”
“It’s not just a porn problem,” Stoya said. “It’s not just an entertainment problem. It’s easy to look at Bill Cosby and think, oh, he had access. No. It happens fucking everywhere.”
