Belle Knox, the Duke University Co-Ed student who grabbed national headlines when she got outed as a porn star, revealed in an interview that she was an adolescent porn addict and rape victim. According to Knox, she attended a private Catholic high school and her parents are both devoutly religious. Yet, she also started watching porn at age 12, lost her virginity at age 16, and can't remember a time before she knew she was bisexual. While playing house, she would ask her friends to lock her in a dog cage. “I don't know why, but it was something that was very appealing to me…” By the time she was in high school, Knox was playing the part of the perfect student at school, but was partying on the weekend with college kids. After naked pictures she sent a guy started making the rounds, she “was grounded for, like, a year. My mom had always told me not to let any naked pictures of myself get out there.” She suffered from depression, which she says she responded to by cutting herself. She also revealed that she was raped at a house party in high school. She’d had so much to drink that she passed out in a bedroom, waking when a guy she’d seen eyeing her earlier opened the door. She wasn't strong enough to push him away. Tragically, of her first porn acting experience, Knox said: “I remember getting naked, and the guy said, ‘You have cuts on your legs. You’re a cutter.’ He could tell I had written the word ‘fat’ in my thigh, so he started calling me fat.” Once they called ‘action,” she recalled being pushed to the ground and slapped. “And I said, ‘Stop, stop, stop. No, no.’ And then they stopped, and they were like, ‘We have to keep going. ‘And I was like, ‘Just please don't hit me so hard.’ But it went on like that, me getting hit, pushed, spit on. But I got through it…You know how you kind of zone out sometimes? I just disassociated.”
Author’s note: The story of Belle Knox is the new normal for those who currently get into porn. It marks a departure from the typical porn star background, typified by the child and teen years of Shauna Grant, Savannah, and Jenna Jameson, who would all later disclose miserable early experiences of sexual abuse and neglect. Knox represents a different paradigm: girls that came from relatively normal loving homes, but were exposed to porn at a young age. I fit into this category myself. Later on, that childhood addiction to porn sets you up as a liberally minded person in terms of all sexual mores: making it easier to become a victim of exploitation. With a damaged psyche, these individuals then seek out the same sorts of cruelty they experienced as children and teenagers; erotizing the deviant forms of sexuality they absorbed through porn. Inevitably, you start acting out what you saw on screen. Then, what you end up with are extremely psychologically disturbed people like Knox, and myself before God saved me, who willingly enter the porn industry because they have already been brainwashed into accepting it; as Knox articulated, sometimes you have to disassociate, but you do it anyway: because its normal.