Page 20 - AVN April 2018

EDITOR’S DESK
CALL ME BY MY (STAGE) NAME
Adult performers use pseudonyms for a reason
OP-ED | By Mark Kernes
Stormy Daniels at the 2018 AVN Awards Show; photo by Jeff Koga/@KogaFoto
See if you can figure out what is, sadly, all too similar
about the following quotes from these mainstream
news sources:
New York Times: “The pornographic film actress
Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy
Daniels, is offering to return a $130,000 payment if she
is allowed to speak freely about what she claims was an
affair with President Trump.”
Politico: “On Tuesday, BuzzFeed’s lawyer wrote to
Daniels’ attorney asking that the adult film actress,
whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, preserve various
categories of documents.”
TheWrap: “The 38-year-old Daniels, whose legal name
is Stephanie Clifford, seems to be enjoying the kind of
attention usually reserved for Hollywood starlets.”
Figured it out yet? Perhaps these slightly altered
excerpts from other mainstream news sources will help:
“Nancy Reagan refused to help Rock Hudson, whose
real name was Leroy Harold Scherer Jr. and who was one
of the leading Hollywood stars of the 1950s and 1960s,
as he sought treatment for AIDS from a pioneering
doctor in Paris, it has been revealed.”
“Gene Simmons is happy to be alive. ‘Every day I wake
up and I never take it for granted,’ the legendary Kiss
frontman, whose real name is Chaim Witz, says with
conviction.”
“Comedy legend Whoopi Goldberg, whose real name
is Caryn Johnson, steadfastly refuses to say President
Trump’s name out loud, despite acknowledging that he’s
‘the man in charge’.”
Got it? That dichotomy, and the implications of it,
impelled this author to send a letter to the Washington
Post, which reads in part:
... I write to express my dismay at the Post’s (and many
other publications’) insistence on using the real names of adult
performers in its articles.
I refer particularly to Stormy Daniels, whose affair with
President Trump more than a decade ago, and the payoff she
received from Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, may easily lead
to the president’s impeachment for campaign law violations. ...
Considering the extremely low esteem with which adult
actresses are held by society, the actresses go to some trouble to
keep their real names from being revealed, though obviously,
journalists often have the resources to ferret out those names if
they want to. The question is, aside from the tittilation value,
why would they want to?
Moreover, reports are rife of adult performers being physically
accosted at public events both by fans and anti-porn zealots,
as well as being approached with unwanted attention in public
areas like supermarkets or simply walking down the street,
and the fact that Ms. Daniels has been linked so closely to Mr.
Trump—and not in a way that’s likely to benefit Mr. Trump’s
political fortunes—certainly makes it far more likely that she
would be in real, physical danger from some of Trump’s more
extreme supporters—and knowing her real name would make
it much easier for such activists to target Ms. Daniels’ residence
and her family.
So considering the total lack of probative value in revealing
an adult actress’s real name in newspaper reports, and the real
danger that such revelations could put them in, why not take the
high road and simply use the name by which the actress is best
known?
The point is, adult performers not only use stage
names to preserve their privacy, but they have legitimate
fears that unsavory individuals will use that information
to stalk and otherwise harass the performer in her (and
it’s almost inevitably “her”) private life, to find her
family (either husband, wife or parents/siblings) and
harass them, or simply to send threats to any of them.
Make no mistake about it: their personal security
is at stake in a very real sense. One recent example
is actress Jessica Drake, who’s become involved in
the Daniels situation owing to her real name having
been listed in Stormy’s “hush agreement” as someone
having “confidential information” about Trump. That
“revelation” by mainstream news reporters led to a
CNN news/camera crew being camped outside the
front yard of her parents’ home, attracting unwanted
attention and cluing the neighbors in that there was
someone presumably newsworthy living there.
And she’s hardly the only one.
“I was horrified and terrified when [gossip columnist]
Luke Ford revealed my real name, as well as dozens
of others, on his blog in the early 2000s,” said veteran
actress Nina Hartley. “It’s a reprehensible, rude,
condescending thing to do, to treat performers that way,
and it shows how little respect he—and anyone else
who’s done it—has for a group of what are essentially
very normal people just trying to do their jobs and live
their lives in peace.”
So consider this a plea to all the workaday reporters
and famous news personalities out there who seem to
get some secret thrill Down There that they A) know
an adult performer’s real name, and B) can—and do—
broadcast that knowledge to the world at large: You’re
not doing anyone any favors, and you very well may be
putting the “personality” you’re covering in real
harm’s way.
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