In 2015 Netflix aired a documentary about the seedy underbelly of the Miami porn industry called Hot Girls Wanted. Two filmmakers and executive producer Rashida Jones followed the stories of three 18 and 19 year olds who answered craigslist ads to have sex on camera. Over the course of the next three months the women were pulled ever-deeper into disturbing and even violent scenes in what is known as “abuse porn.”
I was horrified.
Statistics they showed by the Kinsey Institute showed that 40% of online pornography features violence against women. The average porn star barely lasts three months in the industry. The end credits reported that all three women left the business shortly after the documentary wrapped up.
Since principle photography began about ten years ago, and I wanted to know where the women from the film ended up. I reached out to all three filmmakers and never got a response. But I did manage to connect with Rachel Bernard the woman featured in the film poster who went by “Ava Taylor” at the time.
She recounted how the filmmakers had a very specific agenda behind their project that required her to look like a victim, when the reality was much more complicated. After the film’s release they flew her out to a university campus to talk about the horrors that she experienced, but unlike what the film reported, Bernard was still actively performing, and according to her, thriving.
During the meeting Rashida Jones asked her if she was “going to quit the industry” now, and offered to pay for Bernard to pursue her dream of becoming a photographer at the Art Institute of Chicago. Bernard was excited by the generous offer and accepted it on the spot. But once she began tweeting about her complex feelings about the film the tuition payments dried up.
In our interview, Bernard tells me how while the filmmakers Ronna Gradus and Jill Bauer ostensibly wanted to expose the dark side of the porn industry, they also ended up exploiting the 18-year-old women who they were covering. In one jarring irony as the filmmakers were taking the cover shot for movie poster (and thumbnail in Netflix’s queue) the session followed the same scripted playbook of the actual pornography shoots she did for her day job.
“They told me to ‘pose a little more sexy’ and now look ‘sad’ while she sat in her own bedroom in in her underwear. The net effect was a series of compounding exploitations.
Not only were the women being pressured to perform increasingly violent acts on camera for actual pornographers, but the Bauer, Gradus and Jones used Bernard’s story to sell multi-million dollar film production deals at Netflix.
In this interview with Bernard we talk about how her life has moved on over the course of ten years, her thoughts on ethical porn consumption, the good and bad parts of the industry and the rise of OnlyFans where girls like her have more control over how they appear online.
And what she told me made me reconsider almost everything about my initial reaction to the show when I first watched it. Bernard speculates that Jone’s offer was really a ploy for the documentary crew to sell a follow-up TV series to Netflix that eventually aired under the title Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On. Bernard had to drop out of school and take a minimum wage job to cover her expenses.
