A crooked self-help wellness guru named Ashley Black sold a skin-detaching anti-cellulite device to millions of woman since 2014. When thousands of her former-customers joined a watchdog group that claimed her device detached their skin from the underlying muscle, Black did what successful bullies always do--she went on the attack. Black sued her former customers alleging that their truthful Facebook posts were defamation and undermined her bottom line. She lost every case--all the way to the Texas supreme court. Now Ashley Black has fled to a mansion in Costa Rica and has raised millions of dollars in a crowdfunding campaign that looks as unlikely to be real as everything else Black has done in her career. With special appearances from: Richard Coffin "The Plain Bagel" @ThePlainBagel Alexis Maxence Léveillé (Physio-Debunker) https://www.youtube.com/@nobullshitphysio Chris DaPrato (Physical Therapist) https://www.instagram.com/cuptherapy/ Marty Carney MD (Plastic Surgeon) https://www.instagram.com/drmartincarney/ Voice Overs by: Laura Krantz (whistleblower) https://www.instagram.com/krantzlm/ Ron Doyle (Texas judge) https://www.instagram.com/rondoyle/ #cellulite #fasciablaster #scam Get Early Access on Substack https://sgcarney.substack.com/ Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3PyxGKt94kLzVqkkjEgRFw/join Patreon: https://patreon.com/sgcarney Scott Carney Investigates Podcast https://www.scottcarney.com/podcast YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@sgcarney Books: ⁠The Wedge⁠ https://www.scottcarney.com/the-wedge ⁠What Doesn't Kill Us⁠ https://www.scottcarney.com/what-doesnt-kill-us ⁠The Enlightenment Trap⁠ https://www.scottcarney.com/the-enlightenment-trap The Vortex https://www.scottcarney.com/the-vortex The Red Market https://www.scottcarney.com/the-red-market Listen to the Scott Carney Investigates Podcast on: YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2TVEkr1lWIJp6zZijbuZE8xTn5Edur-7 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scott-carney-investigates/id1675685319 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Eez65bpNJSDLCYQb7yck5 Anchor: https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/12a9Xdpn6yb Social Media: Threads: https://www.threads.net/@sgcarney Instagram https://www.instagram.com/sgcarney/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/scottcarneyauthor Twitter https://twitter.com/sgcarney Bluesky https://staging.bsky.app/profile/sgcarney.bsky.social #ashleyblack #askashley #bethemovement #howdoyoulikeusnow #heartbuttchallenge #fitfasciachallenge #fasciablaster #faceblaster #brianamichel#fasciablaster #ashleyblackguru #fasciablasterblackfriday#ashleyblackexperience#kardashian#fasciaqueen ©PokeyBear LLC (2024)

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.

It’s easy to get disillusioned with American politics. There’s a two party system that makes everything seem intractable, a general lack or transparency, and an overwhelming sense that corporate greed somehow controls everything. But it didn’t have to be that way.

This week I had the great privilege to interview investigative journalist David Sirota about his brand new limited series podcast Master Plan. In it he traces the roots of our current political deadlock back more than 50 years to Nixon administration where the destined-to-be-impeached president took a bribe on tape from the Milk lobby.

When the news came out that dairy farmers were funneling vast sums of cash into the Nixon campaign American politicians did something almost unheard of: they passed new laws on campaign finance that made this exact thing illegal. What could have been the beginning of a new era of transparency in government ultimately had the opposite effect. Frightened by the possibility of clean politics a soon-to-be supreme court justice named Lewis Powell cooked up a document that became the vision of corporate oligarchs to legalize corruption. Sirota and his team of talented journalists (which includes my wife Laura Krantz) follow the story from the infamous Powell Memo through a series of backroom deals, pivotal supreme court decisions and bad faith efforts all the way to the penning of the Republican manifesto “Project 2025” in this year’s election.

I don’t want to give too much away, except to say that the show elegantly covers a huge breath of American history and will make you think about politics in an entirely new way.