Cover photo credit to WFAA. This post was originally shared February 2017.
For 15 years, Ressa Woodward taught at an all-girls middle school in Dallas, Texas. By all accounts, she’s a pretty great teacher, too: she’s been nominated as Teacher of the Year 11 times and is known for being a favorite of her students, according to a report by WFAA News.
But despite her passion and dedication to her job as a sixth-grade teacher, the 38-year-old Woodward survived a past traumatic experience that eventually destroyed her future as an educator.
Her forced sexual exploitation
When Woodward was 19 years old, she married an emotionally and physically abusive man. At the time, she says she was “young, naive, easily controlled. Very book smart, [but] street stupid.” They struggled with money, and that’s when her husband coerced her into shooting pornography to make extra money.
“It was good money,” she said. “So he started booking me for more shoots, and it happened for about a little over a year.”
Then, after shooting numerous pornographic videos, she graduated from college and decided to leave the industry once and for all.
“I said to him, ‘I cannot do this anymore. I’m going to be a teacher, this is going to get me in trouble,'” said Woodward.
Later, she decided to end that marriage, go back to school for her Master’s degree, and tried to put that broken part of her life behind her. Her forced-porn performance was in the past where it belonged, and she hoped that it would never come back to haunt her.
“It was always hanging over me somewhere in the distance, but it all came and hit me in the face that day,” she said.
How porn ended her career
Unfortunately, that looming day finally arrived when someone contacted the school district with Woodward’s former porn name. An internal review performed at the time cleared Woodward of any policy violations and school officials told Woodward she’d be allowed to continue teaching unless her past became public.
But her work as an activist for a political party in Texas would lead to her outing. After a man became annoyed by Woodward’s political standings and attitudes, he began detailing her pornographic past across social media. Fearing a scandal, the school district placed her on administrative leave, and eventually fired her because of what was posted.
In response to her termination, Woodward said, “The message [they are sending] is you can’t get past your past. You’re going to be punished for it over and over,” she said. “There’s no way to rise, and that’s not okay.”
“The sad thing is that if these girls find out I’m being punished for something that I did nearly 20 years ago and had no control of and fought to get out of, well, what does that say about empowerment?
I want my girls to know that no matter what they do, they might make some poor life choices, but there’s a way to come out of it,” Woodward said.
Breanna Guerra, the mother of a daughter who was in Woodward’s sixth-grade class, agrees that the Dallas school district shouldn’t have fired her.
“I really do think that it’s wrong she has lost her job due to a mistake she made 20 years ago,” Guerra said. “She turned her life around,” Guerra said.
Why this matters
This story first broke in February of 2017, but it’s clear that this is a topic more relevant than ever before. Consider Woodward’s situation—young, poor, abused, and then forced into sexual exploitation by a trusted partner.
This, by definition, is sex trafficking.
According to The Trafficking Victims Protection Act—one of the most comprehensive anti-trafficking law ever passed in the U.S.—the definition of human trafficking specifically defines a human trafficking victim as a person induced to “perform labor or a commercial sex act, through force, fraud, or coercion.” In this case, Woodward was forced and coerced into performing in porn, making each video she appeared in recorded evidence of her sexual slavery. And the worst part? Her case isn’t even close to isolated.
One of the most common criticisms we hear is that porn performers love to do porn, and that if they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be doing it. There are many people in society who think that porn is just harmless entertainment and porn performers truly are the insatiable sex-craving stars they are portrayed to be.
Regardless of all the overwhelming research and countless personal accounts exposing the dark reality of the porn industry and its nonconsensual content, many still buy into the fantasy that the porn industry works hard to build.
A lot of people have a similar mindset as this guy who messaged us on Facebook:
“Porn hurts nobody.” “They do it because they like to do it.”
These are popular perceptions that many people in our society have when it comes to pornography. However, perception is not always reality. Woodward’s story is an all too common example of how people end up in porn not by their own desire, but by coercion or abusive means because of dire circumstances.
Watch: Former Performer Rachel Marie Oberlin Talk About Life After Leaving Porn
And while active porn stars rarely, if ever, open up about their situations due to fear of not getting work or being discriminated against, the majority of those very same performers inevitably end up speaking out on their real experiences once they leave the industry. These personal accounts are never pretty, and they often reveal the dark circumstances that got them into shooting sex on camera for money.
Science and research show that porn harms the brain, damages relationships, and contributes negatively to society as a whole. And, as we see in this woman’s case, porn can often destroy the lives of its performers, even when they didn’t want to be involved in the first place.
Related: Ex-Porn Performer/Radio Host Lisa Ann Talks Extreme Abuse Of New Performers
Whether it be the horrific stories of ex-porn performers telling what happened to them or the industry’s sketchy sexually transmitted disease testing methods, the world of “adult entertainment” is a dark place. Regardless of these facts, the porn industry is an estimated $97 billion a year industry which seeks to hook customers early in hopes of gaining a lifelong client.
Porn is anything but harmless, and it has victims on both sides of the screen. The truth is, porn’s impacts last far longer than any money that may have been earned; for many, the impacts last a lifetime.
