Porn Stars to Creepy Fans: ‘We’re Human, Not Just F*ck Toys’
Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault.
When OnlyFans model and aspiring singer Romi Chase attended EXXXOTICA, one of the adult industry’s largest conventions, she expected it to be a fun opportunity to meet and greet her fans. And it was—at least, initially.
“I was there for the fans,” Chase told The Daily Beast of her December 2021 appearance at the expo in Chantilly, Virginia. “I was available for photo opportunities… [and] everything was going pretty well.” But her experience turned sour, she recalled, when one fan—who, she said, had been following her throughout the event—approached her for a photo.
“I told him ‘tips for pics,’” Chase recounted. The unidentified man sent her some money via Cash App, she said, and so her photographer—who’d also accompanied her as an unofficial bodyguard—took the fan’s smartphone to snap the pic.
Dressed in a mini-skirt and fishnet stockings, Chase stood for more than a few images with the fan. “And at some point we did this pose where he is facing the camera and he put his hands around my waist,” recalled the adult performer, whose legal name The Daily Beast is withholding out of privacy concerns. “My back was turned toward the camera, kind of like a butt shot, and then out of nowhere he proceeded to put his hands in my butt, like, underneath my skirt.”
The 30-year-old adult performer described having “froze” with fear. “I didn’t know what was going on. I flinched. He took his hands off, and then he did it again.”
Her photographer friend was unaware of the alleged groping, Chase said, because “I didn’t want to make a scene. I didn’t act like I needed help.” The unidentified assailant, she said, may have been “trying to finger” her. “He saw nothing wrong with it. He was having fun with it,” Chase remarked.
“Once this whole thing was over, I left to smoke a cigarette—and I don't even smoke,” she continued. “It was very traumatic.”
Chase’s photographer, who spoke to The Daily Beast under the condition of anonymity, corroborated the adult performer having told him what happened immediately following the alleged assault.
“It is a horrible situation,” he said. “I was never sure what happened, but I immediately knew something was wrong, and I had to watch [her] jump through the mental hurdles to try to reasonably react to something that’s horrible.” If Chase had openly rebuffed the fan, the photographer said, “she would have been seen as a villain.” He added: “I feel like she was targeted for exploitation because she is in such a difficult position to receive justice.”
Adult expos like EXXXOTICA serve mainly as venues for adult stars of all stripes—hardcore porn performers, cam girls, independent content creators, etc.—to meet their fans in person, take photographs, sell merchandise, and introduce their work to new viewers. The conventions are often a source of lucrative new opportunities for adult performers.
“Hearing anything about alleged incidents from anyone who has attended EXXXOTICA such as these encounters is obviously alarming to us, and it is something we take very seriously,” said Dan Davis, director of operations of Three Expo Events, which produces EXXXOTICA, in a statement to The Daily Beast. “The alarming behavior of the few definitely casts a dark shadow on the industry as a whole. These ‘fans’ have to realize that these women are people. They are someone’s daughter, wife, girlfriend and human beings who deserve respect.”
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Davis continued: “We were one of the first, if not the first, events in the industry to adapt a Code of Conduct. This is posted in multiple places at the events such as in our show programs, with placards around the venues, handouts, and on our website. We also have posted and printed a dedicated security text alert where anyone in attendance for EXXXOTICA that goes direct to our security team and management 24 hours a day during our shows no matter where they are if they are experiencing any sort of issue that makes them feel uncomfortable or in danger or they witness someone in that situation.”
Indeed, according to its official code of conduct, EXXXOTICA “has a zero tolerance policy for… physical and sexual assault and/or battery, unwelcome physical contact of any kind, harassment of any kind.” And yet several adult performers who spoke with The Daily Beast relayed harrowing experiences at expos—and how they often don’t always feel comfortable speaking up about groping from fans.
“Fans get a little too touchy,” said adult-film actress Gigi Dior about her experience at adult expos. She alleged that an unidentified man groped her at the same 2021 EXXXOTICA convention where Chase said she was assaulted.
“There was this one guy, who kept coming back,” she recounted. “He would come up and pick you up and while he was holding you he would reach his hands in between your buttcheeks or grab your leg.” She added: “I’ve had guys walk up behind me and grab my boobs with their hands.”
Dior, whose legal name The Daily Beast is also withholding out of privacy concerns, said she once had to physically fight off a fan at a 2022 convention in Los Angeles.
“I was just walking around and a fan wanted a photo,” she recalled. “He grabbed the back of my head and started pulling me in to kiss him, and I kept fighting back, and fighting back, and I was pulling my head back and he would pull me in.” Dior continued: “A lot of these times we’re by ourselves, and security was nowhere to be found. I finally elbowed him in his ribs and pulled away. By the time I found security he was long gone.”
Overly aggressive fans are a common experience at adult-industry expos, said Kendra Sunderland, a 27-year-old porn actress who rose to fame after her amateur video from a college library went viral online. “I have been doing conventions since the beginning of my career, and there’s always somebody at every convention,” she explained. “It’s always a problem.” Sunderland said that at various conventions she’s had men put their hands underneath her skirt and inappropriately touch her without her consent.
Sunderland’s experience with alleged assault at porn expos has been made public before. In 2017, she told Rolling Stone about how disgraced ex-porn star Ron Jeremy pulled out her breast and sucked on it without her consent at a Dallas convention two years prior. “It was brushed off… because he is who he is,” she told The Daily Beast. “At the end of the day, it wasn’t appropriate behavior.” (Jeremy was later charged more than 30 counts of sexual assault but the trial is being scrapped owing to his “severe dementia.”)
In addition to outlining clear codes of conduct, most expos do provide security guards. Adult content creator Marcela Alonso told The Daily Beast that at the same Chantilly-based EXXXOTICA event in 2022, a fan came into her booth and began to physically assault her. “I had to scream and yell,” she said. “EXXXOTICA security kicked him out."
As Davis added in EXXXOTICA’s statement: “Our top priority with EXXXOTICA or any events we produce is always to provide a safe and enjoyable environment for everyone who attends—from the talent to exhibitors to attendees. We have dedicated security professionals on our staff that are familiar with the industry and travel with us from city to city, as well as the subcontracting of licensed security companies at each event. As the shows have grown in size, so have our needs and size of those contracted professionals. If we are alerted to an issue we will quickly respond to it, and remove any individual(s) who have broken our Code of Conduct and alert local authorities if necessary.”
But security personnel cannot be everywhere all at once. And so, in some cases, the adult performers are forced to take matters into their own hands.
Porn actress September Reign, who asked to keep her legal name private, recalled threatening a handsy fan at the 2017 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. “If you touch me again in that way, I’m going to break your finger so I don’t think you want to continue to do that,” she said she told one man who’d groped her at her booth. “Obviously that made him mad and he walked away.” (Soon after that incident, Reign claimed, she was roofied at the expo when she took a sip of a drink she believes was spiked with gamma hydroxybutyrate, a common date-rape drug.)
While all of the adult industry workers who spoke with The Daily Beast agreed that expos can be a hotbed of inappropriate behavior from fans, they don’t necessarily blame the organizers or the security guards provided by them. The real problem, the women agreed, is the misguided way some male fans view adult performers, often assuming that because they engage in sexual activity for a living they must welcome unwanted advances elsewhere.
“‘How do you assault a porn star or an adult creator?’“ Chase said some people have asked her in the past. “People literally think that it’s impossible because we sexualize things on camera, and we seem to enjoy them, and they can’t tell the fantasy from the reality a lot of times.” However, she continued, “The answer is the same way you would assault any other woman: By violating the consent… They think because we twerk on Twitter they can just come up on it, touch it, or spank people.”
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Appearing at public events, Sunderland said, can be “taxing” enough as it is, and so when attendees “make you feel like a piece of meat, just an object to them, that’s just a crappy feeling.” She added: “No one likes to feel like that. It’s not good for your mental health to feel like an object or piece of meat.”
Dior agreed. “You have to be cute and flirty, and yet you’re trying to keep a firm boundary between you and the rest of the convention,” she said. “It’s an armor, it’s a facade. It’s wanting them to buy your products, and follow your social media, and buy your products, and wanting them to become a loyal social-media fan, and come to these conventions to buy things and see you. So you want that attainability to be there enough, but you have to also keep it just far enough they want it.” She lamented that being an adult performer in public can be a “psychological game” in which “you’re playing with everybody” while having to be able to think and react quickly if someone becomes aggressive. “One false move and it can be the difference between another trauma in my life, versus being able to sleep that night.”
Ultimately, Chase has decided not to attend EXXXOTICA conventions since her alleged assault and is hesitant about public appearances in general. She worries that until some men better understand consent, especially as it applies to adult entertainment workers, such events may never be fully safe for performers.
“I’ll always be a ‘ho’ no matter what. I have plenty of achievements outside of this. I’ll still be a ‘ho’ the rest of my life, and that label will never ever be corrected. It’s hard to deal with it,” Chase concluded. “That’s why it’s important to talk about this because the fans who attend these conventions need to understand we are human, not just fuck toys.”
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