Crissy Moran, Former Porn Star, Has a New Life and Is 'Fasting' From Men
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| Nanette Gonzales |
| After six years in porn, Crissy Moran is helping women heal from "sexual brokenness." |
Crissy Moran holds a pair of drumsticks, her long, slender fingers clanking off-rhythm as she looks up at a monitor above, following along to the directions of Guitar Hero.
Eyes smoky, lips pouty and dark brown hair flowing over her shoulders, Moran, flanked by an all-girl band, shreds "With or Without You" on a dimly lit stage in a bar tucked deep in the Valley. The lead singer, blonde and doe-eyed, hits every note -- off-key. It's so bad that members of the audience join in out of sympathy. But Moran doesn't seem to notice, her gaze trailing off in space as if she's dreaming.
The crowd of a half-dozen at the bar doesn't know what to make of the group's music, FYI, but patrons are enraptured by the beautiful disaster onstage. A few boos are mixed in with catcalls, and then silence.
Moran and her "bitches," as the bar's MC repeats on the mic, are here for her birthday. Her 26th, her girlfriends joke, taking their seats to down Cadillac margaritas and munch onion rings. Rotating in their atmosphere, a steady stream of hanger-on Casanovas crash like asteroids. She looks familiar, they say.
She gets that a lot.
"He was like, OK, take off your bra. And I was shaking. I didn't know what he was doing at that moment. Most women in the business come from backgrounds of sexual abuse, so for me, because I did, too, when he said that, I froze. I disconnected."
Crissy Moran once was one of the biggest names in porn. She spent six years in front of the camera. At the top of her game, she earned about $15,000 a month from her website alone. Roped into the business after falling into a rabbit hole of abusive boyfriends, the self-described "relationship junkie" now does penance as an outreach specialist to women in the adult entertainment industry. Moran works for Treasures, a 501(c)3 nonprofit founded in 2003 by a former dancer to help women heal from what she calls "sexual brokenness."
Moran's brokenness stems from early sexual abuse, she says, followed by a string of abusive partners.
"I was a relationship addict," Moran reveals, sitting in a black leather chair at Treasures' office. "After so many of these relationships, I hit rock bottom, because the breakups were so hard. Each one was taking something different, or maybe the same, just more of it, and I was left alone. After one particular breakup, I went online and I started doing online dating. ... I was doing crazy things. I flew to New York and I met a man; I drove my car six hours to meet a guy. I had to have somebody."
The journey into porn started in Moran's home state of Florida, where she first started posing topless. From there, a new boyfriend started pushing her to work "with females and himself, which I really didn't want to do, either. He controlled my money and gave me a very small allowance to buy whatever I wanted, but all of my money went into his bank account."
They moved to California together, and the relationship became abusive. Moran describes it as jailer/prisoner: trapped and physically overpowered by her boyfriend, a mixed martial arts fighter.
"He would hide my car keys. ... He pulled me around by my hair when he was angry and he punched me in the back of my head. One time in Hawaii he got angry with me, and I ran as fast as I could to the elevator, but before it came, he grabbed me and took me back to the room, where he beat me. Another time I jumped out of his car and I ran into a convenience store, yelling, 'Call the police, he's going to kill me.' There were at least 10 people looking at me, and they watched him carry me away. ... Nobody cared about me. My family wasn't present in my life."
Getting emotional, she talks about her cries for help: "It goes way back to childhood. It just felt like I didn't have anybody."
UP NEXT: Moran describes how she broke free from the cycle of abuse, and how websites are still making money off her image, but she isn't.
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