For my Daily Beast article about Mistress Snow, a college professor who is a dominatrix, I did background research on famous people who did porn and other forms of sex work while in college. Tasha Reign—who did porn in part to pay her way through UCLA, and was also doing porn during her recent master’s program in journalism at USC—told me that her friend Brett Rossi also did porn while in college.
Brett was kind enough to grant me an exclusive interview on this topic; she has never publicly discussed the relationship between her porn career and her college education.
How did you come to do porn while in college?
I was a runway model since I was 14. Once I turned 18, I started working at the Playboy Mansion as one of Hef’s little painted girls for parties. I was introduced to somebody who worked for Penthouse, and it went from there. At first, I was mostly just a centerfold in the beginning. I started doing hard-core girl/girl scenes in 2010, when I was 21.
The sole purpose of me entering the adult business was because I had to survive for myself. My family was not poor, but we were not rich either. When I turned 17, I moved out on my own where I was not supported or helped financially by anyone but myself. Before porn, I had gotten a lucrative job as a mattress salesperson where I moved up the ladder quickly and became a manager. After I got into the adult entertainment industry, I started using the money that I was making there to go to nursing school in Los Angeles, in 2018, when I was 29.
I wanted to become a trauma nurse because when I was in high school, I lost my very first boyfriend to a drinking and driving accident. The trauma nurses kept him alive for 3 days. They worked so hard and fought so hard for his life that I always admired them and wanted to fight to save lives like them.
I was still doing porn to pay for school when I started. But I was outed by a student, and I was bullied out of nursing school.
Ugh, I’m so sorry that happened to you; that’s awful. If you don’t mind me asking, what did the bullying involve?
I was the class president. I had the highest grade in the class. I stayed after class and would tutor these girls. I literally gave my all to this school. And one day, one of my classmates that I was friendly with, came up to me and she said, “Hey, I have to tell you that there’s a whole text thread of the girls making fun of you because you’re a porn star. I don’t judge you, but these girls are judging you.”
A fellow student at school, whom I thought was a friend, had done some Internet sleuthing, and found out everything about me. I asked to see the thread. They were saying the most heinous things about me, making jokes, saying, “At least I’m not a porn star ha-ha-ha-ha.” Calling me a whore. The usual bullshit that people say about sex workers. Just stupid words that don’t mean anything. Like, really? Calling me a whore is going to hurt my feelings at this point? You develop a thick skin to quickly in the sex industry, because you get called that all the time.
Them talking shit and having a whole thread about me, that didn’t even didn’t hurt my feelings. What hurt my feelings was that I’m going out of my way to help these people because I thought these people were my friends and would accept me for who I was. I was really hurt, because in nursing school your classmates become almost like family, because you spend so much time with them, in such intense circumstances.
And I was planning on telling them, “Hey, this is my past,” when I was ready. Instead, they forced me to come out before I was ready. My former friend and her friends outed me to the entire school. Everyone. The students, the deans, the professors. I was terrified she would tell the doctors and nurses at my clinicals in the hospital, and I would be kicked out of the hospital and unable to become a nurse. I left my first year. I was actually bullied out of school by my fellow students.
I don’t understand why people lose their civilian jobs for doing porn outside of their civilian jobs. It’s perfectly legal. As long as they’re doing their civilian job well, it’s none of anyone’s business what you do outside of that job.
It was very sensitive to me. It triggered some PTSD that I have. It was a form of sexual harassment. Talk about a hostile learning environment! And so, I just bailed, because I don’t like confrontation at all. I’m not a confrontational person. I was just like, “I can’t. This is just not a conducive environment for my education or even my wellbeing. If these people are going to sit here and talk about how I pay my bills, then it’s just going to get worse. So I might as well leave.” I probably should have stayed and proved them all wrong. But I mean, it just wasn’t a healthy environment.
It’s not fair, because people don’t know what I’ve been through. They don’t know my walk of life. I work really hard for my money, and the fact that they’re bullying me, it’s like: “Excuse me, but I’m the one with my life together. I’m the one that’s able to pay for school in cash. I’m the one that’s not accumulating debt. I’m the one who’s staying after school, without getting paid, just to be nice and tutor you guys because you’re falling behind.”
I never told anyone I was being bullied. It just happened so quickly and I got so upset that I just left. The dean wanted a conversation. I just couldn’t bring myself to having a conversation with someone who thought so highly of me. I was afraid he would judge me like everyone else.
Instead, when I left, the dean ended up writing me a really nice email telling me that he was sorry to see me go, that those who spit on my back would be behind me soon. It was a really heartfelt email from him letting me know that he saw great potential in me, even though I had gone through what I had gone through at school. That really meant a lot to me. But I was so embarrassed. I just left school one day and never came back. It hurt so bad—it really hurt my mental health.
It was a really shitty time. But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
I’m so sorry, that’s awful and it should never have happened to you. What happened after that? And how was it a blessing in disguise?
After that, I decided to go to UCLA and do their EMT program. I stopped doing porn for a while, and focused on my studies there. Fortunately, no one there found out I did porn, and it was a normal student experience.
I became a licensed EMT in 2019. I worked on an ambulance doing critical care, in 24-hours shifts, for a total of 72 hours a week. I was doing that right up until the pandemic hit. And I just realized that it wasn’t for me.
They were long days and most of the time I felt overworked for the amount of pay I was receiving. The dream of “saving people’s lives” was slowly fleeting, due solely to burn out and how awful we are treated by hospital staff. Soon, people dying became a regular thing that made me become cold and depressed. It wasn’t the people dying that affecting me, it was dealing with the families who lost a loved one and knowing you let them down because you couldn’t save their loved one’s life.
I’m so glad that I experienced that part of the medical field before I invested so many more years to become a nurse; I’m glad that I didn’t invest even more schooling into something that I would later realize wasn’t for me.
I decided to go back to a different college, to study business. And then the pandemic hit, and right when I started knocking away some of my classes, we went into the first lockdown. So I had to do all my college courses on Zoom—statistics, science, English, you name it. It was really challenging. Though I loved the in-person classes, I really didn’t like doing 10 hours of classes a day on Zoom.
So I decided to totally switch it up and go to cosmetology school instead. I decided to be in an industry that is more open, that won’t judge me for my adult career, and that is adjacent to the same industry that I’ve been in my entire life, the entertainment sector. It’s all about making people feel beautiful. I do 10 hour days, 3 days a week at the beauty school salon where we work on clients’ hair and study theory as well, like chemistry surprisingly! The plan is to start off small and start with my own private salon studio and eventually have my own salon where I can rent chairs to other stylists. And I can still do my OnlyFans without jeopardizing my career.
I started at my OnlyFans, and within six months, I made $150,000. I make more on OnlyFans than I ever did doing adult movies. And I was a contract star in the adult industry. I had several contracts. I was a Penthouse Pet. There’s only so far you can progress in the studio-based adult industry. The industry was so much different back then when I started than it is now. Never in our wildest dreams did we think we could be able to create our own content and make three times more a day than what we would make, spending 12 hours on set filming a feature film. I haven’t done a film in like a year and a half. Simply because I make so much on my own. It’s like, “Why would I go to set for 12 hours and make peanuts compared to what I make sitting at my home for an hour’s worth of work?” I mean, there’s more that goes into OnlyFans than that, but you get the idea.
In fact, online sex work, like OnlyFans, is one of the only careers that has stayed afloat and even expanded during the pandemic.
What do you wish people bully or shame porn stars and sex workers knew about porn performers and about sex workers in general?
I wish they knew how business savvy we really are. The stereotype is that we’re all drugged up and have daddy issues. And yeah, there are people who have drug addictions and family dynamic issues or what have you, but that’s true in every type of job; it’s not just the adult industry. That’s just a stereotype that was created around the adult industry. Everyone just thinks, “Well, what do you know? You’re a dumb whore.” And it’s like, “actually, I know a lot.” I ran my own business essentially since I was a child, as a model. And then as a porn performer, after I turned 18. I’m a business marketer. I’m a business accountant. I’m a business administrator. I adopt all of these trades, and most women in the industry do.
It’s sad, because a lot of us get into this industry because we’re trying to set ourselves up for a better future. But that scarlet letter is always attached to you. So whatever future you’re trying to set up, you have to be really aware that you will have a scarlet letter, and you just have to own it. That’s one thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older. You just have to really own your past. Because you can’t change it, and you don’t want to be ashamed of it.
Is your family supportive of your career?
The reason why I wanted to be a nurse is because of the societal norm. It’s what my family told me I should do because it’s normal. Like, “Why can’t you be normal?” I’ve always been the taboo, maverick individual in my family. And although I have a lot of support from my family, no matter what I do, they always made these little jabs like, “Why can’t you do something normal? Why can’t you be a nurse? Why do you have to sell your body to make a living?”
But you know, my grandmother is my best friend. She actually used to be a Pepsi-Cola model. And she is so proud of me and supports me 100%, no matter what I do. She’s been the backbone of everything. So I felt like, “Oh, I need to become a nurse to make her proud.” Then when I had the discussion with her, saying, “Hey, I don’t want to be a nurse, and here’s why,” she was very supportive.
So now I am just doing me, and I’m still going to school. I still want to get my business degree. So when I open up my own salon, I know what I’m doing. It’s always nice to have a degree under your belt, because why not? Education is very important to me. Learning is very important to me. I think you should constantly be learning, and if you’re not learning, you’re stagnant. And if you’re stagnant, you’re wasting time and life.
