Paying a Lifelong Price for Porn Stint

May 27, 2004 -- The frail, waif-like porn actress Lara Roxx has become one of the most recognized names inside the porn industry today — but not in a way she ever expected.

[WARNING: This article contains descriptions of sexual acts that some readers may find offensive.]

She got her start in porn earlier this year, and worked for only three months. But just a few weeks later, her name hit national headlines in the mainstream media.

Roxx, 21, was one of two adult sex performers identified as having tested positive for HIV in April, causing an industry shut down. The other was a man with the stage name Darren James.

Altogether, at least 53 performers were exposed to the two infected actors — either directly or indirectly — and were quarantined for a month. Three others so far have tested positive.

Roxx says she went into the porn world to get money for school. For that gamble, she is paying a lifetime price.

"Who's going to want to marry me? Who's going to want to have a dog and kids with me, you know, and a house? No one," she told ABC News.

Descent to Tragedy

Roxx (also a stage name) grew up an only child in a French-Canadian middle-class home in Montreal.

She says her parents often bickered, and eventually divorced. "Seeing that my parents were unhappy together — that made me unhappy," she said.

She says she always tried to get their attention as a child, but when she became a teenager, she began to act up.

Her parents put her in a facility for troubled teens. Afterwards, she got a job in a strip club in Montreal. Then to earn some extra money she got an agent, and thought she would do a short stint in porn movies.

Roxx says she was firm: she would not have any unconventional intercourse, and absolutely no scenes without a condom. But, she says, her agent pushed her to do more.

It’s All About Money

"You're pretty young, like 18-21, and the men that are getting you in there are like 40-80," Roxx said. "So it's easy for them to make you accept ideas that you wouldn't have accepted from somebody your age."

A big trend in the adult entertainment world these days is something called "gonzo" porn — a whole area of movies where anything goes, said Sharon Mitchell, a former adult movie star who now runs a clinic that tests performers for sexually transmitted diseases.

"It's as extreme as possible, it's multiple penetrations," she said. "It's all about unprotected anal sex. A few people still do vanilla, regular sex, but for the most part it's as kinky as they can get and as much as they can push it as possible."

Mitchell said at the heart of the matter is money: "The distributors can only distribute to so many countries if there is a condom on. It sells more if there's not a condom on."

A Losing Proposition

New to the business, Roxx agreed to go to Los Angeles to make a movie with a man named Mark, an actor/director who impressed her by saying he had worked with her favorite hip-hop artist, Snoop Dogg.

Roxx's agent told her not to go, that she'd be eaten alive. But she went anyway, planning for a short stay, and wondering how bad it could be.

"I really thought, people in the industry were really clean and got tested, like, regularly," she said.

On the set, she was told she would not be participating in the kind of regular sex scene she expected — it would be anal sex with two men at the same time. Darren James was one of them.

"I freaked out. My heart started beating really fast and I was like, well, uh — I don't know," she said. "And he's like, well, it's either that or we don't need you."

And, Roxx says, she had to pay back the $1,100 plane ticket to Los Angeles. The scene with the two men would pay her $1,300.

So she went through with it — but it was not easy, she said. She found herself mentally breaking out of her body and going to a corner of the room "where there's no Mark, there's no Darren, there's no camera. And I would look there and think about the sand, the beach."

Alone in the World

But when she woke up the next day, Roxx said she started aching and found she had a yeast infection.

Days later she was feeling tired all the time. She says she thought maybe she had mono. But the news Roxx received was worse: She was HIV positive.

She says she called Darren James after it emerged that he had tested positive for HIV, and left him a death threat on his answering machine. "I'm going to kill you and kill myself after," she says she told him. The other actor Roxx performed with has not tested positive so far.

Roxx was alone in Los Angeles. She'd only been there one month. In her $44-a-night hotel room, she tried to grapple with the horrifying news.

"I freaked out. I started yelling and punching the walls," she said.

She sought out former performer Bill Margold, who runs a helpline for people in the industry. "I held her in my arms, and she quaked like you'd been hit by 10 points on the Richter scale," he said.

Sunrise

Over the days that followed the public would learn the intimate details of how James had shot a movie in Brazil, where HIV rates are higher — condomless. He apparently contracted the deadly virus there.

"To me, somebody could have raped me and killed me and it would have been less upsetting to me and my family, you know?" Roxx said.

She says she thought about suicide. "I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of dying of HIV."

She stayed up all night struggling with what she'd do. But then she says, when the sun came up, "and when I heard the birds and I saw the sunshine, I felt like, 'I do not want to die.'"

"That's when … I chose to live."