“For some producers, actresses are just meat. We’re at the factory.” In January 2019, Angel Piaff left the world of porn to become Lenka Chadrabova again. During her eight years as an adult actress, she filmed nineteen times for the paid site of the group of the leader of the sector xVideospreviously named LegalPorno. In an episode of Cash Investigation on the giants of the pornographic industry, which we were able to preview, and which will be broadcast this Thursday, September 28, 2023 at 9:10 p.m. on France 2, the former X-rated actress confides. “LegalPorno is becoming more and more hardcore”she admits. “For me, fans of this kind of scene are crazy. They don’t know what it’s like to be humiliated, to be penetrated simultaneously by several men. They want to push us to go further and further and I don’t know where the limit will be. When will they say: “ok, that’s enough”? The young woman began her career in the porn industry in 2011. And, despite her experience, Lenka Chadrabova admits that filming for this site was particularly trying. “Every time I had to shoot an anal scene for LegalPornoI was really scared. During the preparation for the shoot, I didn’t eat, I was really stressed, I couldn’t sleep.” In a poignant testimony, the former porn actress candidly describes “a world of pain”.
On porn sites as elsewhere, the customer is king
During her visits to film sets, she describes using an effective method: dissociation, which means thinking about something else so as not to concentrate on what they were experiencing (most often an emotional self-defense mechanism against trauma, editor’s note). Sometimes she would ask the actors to pull her hair or slap her, so that the physical pain would focus on her upper body rather than her private parts. “I often bled on set for LegalPorno (…) I remember a scene where I was just told to go clean up and come back to the set.” The young woman complies. It’s her salary that’s at stake. And she won’t get a cent if she doesn’t finish the scene in question. One day, an opportunity arises to obtain an exclusive contract with the paid site that offers this content hardcore. To achieve this, Lenka must film a double anal penetration scene and have urination on her face. A sort of audition for the X actress, to whom the big boss promised other juicy contracts if she proved convincing. Only, when the video is online, an Internet user posts the following comment: “she closed her eyes to avoid urine”. Despite the fact that the other comments are all laudatory, nothing more is needed for the boss of LegalPorno : the deal is canceled and Lenka does not get her contract, all because of a single comment, assures the young woman. Fortunately, today, all that is a thing of the past for Lenka Chadrabova. Married, she is currently self-employed. But many other women are still victims of this system.
Better supervision of porn production: an imperative?
In September 2022, the Senate published an information report entitled Porn: the hell of the decor. In it, Laure Beccuau, public prosecutor at the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office, draws up a clear observation: “the incriminations applicable to violent pornographic sites are numerous: aggravated rape, sexual assault, acts of torture and barbarism, trafficking in human beings, pimping (…) The pornographic environment is now almost exclusively that of violence.” It is based in particular on a study of the Scelles Foundationpublished in 2019, Pornography: still not a love story. For their study, the researchers viewed pornographic scenes and found that 90% of them included scenes of violence. The High Council for Equality also identified in April 2023 13,898 videos with the keyword “torture” on the four main pornographic sites, reports The Parisian June 5, 2023. Scenes that sometimes have a terrible impact in real life: “Studies reveal that spectators of the pornographic industry are essentially men who, after having seen films with this degree of violence, tend to to want reproduce scenes in their intimate lives“, alerts Laure Beccuau. Thus, the more Internet users are exposed to this type of violent content, the more this violence will be normalized, including in real life. For some, regulation of the sector is no longer enough; an entire industry needs to be reviewed. Thus, the French association Dare to feminism! campaigns for the pure and simple abolition of pornography.
