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BELLADONNA IN THE NEWS
By Fayner | March 9, 2008
I met BellaDonna years ago right after she began her career in the adult business. At the time I was brand new to LA and the porn racket, but I must admit I didn’t think she had much of a career ahead of her, what with the gap-tooth and huge tattoo on her shoulder.
Boy was I wrong, huh?
Many years later BellaDonna is still going strong. Her gap-tooth is legendary. New talent is compared to her. Tattoos are now accepted.
Did I mention she is also a mother?
Good for Bella.
When a young Belladonna appeared tear-stained and shaken on primetime US television in 2003, few would have predicted a bright future for the raven-haired adult film starlet.
Her first pornographic film role required the 20-year-old to embrace “anal”, a style of sex the daughter of a Mormon bishop had never tried, let alone rehearsed or prepared for.
Soon after that came “The Gangbang Girl #29″, in which 12 men dressed as prison inmates pummelled, probed and battered her into sexual submission.
In the two years the American film crew followed her around, cameras captured Belladonna’s traumatic transformation from naive Utah schoolgirl (her birth name was Michelle) to “ultra hardcore” porn specialist.
Along the way there were tears, drug use, major health scares and numerous trips back home in unsuccessful attempts to leave the industry.
But that was 2003.
The Belladonna who flew into Brisbane last week as the star attraction at Sexpo was light-years from the hesitant, confused girl America met five years ago.
“I’m just in a happy place now and I have my daughter who just completely made my life worth something more,” she says, referring to the family unit she managed to create working in the midst of an at times brutal industry.
“When I met my husband I was already in a process of taking an effort to improve myself and when I met him he just really showed me I was worth it.
“From that point on I just found books that really helped me feel more secure with myself and then I found yoga and mediation.”
That “improvement” process has paid off for the petite and eager to please 26-year-old, who now directs as many films as she performs in and only takes the jobs she wants.
“I started my own company and now I make my own movies under Evil Angel, another company that lets you own your own product,” she says.
“Everything I do is what I want to do and I get everything for it, which is a big difference from when you’re just getting paid a rate for a single scene.”
Belladonna - or Bella as she prefers - also says she learnt from her tough formative years in the industry and is a considerate director who doesn’t spring her actors with surprise scenes or manoeuvres they are not paid for.
“No-one ever ends up doing something they don’t want to do because I went through so much of that in the beginning,” she says.
“I think the performers themselves enjoy working for me because they can come on set and know they’ll never be put in that situation.”
“A lot of the stuff I do is quite intense and a bit taboo,” she says, cross-legged in a naughty navy blue jumpsuit and staring out from under a thick black fringe.
They are necessary, she contends, to defend the niche she has carved out for herself as an ultra hardcore performer and her industry-bestowed status as “the dirtiest girl in porn”.
The sexual feats require extensive physical preparation and despite its risks - she last year battled an outbreak of herpes - Bella insists producing, directing, starring in and editing hardcore porn is an enjoyable day job.
“It’s a great career and it’s something amazing - the problem is that people out there have just put it down so much,” she says.
“I don’t just do (the work) to do it, I do it with passion. I think it’s different when people out there are shooting stuff just because it’s going to sell.”
She has no plans to leave the porn world in the near future but concedes her three-year-old daughter’s presence makes her think twice.
“There’s been times when I’ve been ‘I don’t know if I want to do this anymore because of how my daughter’s gong to have a hard time’, so I’ve really had to talk that through with my husband and learn how to be okay with it,” she says.
“I know she’s going to have moments where she’s going to call me a whore or something - I did that and my mom didn’t even do porn - so I think if you just know that it’s going to be there and hopefully surround her with sex-positive talk, it’ll be okay.”
What if daughter wanted to follow in mum’s footsteps?
“I would definitely be there for her, because if I didn’t it would be like saying what I’m doing is wrong,” she says.
In the meantime, Bella is an outspoken advocate of safe sex, outlining in a video blog her monthly testing regime for the gamut of sexually transmitted infections she could contract.
“Learn from me okay,” she urges viewers. “Practise safe sex or don’t have sex at all.”
On her blogs and in the flesh, there is still naivety about the 26-year-old international star.
It could be the gap between her two front teeth, the hint of a lisp in her speech or the black pigtails.
But somehow, in spite of her rough early years in a brutal industry, Bella has maintained a sort of wide-eyed charm that sits awkwardly with her on-camera persona.
Looking back, she says she “learned the hard way” but maintains if it wasn’t porn, her 18-year-old self would have chosen an equally extreme lifestyle.
“Oh it was going to be something I’d go crazy in,” she says. “Drugs, alcohol, anything. I chose porn.”
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March 20th, 2008 at 10:07 am
[…] a sort of wide-eyed charm that sits awkwardly with her on-camera persona…. source: BELLADONNA IN THE NEWS, Scott […]