Maitland Ward Became a Porn Superstar and Was Shunned by Hollywood

Elizabeth Berkley was canoodling with a man as I exited Whole Foods with a bag of produce on my hip. I hate the word “canoodling” but that’s what it was—less passion, more noodle, with a “can” added to the front for encouragement.

She pulled away from the man, her face pickling as she witnessed me—a woman with a bun atop her head, clumsily managing a bag of vegetables, who also happens to fuck men with dicks as big as the zucchinis poking out of the sack on camera. Not taking her eyes off me, Elizabeth leaned into the man’s ear for a whisper, playing it as coolly as that time her character on Saved by the Bell hid her addiction to No-Doze. His mouth slacked, fanning a wave at the shocked girl who once set out to shock the world with Showgirls. I knew what was happening immediately as I’ve seen those looks before. A Disney princess turned porn star isn’t something you see every day carrying produce.

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It’s not an easy task, growing away from a family-sitcom image, especially one that’s perennially canonized on afternoon repeats. Whether they realize they’re doing it or not, people will throw your life up against your character—one you played when you were practically a child. In order to keep their own youth sacred, they want you to perpetually take up the size and space you did on the television sets in their high school bedrooms. Of course, going by those dimensions, we’re required to remain young, fuzzy, and eternally ten inches tall. There comes a point where you have to break free and be who you want to be or let the box you’ve been sealed in become a coffin.

As I started to walk the path toward adult entertainment, naysayers would say I was just seeking cheap fame. That, or I had been drugged, forced into it, or I just lost my mind. But I did not make a sex tape to garner attention like Paris or Kim. I wasn’t trying to copycat them and get a quick fifteen minutes. I wanted a long-term commitment doing something I loved and that I could be proud of. I wanted years. And that’s something mainstream Hollywood has long denied me.

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Porn has given me that.

But being an adult star is not without its pitfalls. I get a lot of stares, even in a supposedly open-minded melting pot like Los Angeles. Eyes the size of saucers, waiting for anything hot and steamy I have to pour. Open mouths and thick tongues tripping over the words to ask me what it was like to work on Boy Meets World, when they really want to know what’s it like to projectile squirt on cue. Then again, they probably want to know both.

I fall into an odd category. I should be banished and excommunicated for kicking down the fourth wall and fucking on camera, but Boy Meets World is what a lot of the executives today grew up on, and when you jerk off to a girl on TV as a teenager, you’re more likely to keep eyes on her. I’ve become sort of a horticultural science experiment you keep in that old high school bedroom. Something you watch to see if it ends up blooming or choking from the twist of its own vines.

Then there are those that crawl out from the shadows—men, mostly, who knew me years before. Some in Hollywood, some in high school. I may have forgotten their names, but they sure know mine now.

“Wow, it’s been so long. I just happened to find you on my Instagram scroll thing, like out of nowhere, there was your face. Give me a call. Maybe we can catch up over drinks. It’s been so fucking long and I have no idea what you’re up to. I’d love to hear all about… that.”

That was a message left on my phone from a guy I met at a festival years before. The extent of our connection can be tied to boozy line dancing and free ski equipment from the swag room. And he’s not the only one. All the messages and attempts to “reconnect” are the same. There must be some universal response sewn into men’s ball sacks at birth. Once your friend becomes a porn star you must salute her with your shorts.

They always act like they have no clue what I’m up to but when I tell them they don’t act surprised. They laugh nervously, high-pitched, and I can imagine them adjusting themselves as they make a conversational joke of some kind, and then pursue the drinks option harder. Strange, if I didn’t know anything about what a person has done or been for the past five or ten years, I’d certainly spit-take if they told me they’re an internationally known porn star with an award-winning vagina I could buy and set on my nightstand. But then again, they already knew that.

Tori Spelling’s husband propositioned me on Twitter. He wrote me several times and asked if we could meet up and I don’t think it was to discuss his rock collection—or maybe it was. Celebrities, especially sports stars, would hit me up regularly. Football star Terrell Owens asked me to a movie and wanted to know when we could hang out. He repeatedly wrote me and when I wouldn’t give him the answer he wanted, he unfollowed me.

I’ve been unfollowed a lot. The reasons may be different but it all stems from the same place. I’m a sex worker now. Matthew Lillard, who starred alongside me in the indie film Dish Dogs, found out I did porn and dodged me like a bullet about to hit him. No explanations, no goodbyes. Terry Crews, who I starred in White Chicks with, did that too. But he’s been an anti-porn crusader for years, so I am the target of his cause. It’s so disheartening to me that grown, intelligent men can’t feel comfortable enough in their own skin to be friends with a sex worker. As if me being in porn now changed who I was as a person. That my value is virtue. I am not alone in this; this is something sex workers deal with on a daily basis.

My Boy Meets World co-stars haven’t come out against me or tried to shame me, but for the most part they haven’t defended me publicly either. I guess I’m an elephant in the room.

I take it back—I did run into Will Friedle at a comic con soon after my big debut in Drive. I was wearing a speed racer getup to promote my first huge porn feature film and he was just like I remember him: sweet, cute Will signing at a table promoting his successful Batman animated series. I was with Dave, my gray-haired, bespectacled photographer, at the time. The one known to my fans for following me around these kinds of things and sewing me into all my skimpy cosplay costumes—photos of him threading fishing wire through my barely-there metal Red Sonja bikini got him loads of attention when they appeared in the Daily Mail. He really could, in stereotypical fashion, be mistaken for a man in a back room coordinating drug-infested orgies while he polishes off a pack of cigarettes that never seek an ashtray. In actuality, he gets more excitement over a big gulp of Diet Coke at the 7-Eleven.

Will stared at him as I approached. Fans waiting in line recognized our reunion and snapped pictures. I had just had my massive press splash for my career shift, and everyone knew my career was now in porn, so photographic evidence of this was especially exciting. Will’s eyes grew wide the closer I got—that saucer effect—though I knew for sure he didn’t want to ask me what it was like to work on Boy Meets World, and he definitely didn’t want to know about the projectile squirting. What he asked me was if I was happy, eyes still cutting to the man he saw snapping photos of our reunion that would later be published in the press, and I assured him that I was. He gave me that same big Will bear hug.

My photographer and I joked later that I should have whispered to him that this weird, old, gray-haired man follows me around with a camera and makes me do it all. People are always expecting some sort of admission like this, though now that I’ve found such success and wrote my memoir it’s expected less and less. It’s reassuring to know that if this had been the case, Will would’ve punched him and saved me. But I’ve never been the type that needed saving, and Will knew that. Instead, he told me he was happy for me, and though he never wanted to see anything I was doing, he wished me great success with it.

Michael Jacobs, the executive producer for Boy Meets World, is a different story.

Two days after the news broke, I saw Michael and his wife walking ahead of me down the street, but I don’t think they saw me. I ducked away in a store to avoid them and watched them pass the windows and head into a restaurant a few doors down.

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Was I embarrassed to see them? No, actually. Did I think he would confront me or yell at me? Possibly, though that wasn’t my motivating factor for hiding away from them either. The truth is, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being able to give me that smug, fatherly look and tell me all the reasons he thought I had failed, when I was succeeding on my own terms more than ever. And he would have. To him, I have ruined the image of his show. He wanted me forever tied to the squeaky-clean, wholesome mirage he created for me, and to never step out of the lines he drew. Me, living on my own terms, is a face outside of a cage he couldn’t look at. I didn’t want to give Michael the satisfaction to make any commentary on my life and how I chose to live it. I finally took my place of power in the world and I wouldn’t allow him even a tiny crumb of it back.

And I haven’t seen him since. Though I now regret not facing him to tell him I was no longer his little girl.

As I passed Elizabeth that day, with my jumble of phallic vegetables and mop of hair threatening to obscure my vision, I didn’t dip my head or retreat from her stare. Instead, I blew the hair away from my eyes and I met it. I realized she was giving me the same reaction she wanted from everyone years earlier—that mix of befuddlement and shock, and an underlying awe that you’ve done something others only dream of daring to do. So, I smiled at her, and skipped off with my zucchini. The one that her eyes perceived as too big to handle.

It takes a professional.

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