Yahoo News This Porn Star Is Haunted by Bogus Sex Trafficking Rumors
A few weeks ago, rumors began spreading online that Nicole Doshi was missing.
Furthermore, the rumors claimed that the prominent new porn star was actually a sex-trafficking victim. One apparent instigator behind the claims not only plastered them all over forums and social media, they also sent what adult-industry blogger Mike South described as “a blitz of emails, DMs, and text messages” to people across the porn world, trying to find and save Doshi. They even said they’d filed a missing persons report with the LAPD, and urged people to come forward with info on her status.
But Doshi wasn’t missing. Nor is she a sex trafficking victim, she emphatically told The Daily Beast in an interview. In fact, when the rumors first took off, she was at a shoot—and feeling a bit confused about why “the director kept asking if I was OK,” she said.
When the production team eventually filled her in on the claims making the rounds, Doshi wasn’t fazed. Nor was she surprised when, after she took to Instagram and Twitter to assure everyone that she was fine, some commenters on social media insisted she was in imminent danger.
“This wasn’t the first time someone had made a claim like this about me,” Doshi explained. Just after her first professional, mainstream porn scene came out last year, she said, someone else attempted to flag her as a trafficking victim to the NYPD.
Many anti-porn and anti-trafficking groups have long argued that most (if not all) adult performers are actually victims in need of help—even if they say otherwise. Sex trafficking is, of course, a serious problem, and there have been several alleged and confirmed cases in the porn world. But most claims of pervasive abuse and trafficking in porn are based on dubious statistics, logical fallacies, and pure conjecture. So, like other sex workers, porn stars often have to contend with campaigns ostensibly created to help them, but that end up misrepresenting them and drawing attention away from their own efforts to address issues they do struggle with.
“It’s vicious, violent gaslighting that seeks to replace sex workers’ agency with the will of the rescuer,” Mike Stabile of the Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry trade association, told The Daily Beast.
But most save-the-sex-worker campaigns are broad efforts rather than attempts to rescue one individual, according to Kate D’Adamo, a sex-workers rights advocate. Neither Doshi nor any other adult performer The Daily Beast reached out to for this article knew of porn stars who faced such concerted attempts to convince others that they, personally, were a victim.
So how has Doshi become the singular target of a white knight crusade—not once, but twice? She suspects her most recent experience with these rumors, at least, is the result of a romance scam run amok.
Digital scammers often steal porn stars’ content to make fake accounts that they use to contact fans on social media. If a mark seems open to believing a porn star would message them from a private account, scammers try to bond with them—before inventing a crisis and asking this “friend” or “lover” to send cash to help. Usually, they stick to simple stories about, say, a big, unexpected health-care bill. But some fake porn star accounts spin tales about their desperation to escape abusive managers, banking on people’s willingness to believe any dire horror story coming out of the porn world.
A Sex Trafficking Survivor Is Turning Her Trauma Into Porn
The apparent instigator behind the false rumors about Doshi notably claimed in several posts that she was their friend, and they had hundreds of chat messages to prove it. Doshi says whoever may have messaged this individual was not her. This suggests that someone may have been posing as her—and that the would-be savior was the victim of a scam.
Fake Doshi supposedly told them that she was a trafficking victim and wanted to escape, but that she didn’t have her own phone and her agent didn’t let her control her email or social-media accounts. So, the would-be savior claimed, they helped her buy a new personal phone. One morning, Fake Doshi said that she was messaging them from the back of a truck. Then she stopped messaging. That apparently led this individual—who did not respond to a request for comment for this story—to assume the worst and start sounding the alarm.
Doshi’s agent has been accused of misconduct in the past, but she said her experience with him and his agency has been positive. And none of those past allegations match the extreme abuses Fake Doshi apparently described enduring. Still, given how primed many people are to see trafficking around every corner, past accusations might’ve been enough to convince some observers that the tale of Doshi’s disappearance was credible.
But Doshi thinks the bigger factor is probably the fact that she’s an East Asian woman and an immigrant. “People think because I’m from China and do porn, that I was trafficked,” she said.
That makes sense to D’Adamo, who points out that one of the images of a sex-trafficking victim many Americans may have in their heads is that of an East Asian immigrant coerced or forced into working in a massage parlor-slash-brothel.
In reality, as she’s explained in prior interviews, Doshi immigrated to America in 2013 to attend college, then later moved to New York, where she did work in a Chinatown beauty parlor giving massages—but was frustrated by the poor pay. After a client propositioned her for “extras,” she realized she could make more money offering sexual services on the sly, and did so for a few months until her boss caught her and promptly fired her. After trying other careers, she started selling her own nudes and solo videos to pay rent—before her success caught the mainstream porn world’s eye.
To an extent, Doshi said, she appreciates the sentiment behind the rumors and baseless attempts to “save” her. She thinks anyone who bought into them probably has a “good heart.” But she’s also clear that, no matter the intention behind them, these efforts were unwelcome—and harmful.
“The first time, in New York, was scarier,” she said. In that case, she believes that the individual who flagged her as a victim to the NYPD tried to track her down, because soon after she heard from police, someone anonymously sent her a dossier of information, showing they’d found her legal name and her address. Thankfully, the individual couldn’t seem to figure out what floor she lived on. She said she was confident that her doorman would keep unwanted guests from finding her in the building. But every time she stepped outside, she worried someone might be waiting to nab her under the guise of saving her.
“It didn’t really affect me this time,” she said of the more recent round of rumors, because she’s learned to hide details in her content that might reveal where she lives. Still, she said that her agent and producers she worked with were worried enough about someone trying to swoop in and “rescue” her that, for about a month, they had impromptu bodyguards make sure she got from her car to a set, and from the set back to her car, safely.
“All these rumors about sex trafficking only hurt the adult industry,” porn star Valentina Bellucci told The Daily Beast. “People who hate and discriminate against sex workers can use them to attack us all.” Adult industry insiders also argue that they distract people from real cases of sex trafficking, and from the issues that porn stars actually want to address to improve their rights and safety.
In the previous case, Doshi got her lawyer to reply to an NYPD official who reached out to check on her. This year, she said, she went down to an LAPD station to confirm she was not missing, nor a trafficking victim. (The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment. When reached for comment on Doshi’s account, a spokesperson for the LAPD declined to comment besides suggesting The Daily Beast submit a public-records request.) Both times, she said, the cops dropped the issue immediately, and commenters seemed to burn themselves out after a month or so. Doshi has never tried to figure out if the people who advanced these rumors about her still believe them or not, though. Why poke that bear?
But she knows that someone else who comes across posts about her later might decide she’s in dire need of saving once again.
“To be honest, I don’t know how to stop this,” she told The Daily Beast.
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