It wasn’t until I was in the elevator that I thought, That guy just threatened to kill me. I stood in the center of the elevator. My face went numb and I couldn’t feel my feet. I began to shake uncontrollably, and I almost dropped the baby.
I got off on the floor, got to the class, and headed straight to the bathroom. I must have looked crazy, because the instructor yelled after me, “Are you okay?”
“She had a blowout,” I said, “be there in a minute.” I was afraid to tell anyone. Alone in the bathroom, I held my baby close, instinctively covering her head as I stared at myself in the mirror. I was shaking still, but less now. Part of me was marveling that someone had just threatened us and dropped Mr. Trump’s name.
Another part of me was just a really mad mom. That motherfucker thought that was a threat? What kind of a bad guy is that? What hit man wears sexy jeans? It just didn’t make any sense to me. If he had looked at all like a threat, I wouldn’t have gotten out of the car, and if I’d caught a bad vibe, I definitely would have closed my daughter’s door to protect her.
“It’s okay,” I told my daughter. I said it again, this time to myself.
I went and did the class, telling no one what happened in the parking lot. I went back to the same coping mechanism I’ve always trusted: keep it moving and solve this on your own. When I left, I walked alongside people, and I scanned the lot before getting in the car. I repeatedly checked the rearview on the way home. People want to know why I didn’t immediately go to the police. If you want to make a police report, it’s public. This is how I imagined it would go:
“Hi, I’d like to make a report about some guy who came up and threatened me.”
“Okay, what did he say?” I picture the cop as genial but by-the-book.
“He said this and this and ‘leave Mr. Trump alone.’”
“Why would someone tell you to leave Mr. Trump alone?”
“Okay, it’s funny. I had sex with Donald Trump and now I’m selling a story, well, someone else was trying to sell my story and I got caught up in it and I know they’ve reached out to Trump for comment and…”
Which would mean the entire world would know, including my husband, who had just tried to throw himself out of a moving fucking car. I was afraid to open a can of worms by telling Glen about the threat. Would he start to get paranoid about me leaving the house? I needed my freedom and, besides, I was used to caring for myself. Listen, if this guy had broken into my house or held me at knifepoint, I would have been like, Fuck it, that outweighs it. I would have gone right to the police. So, I kept it secret.
That seemed like the right decision soon enough, because In Touch disappeared on me. I called the girl who did the interview and she never answered the phone or returned my calls. Same with the editor. When I called Gina to see if she had heard anything, she ghosted me, too. It struck me as bizarre, because Gina was all about getting that money. I gave up contacting them, because part of me was actually relieved. Fifteen grand wasn’t enough money to ruin my life.
And I hadn’t told Glen. He and our daughter were my only concern. I had all the contacts that Gina had talked up as wanting to pay me crazy amounts of money once the In Touch story came out, but I didn’t bother. None of the money seemed worth it. I let it go, content to let Donald Trump recede into the past.
EIGHT
Maybe life was too good.
By the summer of 2015, Glen and I had successfully moved our family to Texas. Glen had stopped drinking and I was transitioning out of being a porn star and becoming known more as a director. My movies are known for having stories and good dialogue, and I would often have guys coming up to me to tell me, “Thank you, your movies are the only ones my wife will watch with me.” I had directed about seventy films by then and was gearing up to shoot my dream project, Wanted, a three-hour epic western I had been planning in my head for eight years. Wanted would win Best Picture and Best Director at the XBIZ Awards and Best Drama at AVN. It was the industry consensus that I was the best female director out there, and when New York magazine profiled me in an article titled “The Female Porn Director Winning All the Awards,” I got to ask them—and by extension my colleagues—“What does my vagina have to do with directing?”
Outside my film work, I was famous enough that I provided for my family with feature dancer bookings all over the country, but not so known that I was recognized everywhere. Our daughter would soon be going to school, and not a single person in our little neighborhood knew what I did for a living.
Close to my heart, being in Texas meant I could pursue a horse career. I had a new horse I had just imported from Ireland. My horse friends don’t care what I do. I had worked so hard to have the life I wanted.
Then it happened. On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign to make America great again. Seeing Trump on TV jogged people’s memories about all those times he used to call me on sets. I heard from castmates I hadn’t seen in years.
“It will never happen,” I would say. “He doesn’t even want to be president.”
I had a theory that he was a stalking horse for Hillary Clinton, just in the race to make it easier for her to win. It made sense, especially given what I overheard when I was at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the two friends happily discussing their plan. I didn’t put it past either of them. “How does no one remember how much he has donated to her and how much he supported her last time?” I would yell at the news shows. “How are you guys missing this thing?”
As he became less of a joke candidate in the Republican primaries, people started coming out from under their rocks. Good old Gina resurfaced, acting like we had just been chatting a week before.
“You should sell your story now,” she said.
“Why did you ghost me?” I flat-out asked her. “How am I supposed to trust you?”
She told me she had been threatened but didn’t elaborate. She said the magazine was threatened by Trump’s attorney, who she identified as Michael Cohen.
People in the industry called me, each thinking they were the first to suggest that I talk about how friendly he’d once been with a porn star. Brad Armstrong and Jessica Drake at Wicked were pressuring me to come forward because Republicans are seen as bad for the porn business. By then I no longer wanted to kill Jessica. I still didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her, but we could be civil. The things that initially made her my friend were still there: she is a smart businesswoman and committed to her work. Also, once I married Glen and had a child, a fight over some man just seemed childish.
Still, when she showed up on one of my sets one day while I was in L.A., my first reaction was What is this bitch doing here? But that’s mainly because I was directing, and I need complete control of my set.
“Hey, I need to talk to you for a sec,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. This was so strange that I figured it must be really important. We went over to one of the rooms I wasn’t using for fucking.
“I think you need to call this person,” she said, handing me Gloria Allred’s card. “I’ll back you up.”
“No,” I said.
“Just go and talk to her.”
I did, but I decided against coming forward. My life was perfect. I was very happy living incognito as the most accomplished director in the business, one who could also take her daughter to playdates. And on top of that, I still hadn’t told Glen.
Trump won Indiana on May 3, 2016. Ted Cruz and John Kasich dropped out, leaving him as the presumptive nominee. If I thought I had faced pressure before, it was nothing compared to what I got from my gay dads—well, my gay dad Keith Munyan and my new gay dad, JD Barrale. Keith and Dean Keefer had split, and it was like my parents getting divorced. They’d been together more than twenty years, so it was a shock. They hadn’t been happy for a while, and I never saw them be affectionate or even call each other honey. While Dean and I remain close, Keith was much more of a focal point in my life.