Shelley Lubben: Ex-Porn Star, Anti-Porn Crusader, Evangelist

Editor’s Note: This post is the seventh in a series by YNOT’s LynseyG that gives an overview of the history of anti-porn sentiment in America. To read the previous posts in this series, follow these links: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six.

No series profiling anti-porn fanatics would be complete without the troubled and troublesome Shelley Lubben, a retired porn performer who devoted many of the latter years of her life to agitating against the adult entertainment industry.

Lubben was a troublemaker from her teen years onward, following what was variously described as molestation or experimentation with other children when she was nine. Kicked out of her house at 18, she started full-service escorting work. According to her own later accounts, the work could be dangerous: “She found herself having bizarre sex with strangers,” according to a CBN article for which she gave an interview. “Clients stalked her. One tried to kill her and hit her with his truck. She constantly had to lie to get out of very frightening situations.”

After about six years of escorting, Lubben entered the porn industry in 1993, when she was 24 years old. “I figured it was more legal than prostitution, so why not?” she told CBN. But, according to her many retellings of her two short years in the adult film industry, porn was far worse than escorting. According to an archived section from her now-defunct website, “Even prostitution did not involve the brutal kinds of rape and degradation that she endured while ‘starring’ in pornography.”

Lubben appeared in somewhere between 15 and 20 movies under the name Roxy, doing hardcore scenes that often involved more than one male partner. She left the industry in 1994, having contracted herpes and HPV, which led to cervical cancer. Despite her eight years of escorting, Lubben would later blame these STIs squarely on her time in the porn industry. “After becoming infected with herpes, I quietly left the porn industry but went back to prostitution to survive,” she wrote on her website. And what could have been a sad story about one woman’s bad experience in porn, unfortunately, went on to become the entire porn industry’s problem.

Lubben met her future husband in 1994 and was married in 1995. After exiting the sex industry entirely, she became a born-again Christian and, after more than a decade, she began speaking out against what she called the evils of the porn industry. In 2008, she launched the Pink Cross Foundation, a faith-based organization that “concentrated on outreach to and evangelism of those in the porn industry, especially performers. The Foundation offered “support to those wishing to leave the industry” and spread the word about the “hazardous conditions” within the porn world, according to Wikipedia.

Lubben began speaking to the media about her own experiences on set. Her story, as a former porn star, made for an exciting headline, and she was soon appearing on TV and radio, in documentary films, and at adult industry conventions, where she went about “exposing the $57 billion porn industry for what it is—full of lies and deceit, addiction and broken lives,” she wrote on her website.

Lubben was most active with the Pink Cross Foundation in the late 2000s and early 2010s—well over a decade since her own brief and unpleasant experience with porn. Still, she claimed that she knew what went on behind the scenes in the current industry. In interviews and presentations, she described porn as “beastly,” “evil,” and “the devil’s final frontier.” She told CBN, “There was a satanic anointing on me to do those films. It’s not something that the ‘average’ person could do without it.” And she informed journalist Chris Hedges, “Almost all pornography performers were sexually assaulted as children.”

In her book, Truth Behind the Fantasy of Porn—published a full seventeen years after she left the porn industry—Lubben claimed, “None of us freshly-dyed blondes like doing porn. In fact, we hate it. We hate being touched by strangers who care nothing about us. We hate being degraded with their foul smells and sweaty bodies. Some women hate it so much they can be heard vomiting in the bathroom between scenes.”

For people who already believed the porn industry to be rife with objectionable behavior, Lubben’s claims were welcome. And so were her accusations about “the illegal and hazardous working conditions in the industry, with sexually transmitted diseases being a workplace safety issue and public health concern.” Never mind that, four years after she’d left the industry, AIM set up shop in southern California, or that, by the time Lubben began appearing at industry conventions, standardized STI testing was normalized across the industry. The conditions Lubben had, sadly, worked in were largely a thing of the past. 

Of course, that isn’t to say that bad things didn’t still go on in the porn industry when Lubben was actively agitating against it. But the industry she was protesting against was fundamentally different from the one she’d worked in, and she seemed oblivious to this fact. Which would be sad, even tragic, on its own. But Lubben’s wildly under-informed claims were scooped up by the media, landing Lubben interviews with Dr. Phil, Michael Reagan, Fox News, and Howard Stern. Her anti-porn message reached thousands, possibly millions, and made an impact. She even became good friends with Dr. Judith Reisman, who you may remember as the leader of the anti-Kinsey movement and the inventor of the term “erotoxins.” 

Lubben’s Pink Cross Foundation did provide support to a number of performers who wanted to get out of porn, but those services came with a large dose of evangelism. Care packages sent to interested performers included, according to Wikipedia, “religious literature, bibles, Christian music,” as well as more practical items like “local grocery and department store gift cards.” 

Shelley Lubben shut down the Pink Cross Foundation in 2016, and, three years later, died at the age of 50 of unknown causes. In her memorial to Lubben, Judith Reisman claims she “squired Shelley the day and evening before her death. Several days after she returned home we called Shelley to see how she was. She was happily I know, with her Lord.” 

Shelley Lubben image by Slubben licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. It has been resized and merged with the cover of Lubben’s book, “Truth Behind the Fantasy of Porn.”