Survivor: Chanel Camryn Conquers Adversity, Finds Niche in Adult

A version of this feature appears in the September issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition. LOS ANGELES — The new girl everyone is talking about—the bubbly little blonde known for her full-body orgasms—leans forward in her patio chair at Lily and Leo’s, a casual brunch spot just off Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills. She has a secret to share. “My ass,” Chanel Camryn says, “used to be flat.” Hold up, hold up. Seriously? Flllaaatttt? That’s tough to believe considering the popularity of Camryn’s twerking videos on TikTok, where her perfectly-plump posterior has gone viral. “Oh, it’s true,” Camryn says. “My butt actually went inward before I started going to the gym. I got bullied for it. I was a literal two-by-four.” Camryn tilts her head back and giggles—one of the lighter moments during a wide-ranging conversation where the themes have pin-balled from silly to serious to somber. Wearing a pink-checkered dress and penis-shaped earrings, Camryn has already discussed her trademark, quivering orgasms, her love of Tyson microwave chicken nuggets, her drug-addicted stepfather, post-sex cuddling, being a bikini barista—in Alaska, no less—and the time a woman died in her arms. A native southerner, she’s in the middle of a Dolly Parton impersonation as the waiter approaches with a ramekin of almond milk for her iced coffee. “I’m lactose (intolerant),” Camryn whispers as she stirs her drink. “OK … where was I? Seriously, what were we talking about?” She pauses, losing her train of thought. This happens often, Camryn admits, when she meets someone new, whether it’s a fellow performer, a director or even a prospective roommate. Her mind begins to race and suddenly the conversation is darting in all sorts of unpredictable directions. “The one thing everyone will tell you about me,” Camryn says, “is that I talk a lot.” An accurate observation, perhaps—but not a complaint. Along with being one of the top new performers in the industry, Camryn—who is represented by high-profile agent Mark Spiegler—is also one of the most fascinating. The fact that she hails from Alaska sounds like a cute story—until she reveals she fled there from Florida at age 13 after a childhood marred by drugs, degradation and rape. Graduating high school in two-and-a-half years and renting her own home at age 18 sounds uplifting—until you learn that Camryn gave half of her paycheck to her mother, her hero, who often juggled three jobs while trying to raise a younger daughter with special needs. Managing a 52-bed unit at a skilled-nursing facility sounds rewarding—until she shares an experience that drove her into alcohol abuse and depression and almost crushed her. “It’s hard to believe Chanel is only 20,” says Rodolfo, a producer for Naughty America. “It’s like she’s already lived a full life.” Indeed, not even old enough to legally drink alcohol, Camryn, 20, already harbors the experiences and battle scars of someone twice her age. “My struggle,” she says, “is the reason I carry myself the way I do today. If I didn’t know struggle, I wouldn’t appreciate where I’m at.” Camryn points to the rose tattoo in the middle of her torso, just above her breasts. Each morning she stares at it in the mirror—not just the petals, but the word that is written vertically, in cursive, at the base of the stem. “Survivor,” it reads. Camryn smiles gently. “My reminder,” she says. “My constant reminder.” *** Her stepfather, Trevor, was still asleep when 12-year-old Chanel Camryn snuck into the room just before 7 a.m. and peered into the plastic garbage sack he’d left next to the bed. Oxycontin, Xanax, Hydrocodone, Percocet, Tramadol. The multi-colored painkillers that Trevor, a longtime drug dealer, had planned to sell in the neighborhood later that day were all mixed together, and Chanel didn’t know which was which. Blues, pinks, whites, reds. “I called it ‘The Rainbow Bag,’” she says. Opening her hand as wide as possible, Chanel grabbed a fistful of the drugs and then scurried out of the house and walked to school, where she sold the pills to junior high and high school classmates for $5 each. The scenario quickly became routine. “I didn’t even know what I was selling,” Chanel says, “and they didn’t know what they were buying. They just wanted drugs, and I wanted money.” Or rather, she needed money. Her whole family did. Raised in a “ghetto-ass neighborhood” in Jacksonville, Florida, Camryn entered the world in 2001 with the deck stacked against her. She was only six months old when her biological father was sent to prison—and eventually an insane asylum—for attempted murder. Camryn’s mother, Sara, did her best to raise her and her older brother, sometimes juggling three jobs at factories, bars and strip clubs so she could buy them nice outfits. If her children dressed nicely, Sara thought, the other kids at school wouldn’t heckle them about being poor. Still, for dinner each night, Camryn and her brother usually had two choices: hot dogs or Ramen noodles. A few times each month, for a special treat, they’d go to McDonald’s and order from the $1 menu. More than once, the electricity at their home was cut off because the bill hadn’t been paid. “We always kept plenty of candles around,” Camryn says, “just in case.” Camryn never told her mother she was selling pills and weed at school and in the park, but she always slipped the money into a drawer in Sara’s nightstand. No questions asked. She admired her mom, a cancer survivor, for how hard she labored to keep the family functioning—especially after having a third child, a daughter with special needs, when Camryn was eight. “She worked her body to the bone,” Camryn says. Other than Sara, there was no semblance of a role model in Camryn’s life. Not a single member of her extended family ever graduated from high school. Instead most of them plummeted into to the culture of crime and drugs that was pervasive in their community. “Besides drug overdoses,” Camryn says, “most people in my family either end up in jail or shot dead in a ditch.” Camryn’s stepdad certainly seemed headed down that path. Police said Trevor had so many run-ins with police officers that he was on a first-name basis with local cops. Along with being one of the area's more well-known drug dealers, he also started a street gang with friends. One night, Camryn says, they stole an ATM machine. “Mostly, they were just on drugs all the time,” Camryn said. “They’d all come over and put on a movie and sit around and get high.” Camryn says Trevor abused her verbally, mentally and physically. He was calling her a “whore” before she sniffed puberty and referred to her as “Little Liar” for months after he caught her in a petty fib. Camryn says it wasn’t uncommon for Trevor to hit her when he became angry. On multiple occasions, counselors at her school asked about the bruises on her arms, legs and face. And Child Protective Services visited the home to investigate her living situation. “I used to cry when I was sick and couldn’t go to school,” Camryn says. “It was my only escape from my house. It was the only stable environment I had. I had a stepdad that tried to make each day terrible. “Somehow I just learned to suppress everything. I made myself believe that everything was OK.” Toxic as the relationship was, it paled in comparison to the abuse Camryn endured for years from a different relative. Throughout elementary school, Camryn says she was raped by her stepdad’s father, or as she calls him, her grandfather. The molestation began when she was 6 and continued for five years. Camryn says her family was living in her grandparents’ guest house during that span, and that the abuse usually occurred when her mom was at work and her dad was high on drugs. Her grandfather told Camryn he would kick the family to the streets if she ever spoke of the situation. Other times he’d buy her nice clothes and other gifts with the promise that she would keep her mouth shut. On one occasion Camryn says her stepdad walked in as the abuse was occurring, but he ignored it. “He told me I was a whore and that I probably asked for it,” Camryn says. For years Camryn never spoke of the rape and molestation. But harboring all of the pain and trauma affected her psyche. At age six, she says she slapped her mom during an argument. A few years later she smashed a textbook into a classmate’s face during a fight; another time she kicked in a girl’s teeth. During large holiday gatherings her relatives would sit on the porch and swig beer and laugh as they watched Chanel and her male cousins settle disagreements with backyard fistfights. “I lived with so much anger,” Camryn says. “It was all pent up inside. For five years I lived next to my childhood rapist. He was grooming me. I got to the point where I blamed myself for letting it happen. I was so young. All I knew how to do was push it down inside and hide it.” By the time Camryn was 12 she couldn’t remain silent any longer. One morning before school Camryn wrote a letter to her mother detailing the abuse by her grandfather. She folded the note and left it under Sara’s coffee mug. When Camryn returned that afternoon, her mother told her they would make an escape. “Nothing was ever done about what happened to me,” Camryn says. “We never went to court. No one knew what I was going through. I was raising my sister while my mom worked, going to school, dealing with a drug-addicted stepdad and a grandfather who was molesting me. “The only reason I came out about it was that my sister was getting older and I was afraid it was going to happen to her.” Creating an even greater sense of urgency to flee was the fact that Camryn’s biological father had just been released from prison. Even though she had a lifetime restraining order against him, Sara feared for her family’s safety. Still, as eager as she was to move, Camryn never could’ve predicted where the family ended up next. Her eyes widen as she smiles and throws up her hands. “All of a sudden,” she says, “we’re in fucking Alaska.” *** Her surgery was a week earlier and now she wore a neck brace. Still, no one expected Kathy to die. The grandmother in her mid-70s was in good spirits last summer when her caretaker, Chanel Camryn, entered her Alaska hospital room to get her ready for bed. The two had become fast friends, and that evening Kathy gushed to Chanel about how excited she was about a planned visit with her grandchildren the following day. But as Chanel was transferring her from a Hoyer lift to her mattress, Kathy began gasping for air and then stopped breathing. Paramedics were called but they arrived too late. Kathy had suffered a pulmonary embolism. She died in Camryn’s arms. “She was looking into my eyes,” Camryn says. “I felt her last breath.” A few minutes later it was Camryn—only 19 at the time—who had to call Kathy’s family members to tell them their loved one had passed. When her shift ended that night, Camryn left the facility and never returned. “I’d worked there two years and I couldn’t handle it anymore,” she says. “I quit. It was too sad, too heavy. I needed a less stressful career.” Difficult as her job as a CNA had become, Chanel had blossomed into a huge success story since fleeing her tumultuous situation in Florida shortly before her 13th birthday. She said her mom had always dreamt of living on “a big piece of land in the middle of nowhere, away from all the ghettos.” She found that in Seward, Alaska, a hiccup of a town near the gulf in the southern-most portion of the state. Initially Chanel experienced culture shock. The teenager raised in a bustling city of 2,000,000 was now living in a mile-long town of 3,000 people. The high school she attended in Jacksonville boasted about 5,000 students. In Alaska that number dipped to a few hundred. The biggest adjustment, though, was trading the Florida sun for the sub-zero temperatures of the northwest. “I was pissed,” she said. Chanel acted out. She says she got into fights as an eighth-grader, was mouthy with teachers and always had her guard up. “I eventually came to realize that I didn’t have to act like that anymore,” she says. “In Florida I did those things to survive, but now I was in a better environment. It was good for me. I felt safe. I cleaned up my act and didn’t do hood-rat shit anymore.” Instead Chanel began to thrive. She left home after her sophomore year and moved into an apartment by herself in another small town three hours away. She completed her final semester of high school online—earning her diploma in just two-and-a-half years, at age 17—and was then hired to help open a brand new skilled-nursing facility.  As an assistant administrator, Chanel’s responsibilities were wide-ranging: human resources, payroll, evaluations. “They just handed me a book with all of the policies and I got things running,” Camryn says. “I hired everyone, and that became a problem. Everyone I hired was in their 40s with master’s degrees. They hated that a 18-year-old was their boss. They couldn’t deal with it.” Camryn left healthcare management after a year and went into nursing, working as a CNA while taking online nursing courses at a community college. The job paid well enough for Camryn to rent a two-bedroom home, where she lived with her dog and cat. Her mom moved in, too—until Chanel gave her $7,000 so she could get an apartment of her own. Still, as successful as she was financially, the 12-hour shifts seven days a week were brutal, especially in the peak of COVID. Camryn was responsible for 27 patients, all with various needs: memory care, rehabilitation, mental illness, hospice. “There were times,” Camryn says, "when we didn’t even have gloves or wipes. We were using cloths and, sometimes, our bare hands. We were risking our lives working with people who were highly contagious. One needle prick and you were fucked.” Alzheimer’s patients can often become violent; Camryn was groped and pulled into wheelchairs. A punch to the face bloodied her nose. Taking care of people and helping them was rewarding, but witnessing the decline—and eventual death—of patients with whom she’d become close was heart-wrenching. Overworked, depressed and yearning for normal life, Camryn began using alcohol to ease her pain. The death of Kathy—which weighed heavily on her conscious—caused her to hit rock bottom. Shortly after she quit her job, Camryn lost her house and was forced to move in with her mom. She grimaces when she scrolls through pictures of herself from less than a year ago. “You can see the depression in my face,” she says. “I don’t even look like the same person.” Camryn’s unhappiness didn’t last long—and her spirits were lifted in a rather unlikely place: a coffee shop. Camryn was hired last fall as a bikini barista, meaning she brewed and served coffee in skimpy swimwear. The shops are popular in states such as Oregon, Washington and Alaska, an odd fit considering the northwest’s frigid temperatures. A few times in January Camryn reported to work in a bikini when it was minus-15 degrees outside. It turned out to be worth it. Although she’d long been obsessed with sex, Camryn mostly lacked the confidence to dress in a provocative manner. She was a gym rat who loved lifting weights, but she rarely donned makeup, got her nails done or styled her hair. Instead, Camryn was a tomboy who wore sweat pants and crop tops. The bikini barista job changed all of that. “Guys were coming into the shop just to see me,” she says. “They were giving me compliments and telling me how nice I looked and how pretty I was. It made me feel more comfortable with my body. For the first time in my life, I felt girly. I felt sexy.” Indeed, for Camryn, the benefits of the job were twofold. It unearthed a new swagger. And then redirected her life. *** More than 50 scenes into her first year in porn, Chanel Camryn still can’t avoid it. Every time she’s on set, the petite blonde newcomer gets the shakes. Powerful ones, too. Sometimes they seem more like convulsions. Anxiety isn’t causing the issue. And Chanel doesn’t tremble because she’s nervous or cold. The trigger? Orgasms. Of the full-body variety. “One time I came 39 times during a scene,” Chanel says. “I’m just so sensitive. It can make things on set pretty crazy.” Chanel says she’s accidentally head-butted a few cameras mid-orgasm and that she almost “kicked someone in the balls.” “I tell the crew they better be bobbin’ and weavin’,’” she says. “I try to warn them, because apparently what I do isn’t exactly normal.” Camryn has indeed developed a reputation in the adult industry for being unique—a porn unicorn, if you will. And not just because of her crazy climaxes. As memorable as her performances are on camera, it’s Camryn’s off-screen demeanor and professionalism that are making the biggest impression. The buzz began to swirl in April. Fueled by the confidence she’d gained from her bikini barista job, Camryn launched an OnlyFans account and was contacted by an agent three days later. After deliberating for a few weeks she decided to enter the industry. Soon after—when things with her representation went south—Camryn found herself at the apartment of Mark Spiegler., the most well-known agent in porn. Spiegler rarely meets with performers as inexperienced as Camryn. But after receiving recommendations from multiple people he respects, he agreed to chat with the newcomer. Camryn capitalized, arriving at Spiegler’s apartment carrying a laptop filled with modeling photos and clips of all her scenes. After spending an hour sifting through the material and listening to Camryn’s life story, the only question in Spiegler’s mind wasn’t whether he should sign Camryn; it was ‘How could he not?’ “It was clear,” Spiegler says, “that she had her shit together.” Spiegler offered Camryn a spot on his roster and then FaceTimed her mother back in Alaska, assuring her that he’d take good care of Chanel and keep her safe. Not even six months into her career, Camryn has already shot for blue-chip studios such as Vixen, Adult Time, Brazzers, Team Skeet, Naughty America and Cherry Pimps. She’s been in threesomes, groups and all-girl scenes and worked with trans talent. Directors and critics use words such as “energy” and “authentic” to describe her performances. “And she can act, too,” Spiegler says. “If she starts doing anal I think she could be up for Performer of the Year next year. People love her.” One of the main reasons is because Camryn grasps the “other” things that are important about being a performer. She shows up on time, often before the crew arrives. She brings multiple wardrobe options and is well-rested and alert. She puts effort into dialogue and consistently asks for feedback because she’s eager to improve. “I appreciate compliments,” Camryn says, “but I’d much rather have people tell me where I’m fucking up.” More than anything, though, directors appreciate the upbeat vibe Camryn brings to a set: the laughing, the enthusiasm and the respect that she shows to each crew member. Camryn says being on set is “a literal high” for her. She relishes the environment so much that she’s considering working as a production assistant (PA) on her days off.“If I could just do porn and have nobody know who I am, I’d be fine,” she says. “I forget to ask for my check when I leave, because it just doesn’t feel like work to me. And I think that shows up in my scenes.” Pleased as she is with her progress, Camryn says she’s still evolving. Prior to porn she simply grinned and looked cute and spunky in most of her pictures. The seductive, “pouty-face look” is new to her, but she’s working on it. “I struggled with looking sexy,” she says. Camryn also studies other performers. She likes Chloe Cherry’s messy blowjob technique, the way Riley Reid smiles throughout her scenes and how Angela White dominates and takes control. “I pick up on things,” she says. “But in the end I’m building my own brand. I’m not trying to be anyone else. “My life has been a constant wrecking ball. Every time something good seemed to be happening, something came along and knocked me on my ass. Porn is the first time I’ve felt really solid in what I do. I was never good at anything growing up. I played sports and tried other things, but I never found something I excelled at. Now I’ve discovered my little niche, my little spot where I belong.” People familiar with Camryn’s past believe the hardships she experienced as a child and teenager are directly responsible for the maturity and work ethic she’s exhibiting in her new career. Rodolfo, the Naughty America director, says Camryn is strong enough to withstand the rigors of an often-ruthless industry because of the “strong backbone” she developed during her youth. “Chanel is great for our business,” Rodolfo says. “She’s not one of those jaded people who just want their check so they can get the fuck out of there. That energy and big smile of hers uplifts everyone around her.” Spiegler agrees, although he’s quick to point out that many performers enter the industry with enthusiasm but eventually succumb to cynicism and burnout. Spiegler is confident that won’t happen to his newest star, to whom he’s become a mentor. He takes Camryn to lunch regularly, and it’s not uncommon for her to stop by his apartment in the evening, just to lounge around and chat. For Camryn, it’s the first time she’s had a male confidant in her life that she can trust. “He’s the father figure I never had,” she says. “He checks on me every morning. He cares about my career, yes. But it’s obvious that he cares about me as a person, too. It’s a very nice feeling.” Camryn’s success has also enabled her to restart the monthly support she provides for her mother back in Alaska. The two talk multiple times per week, and Camryn says she eventually wants to move Sara to Los Angeles so she can be her assistant. “I want to give her everything she deserves,” she says. “My mother is the main reason I have such an amazing work ethic. It’s definitely come in handy these past few months.” As hectic as things have been, Camryn knows her rising popularity will make things even more intense. She’s just now learning how to post videos on ManyVids and OnlyFans. She’s getting used to hosting hour-long Instagram Live chats a few times each week and she’s working on developing a logo that she can eventually use on merchandise. “Combine that with all of my scenes, and I feel like I have no time to breathe,” she says. “I’m putting more and more on my plate, and nothing is coming off. I try not to let anyone see me get stressed. I’m a fake-it-until-you-make-it kind of person.” Whenever it all seems like too much—during those rare times when she feels overwhelmed and depression begins to set in—Camryn always remembers to stand in front of the mirror, where she’ll pull up her shirt and look at the tattoo of the rose on her sternum. And specifically, the word on the stem. Survivor “A rose is beautiful,” she says, “but it also has thorns. They’re its shield, and they’ll prick you to make sure the rose survives. I’m the same way. I’ve built a security within myself. I’m my own shield.” Camryn glances down at the tattoo. “I got it in the most painful place possible: my chest,” she says. “I wanted it to be a constant reminder of strength. No matter what happens, I’m going to get through it, just like I always have. I’m a survivor. “No matter what happens, I’m going to survive.” Photography by @kogafoto & Chanel Camryn