First the women received a friend request. Then a message.
“heya!”
“ahoy!”
“oh hi!”
“hi hi hi!”
They didn’t know the person adding them on Facebook. According to her Facebook profile, she was “Deja Stwalley,” and her photo showed a youngish blonde woman in a blue romper. Stwalley claimed she was a recruiter for indie porn studios.
“i was just scoping your pics
they’re hot!”
“Sorry for the blind add but you’re super cute so I had to “
Stwalley joked that she loved cocks and money. That’s why she got into the porn business. Stwalley told one woman she could make $450 an hour on a six- to eight-hour shoot. She told another that she could make between $2,000 and $3,000 a scene.
Stwalley’s webcam was always broken, and she could never speak by phone. But she could always type. If the person Stwalley was chatting with seemed skeptical of the porn recruiter’s legitimacy, Stwalley added that she got into this business to protect women from getting lured into sketchy situations.
“basically I try to help girls get into the porn industry without getting screwed over”
“there are scammers out there, but that’s why I DO this. lol
one of my bestest friends got scammed and it was a shitty scene”
“I knew a few other girls with stories like that so me and my ex started doing this. the studios love it cuz now they don’t have to
ha ha”
Liz Shearer was 20 years old when she met Stwalley online. Shearer’s best friend had been approached by Stwalley and turned her offer down, but she recommended Shearer as someone who might be interested. “I’m really sex-positive, and I’ve always been really sex-positive, and I’ve always been really comfortable in my body expressing my sexuality,” Shearer tells me. We’re sitting on a piece of driftwood on a beach near Shearer’s father’s house more than a year after Shearer first made contact with Stwalley. Shearer, who recently moved back in with her family, pries open a pack of blue American Spirits. I can’t read her expression behind her sunglasses, but she tells me she feels numb.
It was Shearer who first reached out to Stwalley in January of 2015. Shearer was working as a nanny in Bellingham. She needed the money. Stwalley told Shearer that she was a recruiter and it was her job to ferry women into the porn industry safely.
“I decided it was an opportunity I would be interested in,” Shearer says. She stares straight ahead, watching a golden retriever romp in the salt water nearby. “And I asked her how I would go about getting an audition.”
According to Shearer, Stwalley told her that she could audition with her ex-boyfriend, a photographer named Matt. Stwalley told Shearer that she would also have to have sex with Matt.
“To prove to production companies that having sex with someone I didn’t know was something that I could handle,” Shearer tells me.
Shearer had never done porn before. “And at the time, I agreed to it,” she says. She had Matt come to her apartment in Bellingham, and later, after Stwalley told Shearer that she needed to reshoot, she says she met Matt at a hotel in Seattle.
