Porn Valley- The last time i talked to Holly Halston was about a year ago. At that time she told me she was done with the adult business. www.adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=4786. Things haven’t changed too much and Halston’s about ready to unload in a book. In recent months Halston’s getting back on her feet after suffering a thyroid illness that has kept her in bed. Halston’s been having a tough time of things because of her illness.

And her husband Troy has been trying to land a job with one of the strip clubs in Florida where they live. Without much success, says Holly Halston. Halston, her husband and three children are for the time being living on savings.

“I think it’s about time that everyone knows the truth of the situation,” says Halston, meaning the business in general and herself in particular. “There are so many conceptions about the adult industry. I think it’s time for somebody who’s not afraid to speak. I’ve already been snubbed enough. I might as well tell the truth.”

From her perspective, Halston said she made a pact with the devil but didn’t know it was the devil. “But you stand up to him and the rest of the world bails out and says we’re scared. That’s the devil.” For her part Halston said she came from a troubled childhood.

“But then I tried to make the best out of it,” she says. “You do what you can. But for some reason the adult industry has problems with people who have morals and values. But we want everyone to believe that we have morals and values.” Halston said her plan was to find someone who’d help her expose the reality of the adult for what it truly is, she says. “And for not what people perceive it to be. There’s some good like in old things. Bad there’s also a truth to the bad that nobody wants to mention.”

Halston says women claim to be victims. “But the reality is they control the industry.” At the same time, says Halston, there seems to be a reluctance to tell the truth. “Everyone’s afraid that if they speak up and tell how it really is, they’ll stop having a job. We’re all going to lose this job anyway. There’s a time limit to begin with. You start into it knowing you only have a limited time. But the moment when there is a problem and you stand up to somebody, it’s amazing how all of a sudden, nobody will work with you anyway.

“Instead of waiting and being afraid of losing what’s already lost,” Halston continues, “because none of us really ever have anything in this business, there’s always going to be a carrot on a stick- I might as well go ahead now while I’m young enough to let it all out now.”

From what she’s saying, I ask Halston if she sat on a joy buzzer recently that got her going like this. Halston says she had been battling with an illness and couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Insurance companies dropped us when they found out what industry we were in,” says Halston. “Even though we only worked together. On one hand you can completely understand that; but on the other, everyone has sex. So you’re going to drop people for their medical insurance because they had sex?”

Halston finally found out what was medically wrong with her. “But it’s amazing to me that unless you’re in a clique or sucking somebody’s dick, when you have a problem, the whole adult industry turns its back on you.” Halston had been diagnosed with a thyroid disease.

“The symptoms are similar to many other problems,” she says. “Like uterine cancer, pituitary gland cancer- a lot of different cancers can be similar to a thyroid disease. It’s very hard to diagnose and a lot of women have it.” Halston says she’s been so sick the last year that she couldn’t get out of bed the last couple of months.

“You loose all your energy- you lose so much,” she adds. “You start to lose your memory; your hair breaks off. It’s really such a crappy, crappy thing. Your thyroid gland is one of the most important glands that you have. It controls a lot of your system. When it breaks down it starts to affect everything else with it. It’s a huge trickle effect.”

Halston is taking a natural supplement and doing much better, she says.

Judging by peoples’ reactions to her, Halston says it’s amazing than you can spend 12 years defending an industry and standing up for people “you knew were wrong”.

“You’re supposed to be family, but they completely oust you,” she says. “If they can’t use you any more, you’re no good to them. It’s an amazing attitude.” On some positive notes, Halston cites the story of Crystal Waters www.adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=10481 and how Jack Gilardi’s club have made an effort to help her.

“Granted it was a very tragic accident,” says Halston. “But it was one of those accidents that could have been avoided with common sense, having met Miss Crystal Waters myself knowing that she had a problem with a little too much drinking.”

In short, Waters jumped out of a boat into shallow water, head first. Waters is confined to a wheel chair.Halston incidents such as these can’t be avoided.

“There’s a lot of other women in our industry who have had health issues,” Halston says. “It amazes me. You get ovarian cancer and you’re done. If you can’t be used and are not willing to do exactly as they say, and be their little robot and just a body without a brain or emotions or feelings, there doesn’t seem to be anything left for you. It’s not like in our industry we can go and get any medical benefits. There’s nothing for us. And we pledge our allegiance to an industry that promises so much and in the end when you need them and you need them to be what they said they were going to be, they turn their backs and run and hide with their tails between your legs. I’m really sorry. But you’re on your own. “Meanwhile most of us have families and responsibilities. We’ve done what we promised we would do- doing other things that most people in the world wouldn’t conceive of doing because they don’t have that confidence that it takes to be that open with your body. The adult industry is one of the most educational and entertaining industries out there, but we’re still looked upon as trash of the world.”

According to Halston, the performers are in the position to do something about it, but do nothing.

Income-wise, the Halstons, with three kids, are living on savings. And Halston’s husband’s Troy has been trying to get a job as manager of a club. “But for some reason we’re just not having any luck,” she says. “And there’s not too many clubs that are willing to put me in as a feature even though I’m better now. There’s really not much.”

Should she write a book, Halston says hers would be far from a foo-foo T&A tome.

“That’s not what it is,” she says. “We’re talking about the typical, traumatized kid that grew up with the crap of the slut mom who was a drug addict.” Halston said she tried her best to make a difference for her children and at the same time maintain some morals and values for her children in an industry where they said it could not be done.

“I did it for the mere fact of survival, not for the fame and fortune,” says Halston. “When people in the industry know that, it’s such a vulnerable thing. “They know it’s your survival. They try to manipulate it. Being a Capricorn I don’t fall for that crap. I’d rather you hate me and say fuck you, you can’t work for me because you won’t suck somebody else’s dick.”

Halston was a single mother at 18 and didn’t want her daughters to go what she went through. “I had a mother who was sleeping with various men doing drugs and leaving me in parked cars outside of bars with no food or water. I wanted my child to have a mother who was home. It was my choice and my decision to have the child and the biological father did not want to have the child. I never put that responsibility on him.”

Halston said being a young, uneducated female, there weren’t a lot of options open. “I tried to find a grant. Honestly, there’s no such aid in our country for that. You’re on your own and I started stripping.”

As for strippers, Halston says many of them start this way. “It’s out of survival. There’s not a lot out there for young women who don’t come from much. I tried out jobs but there was usually sexual harassment in the office. And it’s not like you’re believed when you’re a tiny, busty pretty woman. Yeah, sure. You’re a single mom. Yeah, he was sexually harassing you. No, you’re just looking for money. But this is the way the world works. Conquering a world that’s against you, is not an easy task.”

According to Halston, her husband was in a similar situation when they met.

“He was going through a custody battle with his ex-wife and she was nailing him for $900 a month. Poor hillbilly boy. We met where I was dancing at Shotgun Willie’s. He came in before he was supposed to do a bachelorette party. He just got out of jail because he would not go to domestic violence classes. He didn’t hit her. She hit him. After 12 years of being with the man I can attest to that. Unfortunately there are those women who actually are the violent ones. And the men usually pay the price of that.

“She was bi-polar and wouldn’t take her medication. He took all the brunt of it. it’s not a good situation. There’s not much you can do when someone has a chemical imbalance and is unwilling to treat it. You can’t do anything but ride their fluctuations and their up and down hills. We met. We fell in love that night and have been together ever since. And we’ve battled everything together.”

Halston recalls another instance when she lost everything in a U-haul fire.

“There was no family, just each other and three children to support,” she says. “We made a decision to shoot some movies together.”

Halston subsequently had partner problems when she took in one for Halston Productions.

“We met Mr. Anthony Coviello who has been arrested for many charges,” she recalls. “I believe he’s still being held in the state of Ohio. Before being arrested, he managed to go around us and get our master tapes for the second two movies we shot. He held them for ransomed and left daily messages on our phone. He’s tried to extort $200,000 from us. But the police do nothing because we’re in the adult industry. Even though he’s a known gangster that is in jail.” Halston claims Coviello is in for money laundering and racketeering among other things.

“He’s a gangster,” she says bluntly. “Unfortunately when you go into a partnership with somebody- especially in the adult world- it’s hard to find out what their background is. He was supposed to be a professional in Ultimate Fighting. He owned gyms. We did research on him. April Summers hooked up with him right after we shot our first movie. She also went ahead and wouldn’t help us at all even though we got hr the movie and she found the love of her life. She went ahead and wouldn’t do shit to help us even though it was my money that paid her.

“But in the end, I know me and my family will be okay,” says Halston. “We can overcome everything but the rest of the people that do these sorts of things, these are the people that are going to pay prices that I’m really glad I’m not going to pay. Because their prices are too high for me.”

Halston says she’s dissolved her relationship with Coviello.

“I had no idea he was a gangster and I guess it was good that we dissolved it when we did because we would be looking at something more than we expected. We were grateful not to have gotten any funds, really.”

Halston met Coviello when she was working at the Bada Bing.

“I was introduced to him,” says Halston. “He said he wanted to talk to someone about starting my own production company. At the time we were in the phase of starting our own. We had shot one movie- Holly’s Tea Party and we were in the very beginnings. We were going to build it on our own not to have these problems. He asked us to educate him. We spent two hours talking about what goes on and what you need and how it should be done right. We talked about the real details of the industry then he asked us if he could join in on us because we had so much information and we had the connections.

“It took about two weeks of us negotiating. We made a final agreement based on certain times and conditions. He didn’t want to put anything down on paper formally which was my first clue. Out of $40,000 that was spent on two movies, $33,000 of it was my own. And he just took off with the movies that Richard Anderson gave him.”

Halston claims Anderson sold her out for $2,000. “Even though these were people we had done business with for years, knowing those tapes belonged to us, they gave all of it over to someone else- someone they hadn’t even met.” Halston also claims she told Anderson he was not authorized to deal with Coviello.

“And he sold us out.”