How Shelley Lubben and Daphne Khoury wound up in Sacramento this week is anyone’s guess. But they were trotted out by California state assemblyman Charles Calderon in an effort to support a tax bill that will undoubtedly line Calderon’s pockets as well as his cronies. Kayden Kross who was also also in attendance writes a lengthy piece about this on www.mikesouth.com

Here’s what Kross has to say in particular about Lubben and Khoury.

Kross: “To really drive his point home about what fuck ups the girls [porn performers] are, Calderon brought in two extreme fuck ups to testify. Shelly Lubben and Daphne Khoury, ex-pornstar and ex-stripper, respectively, showed up in church-appropriate attire and fake eyelashes as shining examples.

Shelly Lubben was in the adult industry for a total of 7 years, two of which she spent making adult films, most of which she hooked, and all of which she spent addicted to meth. While hooking and drugs are not prerequisites for this industry they obviously were in her case, as they came before the videos.

Yet she claims she is/was screwed up because of the industry and didn’t know how to get out. Like any other job I can tell you that simply quitting should do the trick. But Shelly isn’t content with quitting. She won’t be happy until everyone does. She testified to Calderon’s committee that she was fucked with scissors on set, given drugs, caught genital herpes, and “couldn’t understand why it was legal for guys to get bodily fluids on her skin” (not kidding).

She thinks that girls in this industry are lost and it is her job to find them. She claims that we have higher than normal suicide rates and that since she started her Pink Cross foundation (as I understand it there are only about 5 members) she has managed to “save” about ten girls a year and deal with one suicide attempt a year. These statistics of course should be applied to the 5,000 new girls entering every year that were previously mentioned.

Daphne Khoury, who appeared to be the more put together of the two, was quick to change my opinion of her once she opened up the water works in her testimony (Shelly did the quivering voice thing).

Not that either of them would care to hold the development of law to reason rather than emotion though. Daphne claimed that she thought stripping was harmless at first, then she got addicted to heroin that was provided by the club owners. At the press conference earlier in the day I had wondered why she kept complaining about STDs as a stripper.

Then i realized the problem. She should have been complaining about STDs as a hooker. You don’t catch herpes from lap dances. You catch herpes from riding a john’s dick. So as the story goes she was hooking and addicted to heroin and after numerous suicide attempts finally got help and quit the strip club.

Arguably I think anyone with a herion habit and severe depression and a side job as a prostitute would probably quit their day job. I’ve known a lot of strippers in my lifetime. This is not a normal story. She ended her testimony with the admission that she is still getting help and battling depression and now she’s scared because her life was threatened if she spoke out and she supports AB 2914.

I know I brought this up earlier but correlation is not causation. I would suggest that Shelly and Daphne would have been fuck ups without the industry. Obviously there is no way to prove this. I don’t really care though whether Shelly and Daphne have problems because of the industry or independent of it though. It’s irrelevent because either way they represent an extreme minority. What is relevant is the underlying ideology behind these two “reformed women”.

Both Daphne and Shelly went into this industry on their own accord. No one held a gun to their heads. (But did i mention that Daphne claimed to have been forced into prostitution- was this by her drug habit?).