[Text ID: We are thought of as less than people. When every story about me broke, it was “porn star Stormy Daniels, real name X,” and they printed my real name everywhere. Every time you see Whoopi Goldberg’s name, or Nicolas Cage or Bruno Mars, they don’t put their real name in parentheses behind it. I had so many female journalists do it to me. And when I said something to them, [they’d say,] “Say her name. Say her name. Her name is Stephanie Clifford, say it! She’s not just porn star Stormy Daniels!” But they never paused to think that maybe that’s the name I wanted. And you just outed my family. I guarantee you wouldn’t misgender me, so why would you use a dead name? And they thought they were doing the right thing because they’re on their big high feminist fucking #MeToo horse and they never even stopped to do the most basic feminist thing, which is ask the woman in the center of the storm what she wants to be called. And nobody did it. /End ID]
Fun fact! When I was googling to find this citation to make it easier to add the text id, google auto-completed “Stormy Daniels” to “Stormy Daniels real name” with her full legal name in giant letters right below the question!
There’s also this very insightful bit from her right before the above passage:
“One of the things I want to do, because of what happened to me in court, is to use [my] platform to lobby to change the rule about being able to discriminate against sex workers. Because as a director, all these years in the business, I saw so many girls come in and not want to be stars. They just wanted to make money to go to school, and they didn’t buy purses, they didn’t do drugs, they didn’t party, they didn’t do anything fucking stupid, right? I really got to know these women on a personal level because I was directing at least once a month for 10 years. And so I saw these girls come in, do everything right, get a degree in nursing, leave the business—but then a year or two years later, they’d come back because they got fired over and over and over because they got recognized at work.
And when they came back, that’s when they were broken. That’s when they did drugs. That’s when they died. That’s when I saw them commit suicide, not the first time around. I can name 50 girls right now who have gotten fired because they used to do porn. And that’s got to change and [the rape shield carve-out] has to change. And what they did to me has to change. Because it’s bullshit. You don’t want us to do porn, but you won’t let us do anything else.”
