I googled her. Her Betty Boop–like curves seemed to dissolve into her minuscule waist and her periwinkle blue eyes gave way to puffy lips. Like most sexy women on the internet, everything about her was perfectly smooth and proportional.

As a photojournalist who has covered women from a diverse range of backgrounds worldwide, I’ve always sought to dismantle stereotypes, dispel preconceptions and portray sensitively people or a culture often misunderstood. I’ve written about and photographed intimate portraits of transgender prostitutes in New York City, the wives of jihadis in Pakistan, women who have been sexually assaulted and enslaved in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan and women fighters on the front lines of war in Syria, Colombia and Israel. So when I was asked to write about Lana Rhoades, the number one porn star in the world, who no longer calls herself a porn star, I was curious.

Rhoades’s social media statistics came up first in my search. She has over 14 million followers on Instagram and 1.4 million on Twitter, and almost one million people subscribe to the YouTube stream of her podcast, Three Girls, One Kitchen. She is described as a pornographic actress, with links to Pornhub, the world’s largest pornographic video-sharing platform, and OnlyFans, where Rhoades posts nude selfies and explicit videos for her paying followers.

But Lana Rhoades shot her last pornographic film roughly three years ago, after an industrious career that lasted barely a year. Now she is attempting to transition to a mainstream public image and the world of PG-13 social media influencing, while hundreds of millions of people are still viewing her X-rated films online every year.

“I wouldn’t say I gained that much success or happiness from anything within the industry. It’s helped me after the fact because it led to people knowing me, so now I can do other things with it,” Rhoades says.

Can a porn star reinvent herself? We live in a society that can’t seem to let go of Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress almost three decades and four presidents later, but perhaps millennials and Gen Z are more forgiving than earlier generations, having moved on from the stigma of sex and the nude female. Perhaps the public cares more about social media popularity than whether someone’s sexual encounters have been viewed publicly.

Interestingly, Rhoades’s popularity as a social influencer has reinvigorated her porn career. When she left the adult-film business, she was among the top 20 most in-demand actresses on Pornhub, and she had roughly $100,000 in the bank. Three years later, she is the number one porn star on Pornhub (and in the world) and, she says, a multi-millionaire. Rhoades’s popularity in the world of adult film skyrocketed after she transitioned her following to the mainstream and rebranded herself as a social media influencer. She now openly discourages other young women from entering the adult-film business, citing alternative venues for sex work that she feels are less exploitative. Yet Rhoades still generates explicit content for her OnlyFans account. So what’s the difference? Now, unlike when she was shooting porn, it is Rhoades who decides when she shoots and how her body is portrayed, and she owns the content. Rhoades is finally in control.

I wanted to know who Rhoades—a person millions of people have virtually invited onto their private screens and into their intimate lives—really was. I watched and listened to hours of her YouTube interviews, podcasts and, admittedly, porn—because for some ridiculously naïve and fruitless reason, I thought I might be able to infer something about Rhoades’s personality by watching her adult films. That failed. So I scheduled a video call with her at her home in Los Angeles. It was late morning on a Thursday—evening for me in London—when her makeupless face popped up on my laptop. She was wearing a blue top that matched her eyes, and looked disarmingly young and innocent as she sipped her morning green juice. I’ve often seen the chasm between celebrities’ public and private lives, so it did not surprise me that she was the opposite of how I imagined.

Lana Rhoades was raised by a single, very successful mother in a suburb of Chicago. She had an older sister who suffered from schizophrenia and, according to Rhoades, most of the household energy and attention revolved around caregiving for her sister, leaving little love or guidance for Lana. When she was 13 or 14, she would escape to her bedroom, watch *The Girls Next Door,* and fantasize about one day living like the glamorous and beautiful Playmates inside one of Hollywood’s most famed mansions. She aspired to be the next Anna Nicole Smith.

“I would just hide in my room and watch the show, and I thought, Wow, their lives look so amazing,” Rhoades tells Playboy. “I want to do that whenever I grow up. That’s where I first had the inkling to do that. I thought the Playboy girls were just so cool. I wanted to be in Playboy.”

She researched the likes of Jenna Jameson, Savannah and Sasha Grey—all successful adult-film stars—and by the age of 14 decided she wanted to be a porn star. Ambition can sometimes obscure the path to success. While Rhoades knew the lifestyle she wanted, she claims she never really processed “that they were having sex for money.” At that point, she had never even kissed a guy.

As early as 15, Rhoades started using her body’s appeal and her pretty, girl-next-door looks in exchange for gifts. She went on Craigslist under the name Dani California—taken from one of her favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers songs—and sent clothed photographs of herself to an older man in Arizona, who in exchange offered to lavish her with the gift of fake boobs. She settled for 10 pairs of six-inch stripper shoes, ranging from clear pumps to pink with a bow.

One year later, Rhoades started dating her first boyfriend, whose life was intertwined with drugs and crime, and whose Chicago clique of friends, Rhoades says, behaved like a gang. Rhoades, under the spell of love and naïveté of youth, went along for the ride. She says she acted as an accomplice on multiple burglaries and other illicit activities while taking a steady stream of “pills, heroin and Xanax…anything that was offered” by her boyfriend and his friends. Eventually, they got caught. At age 16, Rhoades was sent to Warrenville Youth Center in Illinois for, she says, “residential burglary, which is a class one felony, burglary of a motor vehicle and some smaller charges.” Although the original sentence was a full commitment, or detention until the age of 21, she says she was released for good behavior after one year.

Rhoades says incarceration forced her to change the course of her life, steering her away from illicit activities and into a more structured environment.

“I always tell people this, and they think it’s so strange, but going to prison was one of the best things that’s ever happened to me because I was really going down a rough path,” she says. “I was doing drugs. I was hanging out with these people who were stealing things. And I imagine I would have kept going down that path.”

At Warrenville, she says, she felt the kind of love and attention that had previously been diverted to her older sister. She thrived on the discipline and affection she received from the authorities inside, from the counselors to the woman who oversaw her in her first paid job: 40 cents an hour in the kitchen.

“Growing up, because my mom was so focused on my sister and I was so focused on my sister, there wasn’t really a lot of love or guidance for me,” she says. “They had such a great team of people in the facility I was in. They were so great and so loving. It was the first time I felt loved or cared about by a parental figure. I started to really listen to everything they told me, and I felt like it healed my mind because I had dealt with so much for so many years. Their love and care for me made me believe in myself.”

While incarcerated at Warrenville, she got her GED, the high-school diploma equivalent. When she was released, she quit drugs and drinking, and she says she never committed another crime. But she still dreamed of being a porn star. Rhoades started making her way into the world of legal sex work. She went from a hostessing job at the Tilted Kilt, a Hooters competitor, to performing in a strip club (her shoes compliments of Dani California) to shooting her first adult film when she was 19.

The first time Rhoades had sex on camera, her co-star was only the second man she had ever slept with—and she ended up dating him. They never had sex off camera and their intimacy was relegated to long evenings of cuddling, but he was one of few companions she had during an otherwise lonely time.

According to Rhoades, she lasted only a few months in her initial foray into pornographic films with her first agent. She says he was aggressive and controlling, and wouldn’t let her take a day off to go to the doctor for medical issues resulting from constant penetration. She stepped away from shooting for three or four months to contemplate whether she was cut out for the business before changing agents and diving back in. She picked her next agent from a sea of “40-, 50-, 60-year-old men” whose job, as Rhoades described, was to coax girls into doing more and more for the least amount of money.

“You could get into the industry and say, I would never do a gang bang and I would never do this. You know that getting into it. But [agents] say things to you over time to sort of—what would the word be?—groom you into doing more,” she says. They’ll say things like, ‘Oh, all the good sluts do this. That’s how people are going to love you. If you do this, you have to do this and that.’ You don’t want to let anyone down, so you end up doing it over time.”

The more men Rhoades had sex with at a time, the more money she made (though the rates don’t double from one man to two) and often the more attention she garnered. She was game for almost everything that was asked of her, even if it was beyond the “vanilla stuff.” She was offered more and more showcases—films featuring her as the only actress, which were much coveted roles—and her agent kept prodding her to do more. At the crux of her career in adult film, her life was far from the fantasy of The Girls Next Door: She was up at 7 A.M., off to set, sex on camera all day, back home. She had no personal life, no intimacy off camera, few friends.

As her success as an adult film star grew, Rhoades’s search for happiness went unfulfilled. She had grown so robotic about her life, both on and off camera, that she wasn’t even counting the money she was making. Toward the end of her short career in porn, Rhoades started crumbling. She was increasingly asked to perform more hard-core sex scenes and ended up having panic attacks before each shoot. She sought moral support from her closest friend, an aspiring porn actress, who dismissed Rhoades’s anxiety with her own envy, explaining how lucky Rhoades was to be successful in the highly competitive adult-film world.

Rhoades does clarify, though, that she can’t blame anyone else for going physically and emotionally out of her comfort zone, because she never said, “No, I don’t want to do this.” No matter what she was asked to do on camera, she always feigned enthusiasm and appreciation for the opportunity to rise to the top of the industry. But her responses were the antithesis of her emotional reality.

Around the same time, Rhoades says she was hanging out with a social media influencer who had 3 million Instagram followers and was also posting content for YouTube. Most of his Instagram posts revolved around his workouts and fitness. Rhoades had one foot out the door of the adult-film industry and was looking for her next move.

“He was making, like, $15,000 a post,” she says. “I’m like, ‘I’m getting paid $1,500 to get fucked. Why are you making so much more than me?’”

So she quit the adult-film industry and focused on growing her Instagram and other social media platforms. She looked up to influencers such as Mia Khalifa, a Lebanese American media personality who entered and exited the pornographic film world after roughly a dozen films and now has some 23 million followers on Instagram, and spent time with Logan Paul and other YouTube stars, participating in their posts. She also began generating content of her own.

In September 2019, Rhoades debuted on Instagram and garnered over 400,000 likes for an image of herself as a little girl in a tutu wishing herself a happy birthday. She says her Instagram now earns upwards of $30,000 per post through brand deals and a partnership with Fashion Nova. Rhoades’s podcast, Three Girls, One Kitchen, doubles as a show on YouTube and generates ad revenue. The show features Rhoades and her two friends, Alexa and Olivia, in pastel-colored aprons gathered around a kitchen counter, chatting about “hot girl shit”—everything from sex tips from a pro to how to catch a cheater to how to find a rich husband. The current X-rated content she creates and posts is reserved for the 25,000 subscribers on her OnlyFans account, which she says generates hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in income.

All of this new traffic has meant that the popularity of her older films has also grown on Pornhub. And although Pornhub definitely feeds her ever-growing mainstream and social media footprint and translates into fans and income on OnlyFans, Rhoades laments that her former life in porn is like a life sentence she constantly battles with: the judgment from just about everyone she meets (or doesn’t meet); the harassment from men on the street who touch her inappropriately; her neighbors who call the cops on her for wearing short shorts inside her own home in Chicago. Her past is the elephant in the room in every one of her relationships: Basically every guy she falls in love with manages to tell her no one will ever love her like they do because she was a porn star.

Listening to Rhoades discuss the complexities of her professional existence, the question I have is: Does her history as a porn star even matter, as long as she is doing what makes her happy? At 24, Rhoades feels she has not only achieved her dream of living like The Girls Next Door, but also surpassed it. She owns two houses and three cars—including a Lamborghini—runs her own show and just helped design a lingerie line with Yandy (a company whose parent company is Playboy). She has a massive following on social media, and is involved in sex work on her own terms. These days, she is a self-described homebody who relishes structure and is working toward a set of ever-evolving goals. She wakes up each day, brews her own Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, has a green juice and reads the print version of the Wall Street Journal, which she gets delivered to her home. (She highlights the words she doesn’t know so she can study them to improve her vocabulary, because she missed much of high school.) She is focused on growing her podcast, becoming a better communicator and moving forward. As Rhoades transitions out of one world and into another, she isn’t looking back.

“I’m so far past moving on. It’s crazy. I’m just going to keep doing my thing, and keep becoming better in every single way,” she says. “If people choose to accept that later on, then they do. But if they don’t, I have no other option than to just keep being me and doing my thing. You know?”