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In late March, I drive to the edge of the San Fernando Valley, porn capital of the world, to meet Stormy. Different media outlets have presented Stormy as a slutty, giggling cartoon, a shrewd business professional, or a real-life Buffy the vampire slayer ready to plunge her stake into the country’s most divisive leader in recent memory.
Stormy requested I interview her at the horse ranch of photographer Keith Munyan and his life partner J. D. Barrale. Munyan makes a living photographing porn stars’ pictorials and actresses’ head shots. In his dining room, his stills of Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, and Victoria Justice hang like the pop culture equivalent of presidential portraits.
Munyan met Stormy when he was shooting the DVD cover of one of her earliest porn films. A Baton Rouge native, Stormy recognized his Louisiana twang, and Munyan told her he was from Monroe. “Swamp trash,” he says today, talking of his roots. “Pure fucking swamp trash.” They became best friends overnight. Five years ago, when Munyan started dating Barrale, Stormy began calling them both “Dad.” Today, Munyan is the only man she will let photograph her naked.
Stormy now spends most her time in Texas, where she resides with her daughter, seven horses, husband Glendon Crain, a pit bull named Crunch, and a Yorkie called Munch. But during L.A. work stints she crashes at Munyan and Barrale’s ranch.
When I arrive at the palatial spread, where a front yard fountain blasts water into the air, I’m greeted by a scene encapsulating Stormy’s new reality: A Cadillac Escalade carrying a 60 Minutes crew and her power attorney, Michael Avenatti, speeding out of the driveway.
Inside, Stormy prepares for a spray tan.
Danielle, a spray-tan artist, has assembled a tanning tent in Munyan and Barrale’s living room, next to a white bed, where many porn films have been shot.
“I don’t want to look like Trump,” Stormy quips as her gay dads’ three dalmatians circle around them. While Danielle prepares her spray gun, Stormy says her lawyer has hired a security guard and chauffeured Escalade for her L.A. visit. “Figured I’d use it,” she jokes, saying she intends to make use of the secure ride for a trip to the mall.
Stormy strips off her clothes and pauses a moment before covering her hair to protect it from the tanning spray. Even without makeup, her blue eyes stand out, her gaze penetrative.
Danielle laughs awkwardly. “I want to ask how you’re doing,” she says, “but I’m scared.”
“I’m bored!” Stormy cries in a sarcastic, faux nasal voice. “Nobody calls me!”
“I suck dick for a living… Do I have political opinions? Yes. But I’m not interested in sharing them because I am fully aware that it’s my job… to be an entertainer.”
Her three days in L.A. are a respite from her Make America Horny Again strip club tour. Stormy’s new, soaring profile has resulted in other changes, too. She recently left her longtime porn home, Wicked Pictures, to exclusively shoot new content for Brazzers and Digital Playground, two subsidiaries of MindGeek (PornHub’s parent company), for a deal rumored to be one of the biggest in the industry.
When Stormy first landed in L.A. in 2002, she was just there to shoot porn and raise her rates as a featured exotic dancer. She hated the city’s smoggy skies and traffic. But after filming one early, standout girl-on-girl scene, Stormy was signed as a contract girl with Wicked, one of the industry’s most revered production companies, and where Jenna Jameson famously got her start.
Before social media and cam sites allowed women to self-promote, entities like Wicked booked the girls’ interviews, fine-tuned their personas, and ultimately brandished their likenesses on DVD boxes sold at adult video stores across the nation. The contract-girl club was competitive and highly exclusive, capable of taking an everyday woman from stripper to porn star, and Valley hopefuls coveted the spots.
“[Wicked] was careful to pick girls that were a positive influence in the industry,” says Holly Randall, the erotic photographer and daughter of the iconic Penthouse, Hustler, and Playboy photog Suze Randall. Wicked tried to choose girls who were well-educated, or at least could play the part. This approach assured that contract girls could serve both as porn performers and public relations officers. Of course, no amount of brains mattered if they weren’t fit, large-breasted blondes who treated their male costars as sparring partners as much as sexual conquests — what Ashley West, porn historian and consultant on HBO’s The Deuce, calls “fierce Amazonian, Russ Meyer type of girls.”
Stormy quickly made a name for herself, and by 2004 she was writing, directing, and starring in her own films, including 3 Wishes and One Night in Vegas. In 2005 she cameoed in Judd Apatow’s mainstream hit comedy, The 40-Year-Old Virgin — a huge get for a pornographic actress.
In 2008, Adult Video News (AVN) Awards, the Oscars for porn stars, chose Stormy as the Jenna Jameson Crossover Star of the Year. At the award ceremony in Las Vegas, Jameson herself glided across the stage to present the prize. “It’s apropos that this award is named after me,” Jameson began. Then the erotic luminary announced, “I will never, ever, ever spread my legs again in this industry.” With that, Jameson welcomed Stormy to the stage and smiled as she presented the trophy, but her public resignation had upstaged Stormy. “Jenna Kanye’d me before Kanye Kanye’d Taylor,” Stormy deadpans.
Stormy didn’t eclipse Jameson in the mid-aughts. Nobody did. An onslaught of free amateur porn oversaturated the market, reducing the wattage of porn stars. But Stormy left her mark, focusing on writing and directing some of the industry’s splashiest films.
Stormy continued her high-profile work before and behind the camera. In 2015, she wrote, directed, and performed in Wanted, an ambitious, expensive western. During the eventful shoot, a camera exploded, flash floods devastated sets, and a leech crawled up star Anikka Albrite’s ass during a sex scene in a lake, among other problems. “Only thing we were missing were locusts,” Stormy jokes. But the film went on to receive six AVN nominations and win Best Drama.
