At a fundraising event in California, Crissy Outlaw stands at a pulpit wearing a glamorous billowing black mini with a pink flower carefully lodged in her dark hair.
The all-American 41-year-old beauty begins her sermon simply with: ‘Hi, my name is Crissy and I used to be a porn star.’
She opens with this same line to the other congregations she visits, narrating the chilling times she was abused time and time again from the age of four, the failed relationships that left her ‘wanting to be dead’ and how she gave up her career as one of the biggest names in the porn industry to become a prolific Christian preacher.
‘I can’t believe I ever went into the porn industry,’ Crissy told DailyMail.com.
‘And I never wanted to be a preacher but it happened because I felt called to let people know why I left the industry.’
Crissy grew up in Jacksonville, Florida in a lower-class, conservative and chaotic home. Her parents were divorced and she primarily lived with her father, who was adamant about sexual purity and often launched into diatribes about her maintaining her virginity until she got married.
While Crissy – whose mother couldn’t be as close as she wished during her childhood after a messy divorce with her father – believed in God, she says she was ‘confused’ by this advice on staying away from sex because for most of her childhood she was sexually abused by a predatory neighbor who touched her inappropriately – a secret she kept from her father.
‘I couldn’t understand why I was being molested so many times; it was confusing to me,’ she said. ‘Why is it so easy for people to touch my body?
‘I couldn’t make sense of it as a child. I thought it must be something about me that’s making it happen.
‘I didn’t tell my father because I couldn’t have a relationship with him, since he’s hard to get along with.’
She moved in with her mother when she was 13 years old but rebelled against the rules her father had set. A defiant Crissy lost her virginity at 17 and that same year, she became pregnant. Steadfast in the belief she would marry the man she thought was the love of her life, she decided to keep the baby. Just weeks after her decision, though, her boyfriend dumped her and she felt forced to have an abortion in her first trimester.
‘I was fully awake and aware of everything going on during the abortion and my heart was shattered while the life was literally being sucked out of me,’ Crissy recalls.
‘It was awful….my school knew about my abortion and I lost all my friends.
‘That was one of the most traumatic things that happened.’
The abortion led Crissy into a deep depression and for most of her life she looked to relationships to help her out of her mental illness and to fill a void she says her father had left.
‘I felt like I needed to be in a relationship or to be a mother to be worthy of love,’ she said.
‘I look to men to make me feel like I was beautiful, to make me feel protected and to give a sense of stability in my life, things my dad never did.’
Although she heralded romantic relationships as the ideal, Crissy suffered humiliating and degrading treatment at the hands of the men she dated because they often wanted to incorporate pornography in their sex lives.
Among the horror stories was a relationship she had with a pornography addict who raped her multiple times. She says she had to have many abortions because there were times when he would rape her while she was not on birth control.
These failed relationships as well as the memories of her abuse drove her down a path of low self-esteem and she decided to have breast augmentation surgery, believing she could finally measure up to the women her ex-boyfriends watched on screen.
‘I never felt good enough for the men I dated,’ she said. ‘I didn’t feel beautiful because they looked at porn during sex with me. I thought, am I not good enough for you that you can’t only look at me?
‘I felt worthless to the point that I chose porn and I said, “One day I’m going to be one of the girls you watch on screen.”’
She made the bold decision after she posted a picture of herself on a website that was calling for traditional models. Although she rejected countless offers to model in the nude, photographers flooded her email inbox, complimenting her looks and promising her a successful porn career.
Soon, wooed by the acceptance porn seemed to offer, 23-year-old Crissy gave in and decided to become a porn star.
But the nerves she felt on her first day on set proved she wasn’t fully ready for what her new career choice entailed.
Speaking of the first shoot on a Florida beach, she said: ‘I was so scared, I wasn’t really in my element.
‘Even in the picture, you can tell I was so disconnected.
‘When the photographer told me to take my clothes off, my hands and legs were shaking and I was thinking, what am I doing?
‘I was nervous but I checked out, like I did when I was sexually abused.
‘The sense of danger was exciting to me because I wanted to end up dead, that was just how messed up I was.’
Crissy – who performed in over 50 adult movies between 2001 and 2006 and eventually earned $1000 dollars a scene – became more comfortable and quickly became one of the most popular porn stars and entrepreneurs. Towards the end of her six-year career she founded her own website, modelled for notable magazines including Playboy and earned more than $15,000 a month.
The reality of this seductive world was far from its glossy exterior however. Crissy fell to the floor one fateful night in 2006 in her bedroom in California and cried out to God because she felt ‘broken’ by her relationships and didn’t know who else to turn to.
‘I fell to the ground and I said “God, if you’re real, I need you to tell me. I need a sign because everything I know about love isn’t right. And I need to feel you in my life because I haven’t felt you since I was 11 years old” and I stayed on the floor,’ Crissy said.
The next day, the then-31-year-old visited her boyfriend, an actor on a movie set in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During a break in filming, she was hanging out with him, a couple of his friends and film crew members. One of his friends began passing a photo of his topless wife around the circle the group had formed while making lewd comments. Crissy was embarrassed and angry, but a man who worked on the film set, Chris, decided not to look at the picture and rather told the group he would never show any pictures of his wife to anyone.
Crissy was surprised by his response because it wasn’t typically what she heard from the men she dated.
While the rest of the team got back to filming, she continued speaking with Chris. During the conversation he asked her what she did for a living; she eventually admitted she was in porn. He then told her that her boyfriend had already told everyone about her career and had passed around nude pictures of her to other people on the set.
‘I put my head down because I was so ashamed,’ Crissy says.
But Chris asked her a question that reminded her of a prayer request she had made the night before: ‘Do you know Jesus?’
Crissy took that as the divine sign she’d asked for and was relieved God had answered her prayer. The pair prayed together and her life changed in that moment.
‘I started crying when he asked me if I wanted to rededicate my life,’ she said.
‘I said yes. [After that], I didn’t do any more shoots and stopped accepting any income from pornography.’
She ditched her boyfriend and visited therapists to help her heal from her time in pornography. Using the conversation as a springboard for change, she began attending a local church and decided to avoid relationships for a year in order to heal. Soon after her break, she met her husband-to-be, Lawton Outlaw – a youth pastor at the time.
The pair married in May 2013 and Crissy now works part-time in retail in Houston, Texas. She travels around the country to tell others to avoid repeating her ‘mistakes’ and has worked with members of the xxxchurch – which has the biggest anti-porn website in the world – who travel to porn conventions to preach the gospel while wearing t-shirts labelled, ‘Jesus loves Porn Stars’.
‘I made tons of mistakes but entering porn was one of the biggest ones,’ she said.
‘This mistake is out there forever but I’ve come to peace with myself and who God has made me to be.’
Brittni de la Mora considers entering pornography a ‘mistake’ too. This 30-year-old was once named one of Maxim’s hottest porn stars and Howard Stern’s smartest porn star – a title she earned after taking one of the radio icon’s trivia tests he gave to the porn stars he interviewed.
Yet underneath the glamour of her porn-stardom, she battled a cocaine addiction, depression and an eating disorder, which all became so serious that she searched elsewhere for acceptance: the church.
‘I was really depressed…the drugs are the only thing that helped me get through the day because they just made me feel like I wasn’t in this little pit of depression,’ Brittni told DailyMail.com.
‘It gave me a little bit of energy and a false sense of happiness.
‘But after seven years, I started to cry and I apologized to God. I didn’t understand that this is what I’d been doing all these years.
Once considered one of the ‘world’s hottest porn stars’, Brittni de la Mora was an adult entertainer for seven years. She gave up her career to become a Christian Youth Minister after battling a cocaine addiction and suicidal thoughts. She is pictured on the left at the height of her porn career at an anniversary party in 2006. The 30-year-old posted the picture on the right on her Instagram page in 2016, four years after she became a Christian, with the caption: ‘Don’t let your thoughts get in your way & ruin your day. Instead pray throughout the day’
But the road to religion was a long and arduous one.
Brittni says her childhood – riddled with betrayal, neglect and instability – made her feel unwanted. A part of her early life still etched in her memory were the hurtful words she says her parents would often say to her.
‘My parents took a lot of their hurt and pain out on me,’ she said.
‘From a very young age, they would say things to me like “I hate you” and “I wish you were never here” and other very hurtful things.
‘I never felt accepted by my family and when you don’t heal from something, you carry that in your soul.’
Brittni was first introduced to the sex industry at 16 years old, when she worked as a stripper in her hometown, Santa Barbara, California. While partying at a strip club in Mexico, she took to the stage so she would be ‘affirmed’ by her male audience.
‘That was when I realized, if I’m going to be naked and in the presence of men, then they are going to pay me and they are going to affirm me.
‘They want to be around me and that was something I had never felt as a child. I had never felt like I was wanted and so that was that seed that was planted that night.’
She stripped for two years, until a porn director asked her to try ‘romantic films’. Brittni – who was a broadcast journalism student at the University of Santa Barbara and knew exactly what he was asking her to do – agreed because she wanted a more risqué career path and yearned for financial freedom from her parents, with whom she had a distant relationship.
Her first porn scene was at a mansion in Los Angeles, California. Hair and makeup ready, the then-18-year-old was not camera shy but was nervous about one thing: sex positions.
She had never watched pornography so was confused as the director yelled out positions she’d never heard of. Despite her nerves, the novice won them over.
‘They were telling me I was going to be such a big star and that everyone is going to love me.
‘For me hearing all of this, I thought, this is awesome. People are going to love me and I’m going to be a star.’
Brittni quickly became a professional and was shooting at least three scenes a day but a month into her ‘stardom’, she was diagnosed with gonorrhea.
She was even more humiliated after her agent told her ‘just a shot in the butt’ and antibiotics would relieve her.
The event that would trigger Brittni’s addiction occurred just a few days after her diagnosis. Having suffered from an eating disorder in her teens, she was upset when a director she was working with called her ‘fat’ on set.
‘I had gotten out of the hospital not long before that,’ Brittni said. ‘When I was a senior in high school I had anorexia and so that was really hard for me to hear.’
At 5ft 1inches and 105 lbs, Brittni sported a thin frame – and weighed significantly less than the average woman her height. Still, wounded by the director’s comments, she indulged in cocaine after listening to a friend’s advice on weight loss.
‘I was telling myself if I am in the tripple digits…it means I am fat,’ Brittni said.
‘I started looking for ways to lose weight and there was a model I was living with who suggested cocaine and so that’s when my addiction started.
‘Over the next seven years, it just got worse.’
Two years after stripping, Brittni, pictured here at an Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada, became a successful porn star, although she says during her first shoot she knew nothing about sex positions
The novice eventually rocked the porn world for seven years, starred in 275 films and garnered $3 million, but she says her earnings were wasted on cocaine and painkillers, which catapulted the star into a deep depression and brought her close to committing suicide
During those years, Brittni would also take painkillers such as oxycodone and Vicodin when she suffered from withdrawal symptoms. Under the alias Jenna Presley, she still put on a brave face at her job and was quickly growing in popularity. Often, fans would approach her to enquire if they’d seen her ‘somewhere’, as though oblivious to who she was.
At 21 years old, Brittni garnered $3 million after appearing in 275 films but amid the glamor and fame that porn seemed to offer, Brittni reached one of the lowest points in her life. Broke and deep in depression she witnessed her boyfriend, a gang member, stabbed to death by a rival gang.
This incident left Brittni afraid for her life and drove her to attempt to take her own. In 2010, the California native snorted large amounts of crystal meth while in her bedroom with the lights off. She even began slitting her wrists multiple times, but Brittni says in that moment she heard a voice say, ‘Turn the lights on and put the scissors down’.
A verse in the Bible, Revelation 2:20, triggered a life change for Brittni in 2012. When she read this part of the Holy Book, she says she had her ‘light bulb moment’ to turn to God and quit porn
She attributes the voice to God and says the words dissuaded her from taking her life.
‘Had God not spoken to me that evening, without a shadow of doubt, I would have taken my life that day.’
Brittni called her Christian grandparents in Santa Barbara that night. Her grandfather – who lived a two-hour drive away – took her to church and she says it was at this time she decided to commit her life fully to Jesus Christ.
Upon her return to Los Angeles, Brittni went back into porn because she says she was without the support of a Christian community and had entered the wrong crowd.
‘I didn’t go back to church when I went home,’ she said.
‘I went back into the industry because this guy, who turned out to be a pimp, came into my life and got me back into porn, where I stayed for three and a half years.’
But her ‘light bulb moment’ happened again while on a flight to shoot a porn scene. She read a Bible verse, Revelation 2:20, which preaches against promiscuity.
Speaking about that moment she said: ‘That was my lightbulb moment, I started to cry and I apologized to God. I didn’t understand that this is what I’ve been doing all these years.’
Brittni only had a check of $1500 left but still decided to break up her relationship with the pimp and to quit the industry – for good this time.
She took a job at a cab company earning $10 per hour, and became a regular at her local church, the Cornerstone Church of San Diego, where she has become a youth minister. In 2016, she married the church’s lead pastor, Richard de la Mora.
Brittni, who once craved nothing more than the approval from men, says she now only strives to be accepted by God. Her past is now a distant memory and she says she wants to keep it that way, although she plans to tell her children in the future.
‘I don’t worry about my past, I want to teach my children that we all have a past and we don’t judge because of it. We love them through it. I need to be the type of person that I want my children to be.’
