Lily LaBeau and Bonnie Rotten, two women who repeatedly worked with the porn star — who’s recently been accused of rape — told BuzzFeed News he deliberately upset them during filming.
James Deen
Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images
Two porn actors said James Deen was "manipulative" during shoots and that he intentionally provoked and upset them.
Lily LaBeau and Bonnie Rotten told BuzzFeed News in separate interviews that Deen, who has been publicly accused by at least eight women of various sexual abuses since Nov. 28, would go out of his way to push their physical and emotional boundaries, at least some of which were clearly defined.
"He's a fucking psychopath," Lily LaBeau, who estimated she's worked with him 10 times, told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview on Wednesday. "The majority of the time, he's a great performer, but then there will be those weird times when something snaps, and you end up getting your face knocked in or something."
LaBeau said it was 2012 when she first saw this side of Deen. She was supposed to be filming a scene with another actor, but Deen, who was a guest at a party happening concurrent to the shoot at the San Francisco headquarters of the BDSM porn company Kink, wanted to film with her. She said he would have known from working with her previously that she doesn't work with cattle prods. But she recalled he brandished a cattle prod at her, and she panicked. "I started screaming, 'It's on my no list,'" LaBeau said. She told BuzzFeed News she felt Deen deliberately violated the list to upset her — but she also noted that he had not reviewed her stipulations before he started filming the scene, contrary to standard practice.
Some time after he put the cattle prod down, LaBeau said Deen "grabs my no list, and he goes down from the first thing, and he starts doing everything I didn't mark 'no' on, one by one," she continued. He got to foot worship, and put a foot in her mouth, and then, she said, "he slapped me in the face, open-handed, really hard." LaBeau recalled that "something snapped from my ear down to my chin." She had lockjaw, and couldn't close her jaw for 10 or 15 minutes, she said. She panicked again, and members of the crew gathered around her to comfort her.
When reached by email, a publicist for Kink noted the company was still collecting information, but wrote, "If James had been recently tested [for STDs], he could have been allowed to perform in the Upper Floor scene so long as no one in the scene objected. According to the accounts, he did review LeBeau's no list, then decided to use it against her, going as far as he could without actually violating a 'no.' There's a difference between consensual BDSM and outright cruelty. But James seems to have been very smart about exploiting loopholes. But this never should have happened, and I think for everyone at Kink right now, it's about how to stop anything like this from happening again."
Lily LaBeau.
LaBeau's story is similar to one Bonnie Rotten told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview on Tuesday. Rotten, who emphasized that her experiences with Deen were "not the most severe experiences with him," said that she worked with him twice, and both times he went out of his way to make her feel uncomfortable. The first time, around 2012, Rotten said he yelled at her in front of a room full of people about the blow job she was performing on him rather than quietly and politely making a request. It was embarrassing to her and unprofessional of him, she said, and after that, she put him on her no list.
Around 2014, Rotten said she decided to give Deen a second chance. She took it as a bad sign when, she said, he ridiculed her tattoos in the car on the way to the shoot. "It sounds really dumb," she said, but "he's a very belittling guy."
While they were shooting the bondage scene, Rotten said Deen said something to her that she felt was deliberately goading — she could not recall exactly what it was, but she became so angry that she spit on him and knocked off his hat, which was not what she was supposed to do as the submissive in the scene. The shoot was paused, and the director checked if she was OK. Rotten emotionally disengaged and said she just wanted to get the scene over with, while Deen, she recalled, "kind of got more excited — it kind of drove him more to push me throughout the scene." She hasn't worked with him since.
"He doesn't like to be an equal," said Rotten, who regularly works with a rotation around 15 men she feels comfortable with; those men are comfortable with some power shifts occurring during scenes. With Deen, she said, it was different. "He has to be the dominant one at all times," Rotten told BuzzFeed News.
