Amber Rayne, a 31-year-old former porn star who recently accused another well-known adult actor of sexual assault, has been found dead in her home in Los Angeles.
Rayne was born Meghan Wren; the Los Angeles County coroner confirmed her death on its website. The cause of death was not known; the Los Angeles Times noted Rayne’s death was reported as an accident or possible overdose after she collapsed over the weekend. Pornographic actress and director Stormy Daniels also confirmed Rayne’s death on Twitter.
Rayne, a Detroit native, joined the adult industry in 2005. With nearly 500 credits to her name, as the industry publication AVN noted, she retired last year as other women began alleging that James Deen — a crossover porn star known outside the industry for his appearance in “The Canyons,” a film written by Bret Easton Ellis — had sexually assaulted them.
In a graphic account shared with the Daily Beast last year, Rayne said Deen punched her in the face twice with a closed fist during anal sex at a porn shoot for a film released in 2006, an alleged attack which brought “so much blood I couldn’t finish the scene.”
“It took many years before we worked together again … my agent showed up at the end of that scene and said, ‘We’re taking you straight to the hospital.’ He was pissed,” Rayne told the Daily Beast. “I was a big money-maker and I was out of commission.”
Deen, once known for his boyish good looks, has denied Rayne’s allegations as well as those made by other women, saying he was “completely baffled” and “shocked.”
“We are people like any other people in the world – our sex is still sex,” Deen said last year. “The consent is still the same. There is just a different level of understanding … You don’t get to do whatever you want but at the same time you need to accept a certain level of sexual interaction with almost everyone you encounter on set, until you express that you do not desire it.” He added: “I have never claimed to be a feminist or a nice guy, or the boy next door or anything like that. I am a pornographer.”
Rayne worked with Deen later in her career.
“I went in to the scene) waiting for a battle, ‘I’m going to take you on now,'” she said. “It was a challenge, like, ‘I will break you,’ and it ended up being a really sweet scene. At the time, people really liked working with him and it was that scene when I realized why … It seemed like he’d grown up significantly, at least in his interactions with me, and I grew into a stronger person as well.”
However, she said the many allegations against Deen — from Deen’s ex-girlfriend Stoya and Burning Angel founder Joanna Angel, among others — led her to speak out. She said Deen knew his alleged behavior was wrong.
“I can’t blame it on immaturity anymore,” she said. “I can’t blame it on being new to the industry and being some young kid. No, you know better.”
After Rayne’s death, Deen posted a message on Twitter: “These levels of disrespect are powerfully uncool.” Though it was unclear whether the message was meant as a response to Rayne’s death, some took it as such. (Deen was not immediately available for comment.)
Tabloids reported that Rayne is a survivor of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and uterine cancer. In 2011, she marked National Cancer Survivors Day, writing on Twitter that she was “thankful to be celebrating that and that I did survive and am surviving in order to be here to.”
Rayne, who owned a horse farm, announced her retirement from adult films in April, but had come out of retirement at least once since then at Stormy Daniels’s request.
“I announced my official retirement in April,” Rayne told AVN, “and I’ve been in and out, in and out, performing-wise, for like a year, but I’ve still been performing and directing and producing, editing.”
Daniels said that she would care for Rayne’s animals after her death.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Justin Wm. Moyer
