Crowdfunding Campaign Ends In Disaster For Porn Star

It's been a rough couple of weeks, financially speaking, for porn stars. Banks were shutting down their accounts, PayPal reasserted their anti-porn policy, and now an adult star with an acute illness had her crowdfunding campaign terminated because it was connected with "pornographic items."

According to Complex (link below), Eden Alexander "needed money to pay her medical bills, so her friends set up a fundraiser through crowdsourcing site GiveForward. It's a WePay platform site that's sort of like the Kickstarter of medical treatment. Just a few days later, her campaign was suspended by WePay for reasons stemming from her work in the sex industry."

Alexander had an allergic reaction to a prescription medication, which Alexander says was exacerbated by negligent doctors who blamed her condition on hard drug use. Meanwhile, she's been unable to work and earn money due to severe pain and breathing problems, according to her Tweets. The fundraising campaign, which made absolutely no mention of sex or the adult industry, was going just fine, with more than $1,000 in donations.

Eden took to Twitter on Friday morning to post this letter she received from WePay...

After a deluge of outrage on Twitter with many of Alexander's supporters tweeting under the#whorephobia hashtag, WePay responded with a blog post explaining that the campaign violated its terms of service because the company's "back-end processor" doesn't permit offers of adult material in exchange for donations.

There's something deliciously ironic about a site's "back-end processor" being the one that blocks things dealing with pornography. The original post made no mention of pornography, adult material, or Alexander's livelihood, but it appears as if two porn sites doomed her campaign. "The problem, apparently, were two tweets from adult film companies offering free subscriptions or clips to donors, which Alexander re-tweeted from her personal account."

The story does have a bit of a happy ending however, as Eden has started a new campaign on Crowdtilt which, as of press time, had raised close to $9000.

Via Complex