Maryam Irene Haley
RIP, Maryam Irene Haley (Haley Paige, Miriam Haley)
by ROBERT NAGLE on 12/23/2007
in POP AMERICANA,RIGHT AND WRONG,VISUALS,MOST POPULAR
This post is not going to be work-safe, because it is about the death (and possibly the murder) of a woman who starred in porn movies. The womanâs stage name was Haley Paige, but her real name was Miriam Haley (or Maryam Haley).
Hereâs the wikipedia page about the woman. Thereâs a very peculiar thread on an adult website (Not Safe for Work). This thread is messy and hard to read, so I have quoted significant portions from it below on this web page. It starts with the picture can you see here (warning: topless photo). At first glance, it appears to be a random publicity photo of a porn star signing autographs. But it strikes me as unbelievably tragic. The woman is âdressedâ in her sexy regalia while signing a calendar with a raunchy nude photo of her on it. In the background, random male fans are waiting in line to get autographs, laughing, having a good time and yet barely paying attention to her. She is in the foreground of the photo and her body receives the best lighting, her skin positively glistens and her body (while perhaps not perfect) is still very beautiful and yes, sexualized.; but her figure is isolated from the rest of the people; it reminds us of the existential loneliness of the adult performer. For her, the autograph session is just another day at work. One might say itâs exploitative, and maybe it is, but to me it seems mundane and even dull. Just another model, just another set of tits, just another porn convention.
The thread for this photo is awful. (If you remember, I wrote previously about how adult stars actively post on bulletin boards, leaving a permanent record of whatever they doâlike the rest of us!) At first, fans criticize her breasts, and then Haley Paige herself comes on the thread to complain about the way they disparaged her:
âmodt of you who wrote such odious comments about my breasts should find a real past time and get a fu*king life, as it is, obviously my self confidence is not good to say the least, thank you for ruining my week you feeble assholes. yes, my breasts sag, do you think i dont know that?
i look at my self in the mirror everyday and hate them but refuse to get a breast job.
so you will be happy to know that i have basically quit performing and focusing on my studies, as fr the suicide coment, it does cross my mind.â
âive been through enough in my life and ive never treated anyone in the industry with disrespect, and i think it is fair to say i did not deserve those comments you fu*king worthless cunts.
-haleyâ
Later on in the same thread, fans wonder where she has been, then someone posts a news article about her death, then her father posts a full comments filling in the details. Iâve tried to sort through the details; itâs unclear to me whether she died of an overdose or was murdered. I suspect the details will be revealed over time (and the wikipedia page will be updated). Either way, the circumstances are both horrifying and tragic.
I could say a lot about porn as a social phenomena (I wrote a little about it already here ). Iâm fairly tolerant of the genre, but contemptuous towards the mass commercialization of it. The pay is pitiful, and so are the working conditions; only a few are lucky enough to get good-paying parts. Maybe people can do it for a few weeks for the hell of it or even a few months, but after that, it becomes a bad place to be unless you have really thick skin and an ability to avoid the crazies. I once watched a porn film with a striking and smart-looking woman in her twenties. The woman (not Haley Paige) was being interviewed briefly before the sex scene. She said that her ex-husband k**napped her c***d when he didnât win custody. She was an exotic dancer and dabbling in porn. She was doing the porn shoot to pay for a divorce attorney and a private investigator to track the ex-husband down.
Of course, that whole backstory could have been faked, but it came out so randomly during the preliminary interview that it struck me as genuine. The director/interviewer was momentarily silenced by the sad dimension to this womanâs motivations. âArenât you afraid that your ex is going to use this movie as evidence that you are an unfit parent?â the director asked on the video.
âHe already did that,â she said. âAnd that has always been his excuse for stealing my c***d away. But this is honest work, and Iâve been a good parent so far. Iâm doing this to make a living. I have nothing to worry about.â And they had the sex scene, and they laughed and moaned the whole time, as if nothing was wrong.
The problem with porn is that it presents people as expendable and without a past. Porn by itself doesnât have to be exploitative or ugly or demeaning, but when people have to adopt personas, we no longer have to treat them as people. They are just people with ugly tits.
Now getting back to Haley. Haley apparently came in contact with a lot of people in the industry over the past few years. Even her c***dhood (which she described as abusive) wasnât as bad as she described it (if her fatherâs post was accurate). In California she will be remembered by friends and coworkers; apparently lots of people liked her (and in life, isnât that all that matters?) When she disappeared, people noticed it, although not immediately. Her living arrangement in her final months was isolated, not nurturing. A year earlier she agreed to marry someone to help him get a green card, and recently, she got involved with a fetish video director (who did d**gs with her and may have been her murderer). Although Haley was relatively well-known, a d**g addiction isolated her and prevented others from injecting a dose of reality into her fragile life. To escape from the real world is sometimes necessary and sometimes glorious, but you canât do it very long..or youâll have no bungee chord to bring you back. In those final months Haley had no one around to âkeep it realâ or bring a fresh perspective on things.
The Wikipedia page lists an interview with her, one of the many that porn stars do with websites over their short career. These interviews are mostly respectful and bland, asking questions about hobbies and how was it like to work with director X and actor Y. She was glowing about a recent movie she made, the Villa with Vivid (and it was directed by Paul Thomas, truly one of the most respectful and talented directors in his industry). I havenât seen that movie, but Iâm sure it was well-made and probably Hailey was thrilled to be in it.
We may say, âitâs just another porn star, another dead porn star,â but that is too easy. Haley was a porn star who lived; she had adventures, traveled around the world, had political opinions (she did work in the Green Party), and met all kinds of crazy and interesting people. She read Richard Brautigan, loved All about Eve and other classics, went to folk festivals. If I met her at a party and had no idea she was in the porn industry, I would have probably found her interesting. She felt, she thought, she lived.
I donât want to launch a tirade or even a defense about the sex industry; all I know is that some people do well in it, and others do badly. These are unconventional paths for people to take in life, probably not anyoneâs first choice (but my jobs after college werenât my first choice either). But itâs probably good that so many different paths in life exist for people to exploreâŚas long as these alternate paths donât make us feel trapped. There are bad people to avoid everywhere (and porn has more than its fair share).
I remember a notoriously sadistic and perverse Japanese movie I saw a long time ago, âIn the Realm of the Senses.â I remember the movieâs claustrophobic qualities; two lovers were in the bedroom for the entire movie, playing these weird sexual mutilation games which ultimately resulted in death. Itâs one of those arty movies, so of course the sexual games and v******e were meant to be taken metaphorically (although it was based on an actual event). The lovers in the film were portrayed in the movie as romantic and beautiful (though perverse); we were supposed to find them charming and maybe doomed. But if anything similar actually happened to a friend or loved one in the real life, it would sicken us. The movieâs lovers lived only for the darkness. But that was only a movie. Maryam and her porn director boyfriend were teetering on the edge with their alternative lifestyles. d**gs and fetishes brought escape; nothing was forbidden anymore; d**gs became their God. Inside a hotel room, strung out on d**gs, everything seemed fucked up and terrifying. I would like to think that her psychotic fetish-loving boyfriend was entirely to blame, but who really knows?
If Haley had lived a few more years, she would have gone out of the porn business, escaped the gaping maw of d**gs and found some alternative niche. Maybe it wouldnât have brought her happiness, but at least there would be a semi-normalcy. In your twenties, the world is built on absolutes. You havenât established a pattern of living; you donât yet have enough worldly knowledge to see the ephemeral qualities of fortune; you have no way of knowing how precious every single breath and footstep and conversation really is. At that vulnerable age, it is easy to fall into quicksand without realizing it actually is quicksandâŚor that hundreds (if not thousands) would be eager to help bring you out of it. Haley could not have foreseen the consequences, both of her death and its effect on those who knew her..and even those who didnât. That is the irony and also the tragedy.
Postscript: These two photos seem sad, and looking back, I think it is unfair to define a womanâs life (and death) by pictures..even sad ones. Her father has put up some public photos and of course you could probably google her name and find thousands of porn photos where she is happy and smiling.
Postscript #2: (July 4, 2008). In May, the father writes on the original thread:
Iâm glad Iâm back, too. Crass comments donât really bother me. Well, they do, if I let them, I suppose. If I think about them and what theyâre saying about my daughter. But in my state of semi-denial, the comments are not about my daughter at all, but some fictional character I donât quite associate with being her. I relate to the comments about her personality and her real self, not the porn star performing acts my mind wonât let me imagine. Yet intellectually I know itâs her, and I sense the amazing crossover she made by just being herself in an environment that is a polar opposite from her upbringing. I know about the real Maryam, so I can relate to the feelings people have about her as a person rather than an actress.
I realize that what weâre doing on this forum is quite extraordinary, talking about an adult performing artist on levels that go way beyond the subject of raw sex. We have taken the life and soul of a woman in its elemental form, examined her unjust fate in terms that transcend sensational voyeurism, and are in the process of redefining our understanding of her, our concept of her being, in the brazen expectation of discovering something valuable to cherish both in her life and in her death, and at some point, in each of our own hearts. What I find fascinating in our discussion, loose as it is at the moment, is that most of you donât know her before Haley Paige, and I donât know her since. I think weâre telling each other weâd like to swap stories so we can put them together into one. OK by me.
July 4 2008: Read this semi-interesting and totally irrelevant discussion about this article and wikipedia.
July 24 2008: Apparently Ken Haley through an email to the bastardly.com site, has provided a lot more background information. Rather than try to summarize, Iâd prefer just to include the contents verbatim (especially because bastardly seems to be having technical problems with publishing comments):
Thank you so very much, Ida Clair. Iâm still going through early levels of grieving, such as denial and suppression, and only briefly do I experience the anger that inevitably come in heavier doses. There are moments late at night when it hits me that she will not appear to me in person again, that our memories will not be laughed about in happy reunions, that new memories will not be born or even imagined. I feel somewhat dissociated from Haley Paige, the pornstar that people write about, both with dignity and crassness. I never knew Haley Paige, and Maryam Irene Haley would never do what Haley Paige did. Denial? More likely, a self-protection mechanism to suppress overwhelming grief and pain. But grief and pain slip through anyway, when Iâm alone and out of earshot of my wife (Maryamâs mother and I are divorced) and other people. Despite the anguish at the loss of my precious daughter and friend, I am buoyed by the words of you who have written with compassion and tenderness, and those who have been affected by her reality and her life.
I will write Maryamâs story, though how soon I canât say. So meanwhile, if there are questions, like Robertâs, Iâll be happy to try to answer them.â
âTo kind of set the timeline straight, or as straight as I know it to be, this is what I can help you to understand. I last saw Maryam in October 2006 when my wife (her stepmother) and I visited her in L.A (we live in Oregon).I still did not know much about her professional life. For two or three years she had told me she worked for a modeling agency as an assistant and chaperone for the models, and then as an appointment setter. She never told me that she was a model herself.â
âA few months before I last saw her she wrote me about directing an adult movie, but she specifically said she was not an actress or performer. So when I visited her in October 2006, and met Chico, I thought she was still working for the modeling agency. She seemed a bit out of it during the visit, her eyes looked way too droopy, and she took a lot of pills during the time we were there.â
âIn earlier phone conversations and emails she had told me of an addiction to oxycontin, and at the time of our visit she said she was taking prescribed methadone for the addiction. Despite her apparent drowsiness, she was quite active and alert with us, at least during the daytime. We played tennis in the complex tennis court (I took photos of her playing), and she ran and jumped and had plenty of energy. We had lunch together, including Chico. He was somewhat subdued, appeared intelligent though a bit arrogant, and he paid for the meal.â
âAfter we went to her place and arranged to stay the night in her apartment he disappeared. I got the impression she had to ask him for permission for us to stay and he probably wasnât happy about it. But she was cheerful and didnât let on there was a problem. As the evening wore on, she seemed to get drowsier, eventually falling asleep while eating a piece of cake. We stretched her out on the sofa and spent the night in her room. There was another bedroom in the apartment, which Maryam said was locked because somebody was keeping a dog in it. We could hear the dog, and during the night I heard someone going into the room, adjacent to the room we were sleeping in.â
âBefore she fell asleep, Maryam whispered to me that her boyfriend was paying for all her living expenses, but that she didnât care for him very much, and would soon be leaving him, but couldnât right away. She said he made lots of money in a secret business, and I immediately imagined he was a d**g dealer. In the morning she greeted us at the bedroom door as we were getting ready to leave. She was a lot more bright-eyed, not drowsy-looking, and very sweet with us. She hugged and kissed us goodbye and seemed very much at peace. That was the last time I saw her, except in recent dreams.â
âIn may or june of the next year, I got a call from Maryam one evening. She seemed to be chatty at first, and then suddenly asked me a question in a c***dish and whiny voice. âWhy did you let my uncle m***** me?â she asked, startling me. I knew what she was talking about. When she was about 3 years old, we (her mother, herself, and I) were spending the night at my sisterâs home in San Diego. We were living in Mexico, and when we visited my sister and her now-deceased husband, we would usually stay with them in their big home. My sisterâs husband was an alcoholic, but I always thought of him as a lovable person and a good uncle.â
âAs Maryamâs mother and I were settling in for bed, Maryam came running into the guest bedroom and said: âMy uncle touched my pee-pee!â We didnât let her go back out of our room, and after she went to sleep, my wife and I discussed in low voices what we should do. Make a fuss about it? Accuse my sisterâs husband of touching Maryam? Probably alienate my sister? We made the decision not to bring it up, because we felt that if he had done something inappropriate, he had done it while drunk.â
âWe decided, though, never to leave her alone in his presence. Which wasnât hard to do since we seldom visited them overnight again. He visited us once in Mexico before he died, but he stayed in a hotel and we made sure he wasnât alone with Maryam. We never discussed the event with my sister or even brought it up to Maryam again. How she remembered it, I donât know. But as I tried to explain the episode to her on the phone when she called, she kept saying things like, âWhy didnât you protect me from him?â Then suddenly, Chico came on the phone, and started a rant about me allowing her uncle to m***** Maryam, and he was going to tell the authorities. I hung up on him, but he called about 8 more times over the next week or two, and I still have the taped messages. Each time he called he ranted for five or ten minutes (I never picked up to talk to him). A few times Maryamâs voice is heard in the background, sobbing and saying, âDad! Dad!â Like a call for help.
âAt first I was angry with her as well as Chico. In an email that Chico sent, he said he wanted us to pay him $100,000 for all the money he spent on Maryamâs addiction, or he would tell the authorities that I allowed her to be m*****ed and probably m*****ed her myself. I found out that he made the same calls to Maryamâs mother and to my sister.â
âJust a couple of weeks after those disturbing phone calls, I got an email from Maryam that she had left Chico because he had beat her up, and she was staying at her momâs in San Diego. She said she had some information that would put Chico behind bars for a long time, regarding a **** or a murder, and that she was going to testify against him. She apologized for the phone calls, saying that he had made her do in order to extort money. Right after that I got an email from Chico saying that Maryam had left him and he was going to have to destroy her cats. He attached half a dozen photos of Maryam in various hard-core porn positions. âSee what your actions made your daughter do?â he wrote. I donât know how to describe my emotional reaction to those photos. It was like a Hitchcock movie, when lights and twistings spirals zoom in and out on the screen of the mind, and reality warps into a blur of tears and gasps of disbelief. The next day, after a sleepless night, I wrote to Maryam that I had found about her professional life, and that I did not condemn her for it. She wrote back briefly and said she had a lot to talk to me about. A few days later I got a frantic call from her mother that Maryam had left her home and was probably going back to Chico. Maryamâs mother was heartbroken. She said that she knew Chico was an evil person and that Maryam was terrified of him, but that her had a hold on her.â
âOn August 23, 2007 I got a call from my wife on my cell phone as I was returning home from photographing a friendâs wedding. âCome home immediately!â she screamed. Intuitively I knew it was about Maryam. âIt is Maryam?â I asked. âYes!â âIs she dead?â I asked. âYes!â Maryamâs mother had called and my wife had taken the call. Though they hadnât met before, my wife and my ex-wife seemed to bond in grief. My wife had a good relationship with Maryam, who had often stayed with us, including several months in Oklahoma in 2001 and periodically in San Diego over the next couple of years. After Maryam moved to Los Angeles, she visited every few months, and we had several nice visits with her. Maryamâs mother had called 2 days after Maryamâs death, because she had immediately driven to central California when she got the news from the police on August 21. Maryamâs remains were held a few days in King City or Soledad, the county seat, at the coronerâs office. Her mother had gone up there and started to make funeral arrangements at her own hometown in Contra Costa County, not far away. I wish she had called me sooner, but I didnât blame her. As soon as the coroner released Maryam, we planned to have a family ceremony, which took place the following week. My wife and I drove down from Oregon, and my first wife (I have 2 c***dren from my first marriage, both who knew Maryam, but couldnât attend the funeral) attended from where she lives nearby. All three of my wives came together at the funeral, and I took a lovely photo of all three, arms locked in friendship and in tender remembrance of Maryam.
Maryamâs mother told me that there was an investigation about Maryamâs death, and a sheriffâs official did take a statement from me, but I havenât heard of any conclusion on the authoritiesâ part about possible murder or even suicide. The only d**g that I know was found in her system was methadone, which I knew she was taking.â
âChico sent me a long email right before we left for the funeral. It rambled and didnât make a lot of sense, but he seemed subdued and remorseful. I havenât shown it to anyone. He talked about driving for weeks with her after she went back to him, and about getting married in Los Vegas, and making plans for her to get off d**gs and having a normal life. Some of those events were later confirmed, such as their getting married, so itâs possible that this account was basically true. He said he was sorry that she died while he slept, that he didnât know she was sick during the night, and that he loved her and felt lonely without her.
When I read about his own death by suicide just a month later, I wasnât as surprised as I might be. Because something tells me she had exacted a revenge on him in some way. She might have come to him in a dream or a vision, like she has come to me (sometimes as a hummingbird, sometimes as a beautiful mature woman clothed entirely in long flowing black hair) and scared him to death. Or he may have been overwhelmed by a sense of loss, though according to accounts of his treatment of women, itâs unlikely he was so sentimental about any woman that he would kill himself for losing her, unless he had done something to facilitate her death and the guilt got to him. Another possible explanation is the fear he expressed in different forums of his family finding out about his profession. Perhaps they had found out, and they had dispossessed him, and he killed himself out of humiliation.
It was a weird kind of poetic justice, but Iâm happier that heâs dead, though if her life would bring back his, then Iâd let him live just to have her back. Even if Chico didnât have anything to do with Maryamâs death, his control over her, the morbid decay of the d**gs and degrading sex and brutality he visited on her sapped her of her vitality and innocence, and made her life a form of death already. Either way, justice was served, in my opinion.â
Many questions remain, lots of information I would like to compile in order to write a thorough biogaphy, or perhaps a fictionalized biopic of a sweet young woman who made a career decision that confounded all of her friends and family, that led to incredible success and to her untimely death in a matter of a few years. I think tonight I wrote about a chapterâs worth already.
Love you all.
If anyone reading this blog personally knew my daughter, then you also know me to some extent. She and I share a number of attitudes and values, including honesty and openness. Iâm not afraid to be open with people I donât know very well, and can quickly make connections with supposed strangers. Iâm not reticent about expressing my feelings and passions, and I think she was the same way. I have received much appreciated warmth and compassion from people on this blog, and I want to repay you who have given me a piece of your heart. It is a bizarre situation that brings us into each otherâs acquaintance, I accept that, yet it also is natural and as human as any of us can be. You are a source of solace for my aching soul, and I even welcome the sickos who insult me and my daughter, for they will by some measure be touched by your kindness and by the honor you are bestowing on the young woman who left this life too soon. Haley Paige, Maryam Haley, is not in my eyes the adult actress many of you have seen in explicit detail. She is not the innocent girl who got mixed up in something beyond her power to escape. She is my closest friend, who knew me better than anyone ever has, and who wanted to make me proud of her accomplishments. And I am proud of what she accomplished, even in the industry that took her life, but more so for the effect she had on people, and continues to have on you who read these words. Keeping her name fresh and alive, and her memory as strong as her last words on this earth, is more than enough reason to share my thoughts and heart with all of you. Simple as that. Letâs keep talking about her. That includes the sickos who feel a need to insult and degrade. I can hope some of them arenât as sick as they pretend to be.
âŚ
(in response to some criticism by one of the posters)
Itâs hard to take any of this dudeâs language personally. He seems to illustrate one extreme of people in the adult business who are totally without morals or humanity. Iâm convinced this person is Hunglo, who worked closely with Chico Wang and who broke away from Chico for some reason just before the tragic events that surround Maryamâs death. He probably knows more about the circumstances of Maryamâs final days than anyone alive. Too bad he doesnât have an ounce of morality to at least give Maryamâs family some sense of solace and consolation regarding her last days of life. I never met Hunglo in person, though Iâm sure he knew Maryam well. I donât know why he caricatures her so grossly, in contradiction to other people in the industry who knew her personally and who have praised her for her character and personality, and even in contradiction to his hero Chico, who supposedly loved her. However, Chico did write me emails that were degrading of her, also, interspersed with assertions that he loved her and cared for her. He wrote me a day after Maryamâs death saying he was overcome with grief at her passing. Both Chico and this fellow seem to be cut from the same tragic cloth. Nearly devoid of soul, they seek self-aggrandizement in the degradation and abuse of people who are much better than they.
As an aside, Iâm not sure whether reposting this passage is the right thing to do. I will try to contact the man personally and obtain permission. The fatherâs words strike me as reliable, thoughtful and yes, profound. Yet they are also the words of a man in mourning, and later he may have regrets about the amount of candor he showed on this Internet thread. These are events too tragic to be settled on a discussion thread.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge that my original essay about the death was wrong-headed in some ways. Reality turned out to be more complex. Haley hadnât isolated herself that much; she stayed in touch with her father and probably other family members. Chico was a bad man, but had redeeming moments and probably genuine regret about what happened. We still donât know the whole story. I donât know if a âfictionalizationâ of the death will do it justice, but a literary treatment offers more freedom to explore emotions and hidden thoughts and ponder the significance of small details. A reporter (on the other hand) is constrained by the need to make events easy to understand and verifiable. A news article (or an essay like this one) or a discussion thread is limited in how it can portray a person or an event. In this discussion thread we see how different people are trying to impose their own narrative on events.
> The link of the rest of the article <
http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2007/12/rip-maryam-irene-haley-hailey-paige/
by ROBERT NAGLE on 12/23/2007
in POP AMERICANA,RIGHT AND WRONG,VISUALS,MOST POPULAR
This post is not going to be work-safe, because it is about the death (and possibly the murder) of a woman who starred in porn movies. The womanâs stage name was Haley Paige, but her real name was Miriam Haley (or Maryam Haley).
Hereâs the wikipedia page about the woman. Thereâs a very peculiar thread on an adult website (Not Safe for Work). This thread is messy and hard to read, so I have quoted significant portions from it below on this web page. It starts with the picture can you see here (warning: topless photo). At first glance, it appears to be a random publicity photo of a porn star signing autographs. But it strikes me as unbelievably tragic. The woman is âdressedâ in her sexy regalia while signing a calendar with a raunchy nude photo of her on it. In the background, random male fans are waiting in line to get autographs, laughing, having a good time and yet barely paying attention to her. She is in the foreground of the photo and her body receives the best lighting, her skin positively glistens and her body (while perhaps not perfect) is still very beautiful and yes, sexualized.; but her figure is isolated from the rest of the people; it reminds us of the existential loneliness of the adult performer. For her, the autograph session is just another day at work. One might say itâs exploitative, and maybe it is, but to me it seems mundane and even dull. Just another model, just another set of tits, just another porn convention.
The thread for this photo is awful. (If you remember, I wrote previously about how adult stars actively post on bulletin boards, leaving a permanent record of whatever they doâlike the rest of us!) At first, fans criticize her breasts, and then Haley Paige herself comes on the thread to complain about the way they disparaged her:
âmodt of you who wrote such odious comments about my breasts should find a real past time and get a fu*king life, as it is, obviously my self confidence is not good to say the least, thank you for ruining my week you feeble assholes. yes, my breasts sag, do you think i dont know that?
i look at my self in the mirror everyday and hate them but refuse to get a breast job.
so you will be happy to know that i have basically quit performing and focusing on my studies, as fr the suicide coment, it does cross my mind.â
âive been through enough in my life and ive never treated anyone in the industry with disrespect, and i think it is fair to say i did not deserve those comments you fu*king worthless cunts.
-haleyâ
Later on in the same thread, fans wonder where she has been, then someone posts a news article about her death, then her father posts a full comments filling in the details. Iâve tried to sort through the details; itâs unclear to me whether she died of an overdose or was murdered. I suspect the details will be revealed over time (and the wikipedia page will be updated). Either way, the circumstances are both horrifying and tragic.
I could say a lot about porn as a social phenomena (I wrote a little about it already here ). Iâm fairly tolerant of the genre, but contemptuous towards the mass commercialization of it. The pay is pitiful, and so are the working conditions; only a few are lucky enough to get good-paying parts. Maybe people can do it for a few weeks for the hell of it or even a few months, but after that, it becomes a bad place to be unless you have really thick skin and an ability to avoid the crazies. I once watched a porn film with a striking and smart-looking woman in her twenties. The woman (not Haley Paige) was being interviewed briefly before the sex scene. She said that her ex-husband k**napped her c***d when he didnât win custody. She was an exotic dancer and dabbling in porn. She was doing the porn shoot to pay for a divorce attorney and a private investigator to track the ex-husband down.
Of course, that whole backstory could have been faked, but it came out so randomly during the preliminary interview that it struck me as genuine. The director/interviewer was momentarily silenced by the sad dimension to this womanâs motivations. âArenât you afraid that your ex is going to use this movie as evidence that you are an unfit parent?â the director asked on the video.
âHe already did that,â she said. âAnd that has always been his excuse for stealing my c***d away. But this is honest work, and Iâve been a good parent so far. Iâm doing this to make a living. I have nothing to worry about.â And they had the sex scene, and they laughed and moaned the whole time, as if nothing was wrong.
The problem with porn is that it presents people as expendable and without a past. Porn by itself doesnât have to be exploitative or ugly or demeaning, but when people have to adopt personas, we no longer have to treat them as people. They are just people with ugly tits.
Now getting back to Haley. Haley apparently came in contact with a lot of people in the industry over the past few years. Even her c***dhood (which she described as abusive) wasnât as bad as she described it (if her fatherâs post was accurate). In California she will be remembered by friends and coworkers; apparently lots of people liked her (and in life, isnât that all that matters?) When she disappeared, people noticed it, although not immediately. Her living arrangement in her final months was isolated, not nurturing. A year earlier she agreed to marry someone to help him get a green card, and recently, she got involved with a fetish video director (who did d**gs with her and may have been her murderer). Although Haley was relatively well-known, a d**g addiction isolated her and prevented others from injecting a dose of reality into her fragile life. To escape from the real world is sometimes necessary and sometimes glorious, but you canât do it very long..or youâll have no bungee chord to bring you back. In those final months Haley had no one around to âkeep it realâ or bring a fresh perspective on things.
The Wikipedia page lists an interview with her, one of the many that porn stars do with websites over their short career. These interviews are mostly respectful and bland, asking questions about hobbies and how was it like to work with director X and actor Y. She was glowing about a recent movie she made, the Villa with Vivid (and it was directed by Paul Thomas, truly one of the most respectful and talented directors in his industry). I havenât seen that movie, but Iâm sure it was well-made and probably Hailey was thrilled to be in it.
We may say, âitâs just another porn star, another dead porn star,â but that is too easy. Haley was a porn star who lived; she had adventures, traveled around the world, had political opinions (she did work in the Green Party), and met all kinds of crazy and interesting people. She read Richard Brautigan, loved All about Eve and other classics, went to folk festivals. If I met her at a party and had no idea she was in the porn industry, I would have probably found her interesting. She felt, she thought, she lived.
I donât want to launch a tirade or even a defense about the sex industry; all I know is that some people do well in it, and others do badly. These are unconventional paths for people to take in life, probably not anyoneâs first choice (but my jobs after college werenât my first choice either). But itâs probably good that so many different paths in life exist for people to exploreâŚas long as these alternate paths donât make us feel trapped. There are bad people to avoid everywhere (and porn has more than its fair share).
I remember a notoriously sadistic and perverse Japanese movie I saw a long time ago, âIn the Realm of the Senses.â I remember the movieâs claustrophobic qualities; two lovers were in the bedroom for the entire movie, playing these weird sexual mutilation games which ultimately resulted in death. Itâs one of those arty movies, so of course the sexual games and v******e were meant to be taken metaphorically (although it was based on an actual event). The lovers in the film were portrayed in the movie as romantic and beautiful (though perverse); we were supposed to find them charming and maybe doomed. But if anything similar actually happened to a friend or loved one in the real life, it would sicken us. The movieâs lovers lived only for the darkness. But that was only a movie. Maryam and her porn director boyfriend were teetering on the edge with their alternative lifestyles. d**gs and fetishes brought escape; nothing was forbidden anymore; d**gs became their God. Inside a hotel room, strung out on d**gs, everything seemed fucked up and terrifying. I would like to think that her psychotic fetish-loving boyfriend was entirely to blame, but who really knows?
If Haley had lived a few more years, she would have gone out of the porn business, escaped the gaping maw of d**gs and found some alternative niche. Maybe it wouldnât have brought her happiness, but at least there would be a semi-normalcy. In your twenties, the world is built on absolutes. You havenât established a pattern of living; you donât yet have enough worldly knowledge to see the ephemeral qualities of fortune; you have no way of knowing how precious every single breath and footstep and conversation really is. At that vulnerable age, it is easy to fall into quicksand without realizing it actually is quicksandâŚor that hundreds (if not thousands) would be eager to help bring you out of it. Haley could not have foreseen the consequences, both of her death and its effect on those who knew her..and even those who didnât. That is the irony and also the tragedy.
Postscript: These two photos seem sad, and looking back, I think it is unfair to define a womanâs life (and death) by pictures..even sad ones. Her father has put up some public photos and of course you could probably google her name and find thousands of porn photos where she is happy and smiling.
Postscript #2: (July 4, 2008). In May, the father writes on the original thread:
Iâm glad Iâm back, too. Crass comments donât really bother me. Well, they do, if I let them, I suppose. If I think about them and what theyâre saying about my daughter. But in my state of semi-denial, the comments are not about my daughter at all, but some fictional character I donât quite associate with being her. I relate to the comments about her personality and her real self, not the porn star performing acts my mind wonât let me imagine. Yet intellectually I know itâs her, and I sense the amazing crossover she made by just being herself in an environment that is a polar opposite from her upbringing. I know about the real Maryam, so I can relate to the feelings people have about her as a person rather than an actress.
I realize that what weâre doing on this forum is quite extraordinary, talking about an adult performing artist on levels that go way beyond the subject of raw sex. We have taken the life and soul of a woman in its elemental form, examined her unjust fate in terms that transcend sensational voyeurism, and are in the process of redefining our understanding of her, our concept of her being, in the brazen expectation of discovering something valuable to cherish both in her life and in her death, and at some point, in each of our own hearts. What I find fascinating in our discussion, loose as it is at the moment, is that most of you donât know her before Haley Paige, and I donât know her since. I think weâre telling each other weâd like to swap stories so we can put them together into one. OK by me.
July 4 2008: Read this semi-interesting and totally irrelevant discussion about this article and wikipedia.
July 24 2008: Apparently Ken Haley through an email to the bastardly.com site, has provided a lot more background information. Rather than try to summarize, Iâd prefer just to include the contents verbatim (especially because bastardly seems to be having technical problems with publishing comments):
Thank you so very much, Ida Clair. Iâm still going through early levels of grieving, such as denial and suppression, and only briefly do I experience the anger that inevitably come in heavier doses. There are moments late at night when it hits me that she will not appear to me in person again, that our memories will not be laughed about in happy reunions, that new memories will not be born or even imagined. I feel somewhat dissociated from Haley Paige, the pornstar that people write about, both with dignity and crassness. I never knew Haley Paige, and Maryam Irene Haley would never do what Haley Paige did. Denial? More likely, a self-protection mechanism to suppress overwhelming grief and pain. But grief and pain slip through anyway, when Iâm alone and out of earshot of my wife (Maryamâs mother and I are divorced) and other people. Despite the anguish at the loss of my precious daughter and friend, I am buoyed by the words of you who have written with compassion and tenderness, and those who have been affected by her reality and her life.
I will write Maryamâs story, though how soon I canât say. So meanwhile, if there are questions, like Robertâs, Iâll be happy to try to answer them.â
âTo kind of set the timeline straight, or as straight as I know it to be, this is what I can help you to understand. I last saw Maryam in October 2006 when my wife (her stepmother) and I visited her in L.A (we live in Oregon).I still did not know much about her professional life. For two or three years she had told me she worked for a modeling agency as an assistant and chaperone for the models, and then as an appointment setter. She never told me that she was a model herself.â
âA few months before I last saw her she wrote me about directing an adult movie, but she specifically said she was not an actress or performer. So when I visited her in October 2006, and met Chico, I thought she was still working for the modeling agency. She seemed a bit out of it during the visit, her eyes looked way too droopy, and she took a lot of pills during the time we were there.â
âIn earlier phone conversations and emails she had told me of an addiction to oxycontin, and at the time of our visit she said she was taking prescribed methadone for the addiction. Despite her apparent drowsiness, she was quite active and alert with us, at least during the daytime. We played tennis in the complex tennis court (I took photos of her playing), and she ran and jumped and had plenty of energy. We had lunch together, including Chico. He was somewhat subdued, appeared intelligent though a bit arrogant, and he paid for the meal.â
âAfter we went to her place and arranged to stay the night in her apartment he disappeared. I got the impression she had to ask him for permission for us to stay and he probably wasnât happy about it. But she was cheerful and didnât let on there was a problem. As the evening wore on, she seemed to get drowsier, eventually falling asleep while eating a piece of cake. We stretched her out on the sofa and spent the night in her room. There was another bedroom in the apartment, which Maryam said was locked because somebody was keeping a dog in it. We could hear the dog, and during the night I heard someone going into the room, adjacent to the room we were sleeping in.â
âBefore she fell asleep, Maryam whispered to me that her boyfriend was paying for all her living expenses, but that she didnât care for him very much, and would soon be leaving him, but couldnât right away. She said he made lots of money in a secret business, and I immediately imagined he was a d**g dealer. In the morning she greeted us at the bedroom door as we were getting ready to leave. She was a lot more bright-eyed, not drowsy-looking, and very sweet with us. She hugged and kissed us goodbye and seemed very much at peace. That was the last time I saw her, except in recent dreams.â
âIn may or june of the next year, I got a call from Maryam one evening. She seemed to be chatty at first, and then suddenly asked me a question in a c***dish and whiny voice. âWhy did you let my uncle m***** me?â she asked, startling me. I knew what she was talking about. When she was about 3 years old, we (her mother, herself, and I) were spending the night at my sisterâs home in San Diego. We were living in Mexico, and when we visited my sister and her now-deceased husband, we would usually stay with them in their big home. My sisterâs husband was an alcoholic, but I always thought of him as a lovable person and a good uncle.â
âAs Maryamâs mother and I were settling in for bed, Maryam came running into the guest bedroom and said: âMy uncle touched my pee-pee!â We didnât let her go back out of our room, and after she went to sleep, my wife and I discussed in low voices what we should do. Make a fuss about it? Accuse my sisterâs husband of touching Maryam? Probably alienate my sister? We made the decision not to bring it up, because we felt that if he had done something inappropriate, he had done it while drunk.â
âWe decided, though, never to leave her alone in his presence. Which wasnât hard to do since we seldom visited them overnight again. He visited us once in Mexico before he died, but he stayed in a hotel and we made sure he wasnât alone with Maryam. We never discussed the event with my sister or even brought it up to Maryam again. How she remembered it, I donât know. But as I tried to explain the episode to her on the phone when she called, she kept saying things like, âWhy didnât you protect me from him?â Then suddenly, Chico came on the phone, and started a rant about me allowing her uncle to m***** Maryam, and he was going to tell the authorities. I hung up on him, but he called about 8 more times over the next week or two, and I still have the taped messages. Each time he called he ranted for five or ten minutes (I never picked up to talk to him). A few times Maryamâs voice is heard in the background, sobbing and saying, âDad! Dad!â Like a call for help.
âAt first I was angry with her as well as Chico. In an email that Chico sent, he said he wanted us to pay him $100,000 for all the money he spent on Maryamâs addiction, or he would tell the authorities that I allowed her to be m*****ed and probably m*****ed her myself. I found out that he made the same calls to Maryamâs mother and to my sister.â
âJust a couple of weeks after those disturbing phone calls, I got an email from Maryam that she had left Chico because he had beat her up, and she was staying at her momâs in San Diego. She said she had some information that would put Chico behind bars for a long time, regarding a **** or a murder, and that she was going to testify against him. She apologized for the phone calls, saying that he had made her do in order to extort money. Right after that I got an email from Chico saying that Maryam had left him and he was going to have to destroy her cats. He attached half a dozen photos of Maryam in various hard-core porn positions. âSee what your actions made your daughter do?â he wrote. I donât know how to describe my emotional reaction to those photos. It was like a Hitchcock movie, when lights and twistings spirals zoom in and out on the screen of the mind, and reality warps into a blur of tears and gasps of disbelief. The next day, after a sleepless night, I wrote to Maryam that I had found about her professional life, and that I did not condemn her for it. She wrote back briefly and said she had a lot to talk to me about. A few days later I got a frantic call from her mother that Maryam had left her home and was probably going back to Chico. Maryamâs mother was heartbroken. She said that she knew Chico was an evil person and that Maryam was terrified of him, but that her had a hold on her.â
âOn August 23, 2007 I got a call from my wife on my cell phone as I was returning home from photographing a friendâs wedding. âCome home immediately!â she screamed. Intuitively I knew it was about Maryam. âIt is Maryam?â I asked. âYes!â âIs she dead?â I asked. âYes!â Maryamâs mother had called and my wife had taken the call. Though they hadnât met before, my wife and my ex-wife seemed to bond in grief. My wife had a good relationship with Maryam, who had often stayed with us, including several months in Oklahoma in 2001 and periodically in San Diego over the next couple of years. After Maryam moved to Los Angeles, she visited every few months, and we had several nice visits with her. Maryamâs mother had called 2 days after Maryamâs death, because she had immediately driven to central California when she got the news from the police on August 21. Maryamâs remains were held a few days in King City or Soledad, the county seat, at the coronerâs office. Her mother had gone up there and started to make funeral arrangements at her own hometown in Contra Costa County, not far away. I wish she had called me sooner, but I didnât blame her. As soon as the coroner released Maryam, we planned to have a family ceremony, which took place the following week. My wife and I drove down from Oregon, and my first wife (I have 2 c***dren from my first marriage, both who knew Maryam, but couldnât attend the funeral) attended from where she lives nearby. All three of my wives came together at the funeral, and I took a lovely photo of all three, arms locked in friendship and in tender remembrance of Maryam.
Maryamâs mother told me that there was an investigation about Maryamâs death, and a sheriffâs official did take a statement from me, but I havenât heard of any conclusion on the authoritiesâ part about possible murder or even suicide. The only d**g that I know was found in her system was methadone, which I knew she was taking.â
âChico sent me a long email right before we left for the funeral. It rambled and didnât make a lot of sense, but he seemed subdued and remorseful. I havenât shown it to anyone. He talked about driving for weeks with her after she went back to him, and about getting married in Los Vegas, and making plans for her to get off d**gs and having a normal life. Some of those events were later confirmed, such as their getting married, so itâs possible that this account was basically true. He said he was sorry that she died while he slept, that he didnât know she was sick during the night, and that he loved her and felt lonely without her.
When I read about his own death by suicide just a month later, I wasnât as surprised as I might be. Because something tells me she had exacted a revenge on him in some way. She might have come to him in a dream or a vision, like she has come to me (sometimes as a hummingbird, sometimes as a beautiful mature woman clothed entirely in long flowing black hair) and scared him to death. Or he may have been overwhelmed by a sense of loss, though according to accounts of his treatment of women, itâs unlikely he was so sentimental about any woman that he would kill himself for losing her, unless he had done something to facilitate her death and the guilt got to him. Another possible explanation is the fear he expressed in different forums of his family finding out about his profession. Perhaps they had found out, and they had dispossessed him, and he killed himself out of humiliation.
It was a weird kind of poetic justice, but Iâm happier that heâs dead, though if her life would bring back his, then Iâd let him live just to have her back. Even if Chico didnât have anything to do with Maryamâs death, his control over her, the morbid decay of the d**gs and degrading sex and brutality he visited on her sapped her of her vitality and innocence, and made her life a form of death already. Either way, justice was served, in my opinion.â
Many questions remain, lots of information I would like to compile in order to write a thorough biogaphy, or perhaps a fictionalized biopic of a sweet young woman who made a career decision that confounded all of her friends and family, that led to incredible success and to her untimely death in a matter of a few years. I think tonight I wrote about a chapterâs worth already.
Love you all.
If anyone reading this blog personally knew my daughter, then you also know me to some extent. She and I share a number of attitudes and values, including honesty and openness. Iâm not afraid to be open with people I donât know very well, and can quickly make connections with supposed strangers. Iâm not reticent about expressing my feelings and passions, and I think she was the same way. I have received much appreciated warmth and compassion from people on this blog, and I want to repay you who have given me a piece of your heart. It is a bizarre situation that brings us into each otherâs acquaintance, I accept that, yet it also is natural and as human as any of us can be. You are a source of solace for my aching soul, and I even welcome the sickos who insult me and my daughter, for they will by some measure be touched by your kindness and by the honor you are bestowing on the young woman who left this life too soon. Haley Paige, Maryam Haley, is not in my eyes the adult actress many of you have seen in explicit detail. She is not the innocent girl who got mixed up in something beyond her power to escape. She is my closest friend, who knew me better than anyone ever has, and who wanted to make me proud of her accomplishments. And I am proud of what she accomplished, even in the industry that took her life, but more so for the effect she had on people, and continues to have on you who read these words. Keeping her name fresh and alive, and her memory as strong as her last words on this earth, is more than enough reason to share my thoughts and heart with all of you. Simple as that. Letâs keep talking about her. That includes the sickos who feel a need to insult and degrade. I can hope some of them arenât as sick as they pretend to be.
âŚ
(in response to some criticism by one of the posters)
Itâs hard to take any of this dudeâs language personally. He seems to illustrate one extreme of people in the adult business who are totally without morals or humanity. Iâm convinced this person is Hunglo, who worked closely with Chico Wang and who broke away from Chico for some reason just before the tragic events that surround Maryamâs death. He probably knows more about the circumstances of Maryamâs final days than anyone alive. Too bad he doesnât have an ounce of morality to at least give Maryamâs family some sense of solace and consolation regarding her last days of life. I never met Hunglo in person, though Iâm sure he knew Maryam well. I donât know why he caricatures her so grossly, in contradiction to other people in the industry who knew her personally and who have praised her for her character and personality, and even in contradiction to his hero Chico, who supposedly loved her. However, Chico did write me emails that were degrading of her, also, interspersed with assertions that he loved her and cared for her. He wrote me a day after Maryamâs death saying he was overcome with grief at her passing. Both Chico and this fellow seem to be cut from the same tragic cloth. Nearly devoid of soul, they seek self-aggrandizement in the degradation and abuse of people who are much better than they.
As an aside, Iâm not sure whether reposting this passage is the right thing to do. I will try to contact the man personally and obtain permission. The fatherâs words strike me as reliable, thoughtful and yes, profound. Yet they are also the words of a man in mourning, and later he may have regrets about the amount of candor he showed on this Internet thread. These are events too tragic to be settled on a discussion thread.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge that my original essay about the death was wrong-headed in some ways. Reality turned out to be more complex. Haley hadnât isolated herself that much; she stayed in touch with her father and probably other family members. Chico was a bad man, but had redeeming moments and probably genuine regret about what happened. We still donât know the whole story. I donât know if a âfictionalizationâ of the death will do it justice, but a literary treatment offers more freedom to explore emotions and hidden thoughts and ponder the significance of small details. A reporter (on the other hand) is constrained by the need to make events easy to understand and verifiable. A news article (or an essay like this one) or a discussion thread is limited in how it can portray a person or an event. In this discussion thread we see how different people are trying to impose their own narrative on events.
> The link of the rest of the article <
http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2007/12/rip-maryam-irene-haley-hailey-paige/
14 years ago