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Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On has been making headlines lately, but not in a good way. Since its release in late April, the docu-series executive produced by Rashida Jones has been haunted by allegations that it revealed sensitive information about its subjects, many of whom are sex industry workers, without their consent. One of the most vocal critics of the series, adult film star Gia Paige, has even implied that the series led to someone discovering her real life identity and endangering her family.
Decider spoke to the directors of the original documentary and its controversial follow-up series, Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus, earlier this week. The directors and executive producers talked about where the idea of Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On came from, discussed two of the series’ most controversial episodes, and explained what they see as their ethical responsibilities when it comes to telling sex workers’ stories.
Whereas Hot Girls Wanted explored the world of amateur porn through one talent agency, Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On broadens that focus, exploring the many ways technology has changed society’s relationship with sex. Bauer and Gradus’ interest these subjects can be traced back to the duo’s 2012 documentary Sexy Baby. ”We saw the cultures kind of intersecting … because of technology, and we found that really interesting,” Bauer said. “Our interest was always and continues to be big picture and the mainstream world. So telling stories of sex work and sort of porn world stories, that was an accident, really.”
The original Hot Girls Wanted focuses on an agency run by Riley Reynolds, who is also featured in Episode 4 of the new series, “Money Shot.” “One of the things that we wanted to explore further was what the experience of pornography is like for the men involved,” Gradus said when asked why they returned to Reynolds’ story. “We found out that Riley started repping male talent, and since we already had a relationship with him and we were also very intrigued by his personal story, we figured that would make a good episode.”
Focusing on Reynolds also allowed them to explore racism in porn. “There’s dedicated websites to interracial porn, and there’s special rates, and contractually a lot of young women aren’t supposed to do it until they’ve done a lot of other stuff. We knew that it was this taboo and stigmatized thing that you don’t really see anywhere else in the mainstream because it wouldn’t be tolerated,” Gradus said. “Within porn it’s still very much happening.”
“Money Shot” is also the episode that has been the main source of controversy for the docu-series. Adult film star Gia Paige, who appears briefly in the episode, claims that after initially agreeing to appear in Turned On, she asked to be removed from the episode. In an interview with AVN, Reynolds has also confirmed that story, claiming he agreed to show Bauer and Gradus more of his family life in exchange for footage of Paige to be removed from the episode (Warning: NSFW link above). Decider asked the filmmakers what the conversation about Paige’s removal looked like.
“After the filming had happened with her, when we were done filming her, she did request via Riley afterwards that we did not use her footage,” Gradus said. “We had a lot more footage of her than what appears in that episode because we did take that into consideration, and we scaled her back quite a lot to really just a few very brief scenes. But we only went as far as we felt we could while still maintaining the integrity of the story.”
Bauer added that they have between 12 and 14 hours of footage with Paige. She said that Paige asked the filmmakers not to use footage of anything personal or about her family. Bauer maintains they did not cross that line. “We absolutely adhered to her request and respected her request not to talk about anything personal. There’s nothing in the footage that we use of her that she asked not to be used,” she said. “That’s an important thing to clarify. We absolutely respected her wishes.”
In a follow-up email to this interview, Decider asked Turned On‘s filmmakers if they had been in contact with Gia Paige since she started speaking out about the docu-series. A PR spokesperson speaking on behalf of Bauer and Gradus replied with the following: “Gia has never reached out to them, and they could not reach out to her as Gia refused to give them her contact information during production, all of their communications with Gia were with Riley as the intermediary.”
Paige and Reynolds’ episode, “Money Shot,” also features two screenshots of Paige’s real life Facebook account. The images only reveal her first and middle name, but they have been used in arguments discussing the lines the series may have crossed when it comes to sex workers’ identities. When asked why those screenshots were used, Bauer and Gradus explained that they had come to know the actress by her first name, so they felt comfortable using it briefly in the episode.
“It’s not her last name. It’s her first and middle name, and just as background, if you were to go to Facebook and look up that name … there are hundreds of people with that name,” Baur said. “I didn’t look at that until recently, but we did not use her last name.”
“It felt appropriate. But obviously we had no idea she would be that upset, and we feel badly that she is that upset about it,” Gradus said.
In an interview with The Daily Dot, Paige also implied that the footage that appears in Turned On has led to someone discovering her real identity and harassing both her and her family. Decider asked the filmmakers if they had a response to these allegations.
“I will say I don’t know how that would lead to … ,” Gradus said after a pause. She then explained that there are many bios on the internet about porn stars and that Paige’s listed where she was from as well as whether or not she had siblings. “I’m not really sure how knowing her first name, her real first name, would have led anybody any closer to finding her.”
“With the internet, I just feel like people can find anyone, you know?” Bauer said. “When I’m actually looking for somebody, I can just piece things together, you know like a career and a first name and a couple of details.”
“But again, it was just her first name, and again there’s other information that I’ve seen about her on the internet, saying where she’s from, which we did not do,” Gradus added.
In a follow-up interview, Bauer and Gradus stated that “Gia and all other participants signed a release form before participating.” A PR spokesperson for the production also provided Decider with the release form Turned On gave to participants. The same spokesperson also offered to provide behind-the-scenes footage of conversations with Paige, covering what she was and was not comfortable discussing and the use of her real name, as background research for this article.
Turned On has also been criticized for its sixth episode, “Don’t Stop Filming.” The episode features Periscope videos from two adult film stars, which were featured without alerting the actresses beforehand. When asked if there was ever a conversation about blurring these women’s faces, Gradus and Bauer said no. According to the filmmakers, no one working on the episode even knew the women were in the industry until after it aired. “We did not know who they were, and there was nothing — I mean we were not divulging their identities at all. So there were no usernames, no handles — nothing,” Gradus said.
Bauer and Gradus also talked about what the overall response to the series has been. Gradus pointed to the series’ second episode “Love Me Tinder,” which has been generating a lot of social media attention. “We see people tagging each other on Facebook and tweeting links to each other because I feel like a lot of people feel like it finally brought a story to experiences a lot of us have had,” she said. “That one is really resonating, which is great.”
“We’ve heard from a lot of people that it’s made them stop and think about things that they may not otherwise have reason to think about, and that’s great. We love that sort of reaction — when it inspires a conversation that people didn’t realize they wanted to have or felt the need to have and finally there’s something that helps sort of shepard these topics,” Gradus said.
Bauer added that she’s seen positive reactions to “Money Shot,” “Take Me Private,” and the Rashida Jones-directed “Women on Top.” “The fact that we have this opportunity, that Netflix — they really did give us such a great platform to deliver because people can watch it privately and have conversations. It’s just such a huge gift because even though, sure we take a lot of heat because it is such a difficult subject matter to cover … we feel it’s really necessary because we just think this conversation has to be had,” she said.
A lot of the criticism the documentary has received stems from debates about what is legally acceptable for documentarians to show versus what’s ethical. Decider asked Bauer and Gradus what they see as their ethical responsibility when it comes to telling stories about sex workers.
“I mean, we approach their stories the same,” Gradus said. “We apply journalistic standards, which is that we try to be fair and balanced, and [the subject is] definitely stigmatized. We know that. But as documentarians we try to be like fair and balanced.”
“I think we’re very empathetic filmmakers … but at the same time, we are journalists, so any story that we’re going to cover, we’re going to cover in a journalistic, ethical, caring way,” Bauer said. “But we can’t like make PR pieces or let characters sort of dictate the narrative because that’s not journalistic.”
Gradus also talked about Turned On’s very deliberate decision not to show sex. “For a series that talks about sex as much as it does, you don’t really see a lot of nudity at all. There’s really barely any, and that’s a very deliberate choice because again … we don’t do the storytelling to sensationalize it at all,” Gradus said. She also spoke about the importance of letting subjects tell their own stories. “We give them lots of space to tell us about the positive experiences about their job and then also some of the negative experiences about their job. Those are things that they chose to tell us, and a lot of times we do get criticized that we leave space for the whole range of experiences. But like Jill was saying, as journalists, we want to tell a full story.”
“Even if we go back to the sort of, you know ‘episode in question,’ you know if we go to Riley’s episode, I mean we go home with him,” Bauer said. “We knew that Gia was a big part of his life, and we include really only the parts that she said that it was fine, that she had no problem talking about her relationship with him and everything. And it’s because we want to portray someone. We want to show you who someone is, who this person is in a full way.”
When asked if there was any chance of a Season 2 of Turned On, Gradus said, “We sincerely hope so. The possibilities for more stories are just endless. There are many many things that we just did not have a chance to get to.”
