Drugs, Boobs, and Bunnies: Porn Star Tasha Reign Tells All

The below is an excerpt from Tasha Reign’s new memoir, ‘From Princess To Porn Star: A Real-Life Cinderella Story.’

I awoke in a drugged-up stupor, with double D-size breasts and a perfect little nose, though I couldn’t see either due to the white bandages that covered my swollen body and bruised face.

I was recovering at the W Hotel in chic-as-fuck West Beverly Hills, California, a luxurious hotel in a cute college town, right next to Hugh Hefner’s old mansion and adjacent to my university at the time, UCLA. I was twenty-one years old, my father had just died, and I had spent over $20,000 of his life insurance money on plastic surgery.

Even though I had received a couple hundred thousand dollars from his policy, I was in no mental state to fight for my multimillion-dollar trust fund that my evil stepmother was sitting on. My father had lost a battle with sarcoma (blood and tissue cancer) after two long years of fighting tooth and nail to survive.

My last memory of him was when my stepmother pulled the plug on Christmas Day. Sure, he wasn’t going to make it, but why she chose Christmas Day as his death day, I’ll never know. I blasted the song “Last Resort” by Papa Roach as the realization sank in. My father was dead, forever. I couldn’t believe it. So, I just sat there on the oversize sofa screaming the lyrics, “Cut my life into pieces, this is my last resort, suffocation, no breathing, don’t give a fuck if...” as my stepsiblings stared at me in disbelief.

“Hide his art—take everything to storage!” my twisted stepmother scathingly whispered to her son. She didn’t want me to have anything of my father’s. That would become clear soon enough.

He had tried every solution: experimental procedures, expensive procedures; you name it, he tried it. He was a handsome man, an active man, and an overall Renaissance man. Everyone in Newport Beach, where he resided, wanted to be like him. After all, he had beautiful children, a picturesque home in a coveted private neighborhood, a yacht, a sailboat, a membership to the best country club in town, and a hot mistress on the side, all before age sixty-five. He spoiled me rotten, but not as much as his stepchildren, which I would grow to resent later on in life.

In preparation for surgery, I booked myself a lavish suite at the W Hotel, where I was going to recover in decadence and allow myself a glamorous mourning. I started by going full throttle, trusting Dr. Garth Fisher and Dr. Raj Kanodia to perfect my youthful body and face, perhaps to distract myself from what just happened. They changed the direction of my career for the better, opening many doors for me in an industry where your appearance is your ticket in.

My whole life, I had been insecure about my nose. I was teased about it in middle school and in high school, and then I never felt fully confident with my profile when I started posing for sexy photos. I couldn’t shake the memory of the house party where, before one of my first hookups, a handsome upper-classman had discussed my nose with his friend right in front of me, and his friend had commented, “She’s pretty except for her nose!” tracing his own profile to demonstrate what he meant.

He was talking about my dorsal hump nose, where there was a bump in the center, noticeable when I turned to the side. I am not blaming my insecurity about my nose on the people who commented on it throughout my life, but it definitely didn’t help. I was never the prettiest girl in high school, but I was always smart and popular.

Growing up, my best friend, Clara, came from a famous Hollywood family, who would send us a limo every weekend to visit them in the hills of Los Angeles. Ted Field, a successful producer behind movies such as FernGully and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, was her father. His many girlfriends were always Playmates and supermodels—they were stunning. I grew up idolizing them and the lifestyle they had curated for themselves. Ted had a close friend, Raj Kanodia, who also happened to be the best rhinoplasty surgeon in the world.

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Fast-forward thirteen years later and I am doing my research at the Playboy Mansion, trying to find the best plastic surgeons, and all of sudden life comes full circle. Asking all my weekend girlfriends whom I should go to to get work done was easy; they all went to the same two surgeons, Fisher and Kanodia. It’s a small world here in Southern California, and everyone knows everyone. The doctors gave me a discount for being one of Hef’s girls—just another perk of the position.

Waking up from such a hard-core surgery is a blur. I was highly medicated when they rolled me out of the hospital in a wheelchair. I know my mother, Michelle, picked me up because the surgeon later told me what a delight she was. The way he said it immediately made me realize she had probably flirted with him; she flirts with everyone. I do not. I try my best to be professional so that people will not conflate my natural friendliness with flirtation.

My mother and I have a love-hate relationship. I vividly recall wearing a forest-green True Religion sweat suit the morning of the big day, which I had purchased specifically for recovery. “You really don’t have a stitch of makeup on, do you?” she passive aggressively sneered. She always has made little comments to poke at me. After I woke up in my hotel suite, five of my closest friends from high school took turns visiting me during recovery. They brought me flowers and cards and acted like what I had done to myself was pretty intense.

“There’s a huge elephant on my chest, just sitting here and weighing me down!” I kept reiterating that, and to this day the immense pressure of the imaginary yet painful elephant is clear in my memory. In a blurry haze, I asked one of my oldest friends, Nathan, if he could please fetch me my pain medication—and that is when we realized it was gone. In the guise of making sure I wouldn’t become dependent on it; my mother snatched those fun little suckers right up for herself.

Mother has been in and out of rehab a couple of times and is an addict. She is a wild and fun-loving person who struggles with depression and an affinity for Chardonnay and pain pills. Watching my mom’s personality shift with drugs and alcohol while I was growing up is enough to make me gag at the smell of white wine.

Now with no medication and an elephant on my chest, what was I to do? I kept throwing up, over and over again, just hurling out the nothingness that was inside of me. This was my therapy. I went from my beloved father dying straight into what I thought would make me a happier, more confident person: plastic surgery.

“Are you okay?” Lacey shouted through the door in the bathroom as I barfed everywhere. I was obviously not okay. In so much pain I could hardly move, I was lucky to have my friends in and out of the hotel checking on me, even if my mom had taken off with my drugs. To this day my girlfriend Cindy tells the story of my recovery at parties and vows never to get work done because of it. I was a hot mess.

Within a week or two, I was back in my black Porsche Cayenne, which I had bought in cash, speeding around town. I got pulled over by a police officer for running a stop sign. I wheedled my way out of the ticket because I showed him my nose bandages and he felt bad for me. Shit, I felt bad for me; I was a mess and a half.

Today, it’s been twelve years, many hours, and thousands of dollars of therapy later and I still haven’t gotten over the death of my father. The best way I can describe the pain is that there’s a wave that keeps hitting me, but the magnitude just feels a little less sudden with every hit. My therapist told me that would happen. Grieving the death of a parent is the worst pain I’ve ever felt. That following week, I was in class, bruises, bandages, and all. People stared, but no one dared to ask me why my face looked blue and wrapped. They probably just assumed it was plastic surgery; this is LA, after all. A weird part about death is that life goes on, even though your special person died; that seems cruel, doesn’t it?

I had recently read the memoir How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, about Jenna Jameson, cowritten with Neil Strauss, and it had changed me. Great pieces of art will do that to you. They will excite you and tantalize you and move me, and that is exactly how I felt after reading this book. I recovered from plastic surgery by watching old porn movies in my plush hotel bed, renting The New Devil in Miss Jones, an erotic movie by Vivid Pictures, starring Jenna Jameson. What appealed to me most was the glamour, beauty, and femininity that Jenna seemed to exude on film. There was also something masculine and strong coming through as I watched her brave performance.

I loved the athleticism of the sex itself; it was like the best of the best competitors doing the most enjoyable thing imaginable. I thought that the mere concept—that she was monetizing her physical body as a brand—was the coolest thing in the world. I was already in the sex industry, but this genre seemed more appealing than the escort work I had been up to. I had always had a strong desire to entertain people. I was athletic, a businesswoman, and this job seemed like the right fit for me. I had watched documentaries about adult film stars while I was in high school and thought, That looks like the greatest job ever.

How could someone get paid for having sex on film and do it with so much grace? I wasn’t fully aware that the movie was made in the golden age of porn. I also wasn’t aware that the adult industry changes its business model every decade. DVDs and feature films would soon be on their way out. I related to the unbridled women in front of the camera, and I knew that I had to be one of them. I felt like I was meant to be a porn star. I was in a lot of pain in that hotel bed, but I had an epiphany about what I wanted my future to look like.

The same way men idolize football players, I idolized Tera Patrick, Stormy Daniels, Carmen Electra, Jenna Jameson, Pamela Anderson, and so many other powerful and beautiful women. Now all I had to do was dive into their world. But where would I start? The best way I can explain the feeling of knowing I was made to do something was that I couldn’t imagine my life without being able to model nude. That was where it all began...

Excerpted from From Princess to Porn Star: A Real-Life Cinderella Story by Tasha Reign, copyright 2023, published by Cleis Press, reprinted with permission.

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