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These celebrities left one form of entertainment for another. Following their time in the spotlight during the 1990s and early 2000s, stars including late singer Aaron Carter and Boy Meets World actress Maitland Ward explored a career in porn.
In the early 2000s, Dan played Zeke Beakerman on the Disney Channel original series Wizards of Waverly Place, starring Selena Gomez. However, he eventually left the TV industry for the world of porn. Now that he’s a full-time OnlyFans creator, he said in January 2024 that he thinks his NSFW career is the reason he wouldn’t be asked back on Wizards. “I made choices… I put the chance of bringing back the character that I played away when I decided to go along this path of being an adult content creator. I get it,” he told TMZ. “Do I think that by me doing porn made it so they can’t bring my character back? Yes. The short answer is yes. I think that I put them in a situation where they don’t have a choice. They can’t reasonably bring back my character without bringing back all of the weight that my personal choices have [caused]… It’s crazy to be an adult content creator, and it’s crazier to do it so publicly and to be a former child actor from a Disney Channel show.”
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YouTube; Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Maitland Ward
Best known for playing Rachel McGuire on the sixth and seventh seasons of the ABC sitcom Boy Meets World from 1998 to 2000, Maitland retired from mainstream acting in 2007 and eventually began to pursue a career in porn in 2019. Ahead of the release of her first adult feature film, Drive, she exclusively told In Touch, “They asked me to be a part of this, and I thought, ‘I never knew there was anything in adults or porn or whatever that was this well done.’ I read the script, and I was like, ‘This is really, really well-written.’ This has so many themes in this and just my character is so different than anything I have portrayed before.”
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Aaron Carter
Before his death on November 5, 2022, at age 34, the former 1990s pop star was active on his OnlyFans page, where he shared naked photos and videos. In September 2020, Aaron went live on the adult website CamSoda and pleasured himself “for a live audience,” according to Distractify. Aside from his OnlyFans profile, Aaron continued to make music up until he died from an accidental drowning after inhaling difluoroethane and taking alprazolam, the generic form of brand-name Xanax.
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Dustin Diamond
The late actor, who rose to fame playing Screech on Saved by the Bell before his death on February 1, 2021, at age 44, released a sex tape called Screeched in 2006. “The sex tape is the thing that I’m most embarrassed about,” Dustin said in an interview, explaining that the idea came after learning that Paris Hilton reportedly made $14 million off her sex tape. “And my buddy said, ‘$14 million? Holy smokes, where’s the Screech sex tape? You got to be worth at least a million.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah — yeah, maybe.’ And that’s as simple as it was.” He also claimed it’s not actually his body in the tape. “In my stupidity, I thought I could totally fake this. I could get a stunt person to take my place,” he said. “It’s my face but nothing else. Looking back now in my 30s, I realize that was really dumb.” In January 2021, the actor was diagnosed with stage four small cell carcinoma of the lungs and died weeks later.
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Courtesy of Jaimee Foxworth/Instagram; YouTube
Jaimee Foxworth
Best known as Judy Winslow, the youngest daughter of Carl and Harriette Winslow on the ABC sitcom Family Matters, Jaimee later made porn films under the pseudonym Crave. She previously explained that she ventured into the adult entertainment industry after being written out of Family Matters because she was in need of extra cash. “It was, to me, the quickest money,” Jaimee said, adding that “the hardest thing” was explaining her choices to her family after her secrets came out. “I couldn’t hold my head high. I couldn’t walk around and say, ‘My name is Jaimee Foxworth’ without someone saying, ‘Ew,’ or, ‘We heard about you’. That’s the most degrading part. I lost all my confidence. I lost all my self-esteem. I lost friends. I lost some family members.”
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Cover Images; Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Paramount+
Tyler Posey
While he became known for starring as Scott McCall in the MTV series Teen Wolf from 2011 to 2017, Tyler was also a child actor in the early 2000s, playing Ty Ventura in the Jennifer Lopez-led film Maid in Manhattan. He eventually joined the NSFW social media platform OnlyFans, explaining (per Buzzfeed), “I’m nude a lot and I wanted to be more open-minded about social media, so I just started posting. I love being nude, because you’re not born wearing clothes. I want to go out the same way that I came in. I want to die naked, and since 2020 has been a little scary, I feel I could die any second now, so I want to be ready.”
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Courtesy of Cara Cunningham/Instagram; YouTube
Cara Cunningham
The transgender internet star, who gained fame in September 2007 from her viral video “Leave Britney Alone!,” released Chris Crocker’s Raw Love in 2014 with hopes it would boost her acting career — but unfortunately, it didn’t. “Obviously doing the porn thing didn’t necessarily help me,” she said during an interview with Out in March 2013. “Having done the porn, everything’s a little bit tarnished right now… but, you know, it’s pretty much up to me to make those little calculated moves. I dropped out of school in the eighth grade. So even if I just wanted to go get a regular job — even a job at Starbucks — a lot of people wouldn’t hire me.”
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YouTube; Getty Images
Kelli McCarty
After being crowned Miss USA in 1991, Kelli played the recurring role of Beth Wallace on the soap opera Passions in the early 2000s. She eventually began working as a porn actress with Vivid Entertainment. “I just sat on the idea [to do porn] and started looking into other companies,” she previously revealed. “That’s when I approached Vivid [Entertainment] and they said, ‘Yeah, let’s make a movie.’ So then it just started. It was literally like one day, I was just hanging out doing laundry, and the next day I was talking…about doing an adult film.” She said it was important to her to “have control over what the story was about, even though I know that the story is not the main focus of a porn,” adding, “I wanted to combine the acting and the sex, [and] it was important to me to have a storyline that I liked.”
