James Deen isn’t the only porn star wowing the press with their political ideas!
Miriam Weeks, aka “Belle Knox” or the “Duke porn star,” had died out of the media for a while, but appears to be making a comeback with a Business Insider profile detailing her political ambitions.
“People always laugh at me when I say this because everyone always thinks I can’t do it, but I want to be a lawyer for women…Gloria Allred, she’s like my idol and I want to be her,” Weeks said. “Once I have my law degree and I kind of have that background … I would love to be somebody who could testify in front of Congress or somebody who does advocacy.”
She also expressed an interest in working for a political campaign—and maybe even starring in one someday. “If someone would want to have me as their campaign assistant I would love to do that. I don’t know if I could ever win if I ran for political office because I’m very radical. I’m kind of very radical or extreme on the spectrum I feel like and, obviously you have to appeal to the average person, but you never know,” she said. “There’s a porn star in Italy who’s now a politician, so, you never know.”
Weeks rocketed to fame last year, when a fellow student at Duke outed the freshman as the up-and-coming porn star “Belle Knox.” Although Weeks had initially hoped to conceal her identity, she ended up making the most of the situation, penning a defiant response for xojane and making numerous media appearances defending her profession.
Weeks identified herself as a libertarian early on in her public appearances, and now speaks warmly of how the community accepted her: “I think that it’s actually helped me within the libertarian community because I think that people have been able to kind of look past it and they do respect it. And I think they also do respect it that I made it into more of an academic thing and more of an educational thing.”
“I think that my work and being in the porn industry definitely hits on so many libertarian themes like free speech, and censorship, and, you know, choice and autonomy over our bodies,” Weeks said. “So I think that I’ve really become passionate about libertarian issues because of the intersection.”
She joined the libertarian student group Students for Liberty, and became both a campus coordinator and a “Young Voices Advocate” for them, helping host libertarian speakers at Duke and giving interviews everywhere from Stossel to The View.
While Weeks focuses on topics like feminism and de-stigmatizing sex work, she also wrote an op-ed for Time critiquing how “artificially inflated demand for college” has led to extravagant tuition rates.
But Weeks told Business Insider that she still feels ostracized by the media. “People want to focus on the negative. … My story really has so many angles to it and there’s a narrative of women who do porn and women who do sex work of a victim. And I don’t fit that narrative because I am doing really positive things, like really cool academic and positive things,” Weeks said. “I think that media is scared. Like, if they write this article, ‘Belle’s Really Doing Well,’ then girls everywhere are going to want to do porn.”
