Kagney was my favourite. Since 2009, I followed her porn career, with ups and downs. She was beautiful, sensitive, entrepeneurial. Her scenes in her prime 2011-2014 and 2016-2017 were incredibles. She deserved 2014 AVN no doubt. I know she fought with her mental problems since a decade but she can always get up and carry on....until the last week 😥
Kagney, wherever you are, you gave me fun and positivity
I think it's too easy for us, whenever we appreciate sex performers as beautiful women, to shut down the part of ourselves that appreciates them as beautiful people.
This isn't entirely on us, now. Performers have their own on-screen personas, which are reinforced by their stage names, and for their own privacy and safety they must keep their XXX lives separate from their personal lives. So these barriers aren't going away; in the wake of Kagney's loss, they may even get stronger. But we as fans may need to consider whether our stars hear us when we say we love them, and know that we're talking about them as opposed to their tits or their asses. I wrote a little something about Kagney myself for this forum perhaps a month ago. Maybe it was for the thread about pretty girls with fake tits. What does a girl with fake tits think when someone says they love her tits? "Sure. You'd say that about the fakest thing about me. What would you say to my face, about me?"
You've all seen the frequent reminder from the mods here to refrain from speaking about stars as if they weren't here with us. I've always loved Kagney's body, and I would want her to have known that. But could I have said something more about how she comes across as a person, and not just a pair of boobs? When she read the thousands of notes of thanks and admiration for her work and her stunning body, did she see them as love? Or did her depression tell her, "Yea, but they're only liking you for your ass, not for you?"
Some veterans of this forum have long, long lists of performers they love. And I've said this before: Isn't it wonderful that we live in a time when we can appreciate the naked beauty and raw sexuality of so many beautiful women, like at no other time before? It probably isn't possible for us to say we appreciate all these women as people, unless we're imagining personas for them in our minds, or comparing them against girlfriends or wives we've loved. I've always loved watching Jada Stevens; I don't know a damn thing about her. If she were here, and I said, "Jada, we love you," how could she not think, "Yea, they're really talking about my butt?"
We could try a little harder, though. We could remember that these women are trying to project themselves for us as being at their best and their strongest, when they're truly at their most vulnerable - they're totally exposed, with their sexual organs in our faces, being penetrated and trying not to lose control. This is a difficult job, often physically, but certainly psychologically. In Kagney's memory, let's cease giving any credit to the notion that women "on their backs" aren't working. People may be prone to depression for any reason - they don't have to be porn stars or film stars, sexual or sensual performers, they don't have to be exploited by their managers or agents, they don't have to be rejected by their families. It certainly seems Kagney had friends, colleagues, and true support. Depression can happen anyway, in the abundance of all of these good things, yet we know depression can be triggered easily in the presence of one little bad thing.
Let's do what we can to eliminate what triggers we can, and not add new ones. When we write about performers here, let's heed the true meaning of the mods' admonition about treating them like they're present with us. Let's let them know that, while we love their bodies and how they make us feel, we also respect them as people, even if we don't know them. Let's acknowledge the harm that would come to them as assault, and not give harm a free pass because these girls do kinky stuff on video. Let's agree that they deserve to be liked as artists. They let us lust for them and even encourage us to jerk off while watching and thinking about them, but that should not diminish who they are as people. Their value should not go down because they appeal to our need for lust.
So maybe, just maybe, when a great performer checks her social media feed and sees that one inevitable post telling her she's ugly or that her tits sag or that she's too skinny or too fat or too something, she will know that there's far more respect for her in the world than disrespect. And that fact might just pull her out of a terrible, downward spiral.
Periodically I make a donation to Pineapple Support, which provides free and reduced mental health care to those who work in the porn industry. Their url is: https://pineapplesupport.org/ I first learned about them on Holly Randall's podcast. If you have the means to do so, I'm sure they'd appreciate your support.
Me and my friend were talking about this yesterday at work and he compares this to August Ames six years ago. The August Ames situation was totally different because she was bullied by several performers because she refused to do scenes with guys that did gay porn cause of certain health reasons which I don't blame her. She also has some mental health issues in the past and the whole bullying on Twitter triggered that which causes her to take her own life. We don't know what made Kagney kill herself because we didn't from her social media. She seems to be happy and free spirited but we don't know what's going on in their personal lives or behind-the-scenes.
Here's a weird situation her death it was on the birthday of the late Kurt Cobain who killed himself with a shotgun. I wasn't even born yet when Cobain took his own life. How shockingly that his death and Kagney death is 30 years apart at the same thing when John Belushi who overdose in 1982. 15 years later, Chris Farley did the same thing and both died at the age of 33. But I did read that on this form that she almost killed herself 10 years ago because of the Chris Brown incident she was on drugs, but finally gotten sober.
Well, let's not forget that adult performers or regular people just like you and me even though they live a sexual lifestyle but we don't know what's going on in her personal life or we don't know what goes behind the scenes. As for Kagney it's not gonna be easy for her mother because now she has to bury her own child even though that she's 36 years old well, that's still her child. You supposed to bury your own parents, but doesn't work the other way around. But let's remember if you have someone that has mental illness and your friends just check on them because it would help just like I check on my friends and my friends check on me..
This type of news is beyond sad because 36 is way too young to die and so enraging that a person can't find the help she needs and has to resort to suicide to end the pain.
This is exactly how I felt about her appearance in that show. It made me view her scenes in a totally different way. As soon as I heard the tragic news, my mind went back to that documentary. A terrible few weeks for porn that I think has shell shocked the industry, as well as brought out the disgusting comments online. KLK seemed like a sweetheart who was beloved by many. RIP
I remember her for her great scenes, stunning looks and all action onscreen presence as well as the sudden impact she had on the industry from the start. However, I suppose my lasting memory of her will be of her in the Louis Theroux Documentary 'Twilight of the Porn Stars' . She came across as business like with a clear and definitive work plan and to collect a few awards along the way. I now know (having not followed the industry of late) that these were the good years with the subsequent not being so well, however, 36 is no age at all and definitely far too early for this.
Absolutely Tragic! I knew Kagney had her own struggles related to mental health. I was lucky enough to meet her & see her feature dance back in 2016. She truly was an angel & looked happy & healthy back then.
Wow, I completely missed this news last month. This is very sad; RIP Kagney. I always find myself self-reflecting after news like this. I am at heart a happy, kind, good person. But like so many, I have my demons, struggles and worries. When news like this hits, I've often thought of the fact that my porn addiction (and yes, it is an addiction - my only one in life) is fueled by an industry that can be so detrimental to the mental health of the people who participate in it. I have found over the years that I just cannot watch a scene again of a star who I once loved who died too young - I feel that I contributed, ever so slightly, to her death. With that thought, I'm off to golf course, my happy, meditative place.
It's been over three weeks since she took her own life, but now I'm reading on Twitter that some of these anti-porn/Christian nut jobs are blaming the porn industry for her death to boycott the porn industry. They're going to use Kagney death as a perfect example, and a lot of folks in the industry have already hated on this. It's the same thing when August Ames took her life and they blame the porn industry for her death, but in reality is that she was bullied on social media and had a few mental health problems. I know that the adult film industry were drugs are involved and lousy agents, but that goes on in Hollywood in real life too.
Kagney never said anything bad about the industry and never brings any drama on social media and has been sober for years before she took her life.
My first suggestion, if I may: Please don't fall victim to the message that we're all contributing piece-by-piece to the decline of sex performers' mental health just by enjoying their bodies. You loved watching this woman just as I did, and if you're like me, you thought more highly of her. You appreciated her, respected her. I have no doubt you are, as you say, a happy, kind, good person. If anything, you contributed to Kagney's well-being. We're taught that lust is bad because it leads to bad behavior. But if we avoid behaving badly, then is lust still wrong?
People in any other industry in the world are just as capable of mentally or physically abusing their co-workers, and in those situations, it's not the industry that's responsible. It could be the company that enables this culture of abuse, but if you want to see a business where people's well-beings are ground up and spit out just like a sausage mincer, take a look at teaching. I don't know any other business anywhere whose practitioners can feel so proud to be alive one day, and like their souls have been hit by a bomb the next. Kagney was no less likely to have had her character assaulted. or been bullied either by her peers or online, had she taught 9th grade chemistry.
Of course, I can't know whether you've been diagnosed with an addiction. A professional would say someone is addicted to a thing when his behavior is altered without it, and he requires that thing to feel normal again, but the need never stops. I've known people with food addictions, and I've seen how it destroys their lives.
But need itself is not addiction. I really need music in my life. I don't think I can go five minutes without a tune in my head. In a quiet room, I'll start to sing to myself. I've never once said, "Okay, that's enough music, I feel fine now," and shut the sound off. I need music to feel good. It's the truth. Now, is that an addiction? Should I join a cult of silence to purge all things melodic from my environment? I'm dependent on music like I'm dependent on oxygen. Am I some altered being? Do I need to detox from music? Surely not. I'm a good person too, and music is a huge reason why.
I don't think there's anything wrong with asking a mental health professional if you're addicted to porn, and keeping your mind open to the answer. (Maybe you already have, and that's your business, not mine.) But you may be surprised to learn that you just have a need, not an addiction. Total chemical dependency can be detrimental, even deadly, but need is not wrong.
If you want to talk about an inhuman industry that's deadly and that feeds on people's lives, look at cults like these. They co-opt religious and political icons, but they feed off of people's guilt. Porn isn't so much an evil for these nut-jobs as a rival for people's attention. Every moment you're worshiping beauty like Kagney's is one moment you're not pledging devotion to hatred like theirs. The people locked into these cults are addicted, and they're being exploited just like the customers of a drug cartel. The death toll from these cults dwarfs anything the porn industry could produce.
I'm just devastated, she is one of my all time favorites and I only found out about this today. I actually watched her from when she first started in the industry. From the scenes/interviews she always seemed like such a sweet person, very soft spoken. Also, one of the most beautiful girls to grace the industry. With the recent news of Emily Willis this has been such terrible month. I pray she's in a much better place.
I miss Kagney every much!! I got to know her personally when she came to feature dance in NY. She hanged out with me and my friend before her show and chatted what's been happening with her then after her show my other friends came for the show and the meet & greet. I got a lot of great photos with her.
Can't believe it's been one years since she took her life, and fans still remember her. She was inducted to the AVN Hall of Fame last month but sadly, her family doesn't even know about it and several performers didn't even about it too. AVN Hall of Fame is bigger than the award show because it's a big accomplishment if you're inducted to any Hall of Fame no matter if it's football or anything. She was a great performer, and I got a chance to watch some of her pass scene even know I wasn't that ages yet when she started.
There has been a lack of recognition from the actors she worked with and most of them didn't even mention it (I don't know if they even attended her funeral)
Is there a video clip of her being inducted into the hall of fame. The only person whom I saw mentioned her death were Isiah and handful of others.
I still sad you took her own life a year ago. I feel like watching her scenes make me happy since I knew her personally do to her feature dancing days.
I miss her. I always remember her as full of joy and smiling. It makes me sad when I think that such a person couldn't find a reason to live anymore. It's like she gave much more to the world than she received back.
Very tragic. I remember an early scene she did on BangBros in interview where Preston Parker couldn't pronounce her first name. He nearly ruined the scene being tongue tied with her first name, but she rescued things with her eroticism and there was a happy ending ! RIP and bless her.