RN
There is a particular kind of news story that only becomes interesting once it has an ending. In August 2017 an adult performer named Cherie DeVille released a video announcing a run for President of the United States in 2020, with the rapper Coolio as her running mate and the slogan "Make America Fucking Awesome Again." Written up at the time, it was a novelty item where the only available conclusion was we shall see.
We have seen. So it is worth going back to it, because the ending is more instructive than the announcement, and because the surrounding history contains something most people do not know: an adult performer has actually won a national parliamentary seat, and it was not in the United States.
What was announced
The ticket was DeVille and Coolio, with the performer Alix Lynx named as prospective press secretary. The platform, as described at the time, was sex-positive, cannabis-friendly and pro-net-neutrality — an unremarkable set of positions for 2017 that would have looked at home in a dozen other campaigns.
Two things about the announcement are usually skipped. The first is that the sources do not agree on what she was actually running as: some contemporaneous coverage describes a Democratic primary bid, and later summaries describe an independent run. That ambiguity is itself informative about how developed the plan was.
The second is DeVille's background, which the coverage mostly treated as a punchline setup rather than a fact. She holds a doctorate in physical therapy and worked as a licensed clinician before entering the adult industry, and has said she continued practising part-time afterwards. That is a more conventional professional history than a large number of people who have actually held office, which is not an argument that she should have been president — it is an argument that "porn star runs for president" was doing a lot of work as a frame.
What actually happened
In January 2019, roughly seventeen months after the announcement, DeVille told the Washington Examiner the campaign was over. Her stated reasons were the ordinary ones: no fundraising, no traction, and threats directed at her. She endorsed Bernie Sanders on the way out.
She appears never to have filed with the Federal Election Commission. Reporting from the 2017 announcement noted no filing existed then, and none surfaced in the coverage of the campaign's end.
That detail is the whole story in miniature. Filing is not a formality you get to later; it is the point at which a campaign becomes a legal entity that can raise and spend money, and everything downstream — ballot access, primaries, delegates — is gated behind it and behind fifty separate sets of state requirements. A campaign that never files is a press campaign. It can be a perfectly good press campaign. It is not a run for office in the sense the headline implies, and the seventeen months between announcement and withdrawal contained no mechanism by which it could have become one.
The 2020 Democratic nomination went to Joe Biden, who won the general election. Coolio died in September 2022, aged 59; a coroner attributed his death to the effects of fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamine.
The case where it worked
Here is the part that gets left out of every version of this story.
In June 1987, Ilona Staller — who performed as Cicciolina and was, unambiguously, a pornographic actress — was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies on the Radical Party list. Not as a stunt candidacy that finished tenth. Elected, and she served a full term.
The structural reasons matter more than the novelty. Italy used an open-list proportional system in which voters could write in a preference among a party's candidates, so Staller needed a bloc of committed voters rather than a plurality in any district. She ran with an established party that had a genuine libertarian-civil-liberties platform, and her candidacy was continuous with that platform rather than a joke attached to it. Under a first-past-the-post system with a two-party equilibrium, none of that is available.
The American comparison is Mary Carey, who ran in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall — an election with a famously low bar for ballot access and 135 candidates on it. She finished tenth, with a little over eleven thousand votes, around two tenths of one percent. She ran again in the 2021 recall. Ballot access was achievable; the votes were not.
That is the actual pattern. Where the electoral system rewards a concentrated minority of committed voters, an adult performer has won. Where it does not, the candidacy functions as publicity, and everyone involved generally knows it.
What the campaign was for
The original piece framed this as a serious contest and asked readers to keep an open mind about the result. The result was never really in doubt, and treating it as a horse race missed the more defensible thing DeVille was doing.
Her own stated reasoning at the time was that the 2016 election had demonstrated the electorate would vote for celebrity, and that if that was the game, she could play it. Read as satire that is a coherent argument, and the campaign's actual output — attention, an occasional platform, a few sympathetic interviews with someone the press would otherwise only ask about sex — was roughly what satire can be expected to produce.
What it did not do was change how the industry's workers are treated, which was the grander claim made on its behalf. Seventeen months of coverage, and the thing most articles found worth reporting about a clinician with a doctorate was still the job title in the headline. If anything demonstrated the point she was gesturing at, it was that.