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The list itself is older than most of the sites carrying it. Names get added, nothing gets removed, and no version I have seen shows any sign that anyone went back to the source material. Several entries have been wrong the entire time.
Worth checking, then — not because the underlying fact would be shameful if true, but because these are statements about identifiable people's sexual histories, and the standard for those should be higher than "it was on another list."
The ones that hold up
Sylvester Stallone. He appeared in The Party at Kitty and Stud's in 1970, a softcore feature made when he was broke and unknown, for a fee that has been reported as a few hundred dollars. After Rocky it was reissued to capitalise on the name — as The Italian Stallion, not the pun most versions of this list print. Stallone has discussed it in interviews for decades without much visible embarrassment, which is more or less the correct response and rarer than it should be.
Sibel Kekilli. The German actress won the Deutscher Filmpreis for her lead in Head-On in 2004. Within days, tabloids ran her earlier adult work. She confirmed it, declined to apologise for it, and continued a mainstream career that later included Game of Thrones and the German crime series Tatort. Her family's reaction was reported at the time; it is her private business, and this article is not going to relitigate it as a bit of colour.
Shu Qi. The Taiwanese actress worked in Hong Kong's Category III erotic cinema in the mid-1990s before crossing into mainstream film, and won a Hong Kong Film Award early on for Viva Erotica — a film that is itself about the adult industry. She has spoken publicly about the period and about the pressure attached to it. She has since worked with Hou Hsiao-hsien, among others, in a career that outlasted the framing.
Three entries. All three are people who addressed the fact themselves when it came up, which is worth noting: nobody had to expose them.
The ones where the category is wrong
Jackie Chan. He appears in a 1975 Hong Kong sex comedy — made during his lean years as an unknown, and the only feature he has led with no fight or stunt work in it at all. He plays a rickshaw driver, appears nude, and has a sex scene, one of only two in his entire filmography. But the film is a commercial comedy in a genre Hong Kong produced in volume, complete with a plot about a group of friends deciding to shoot a dirty film, and it was released as such. Simulated sex in a distributed comedy is not pornography, and "Jackie Chan was a porn star" is a genre mislabel. The further claim that he is the only Asian celebrity with such a history is contradicted by an entry two paragraphs above it on the same lists.
Matt LeBlanc. Red Shoe Diaries was a Showtime erotic drama. That is a cable television genre, with a director, a distributor and broadcast standards. Calling it pornography is the same error as calling a late-night thriller a snuff film.
Chyna and Stephen Geoffreys. Both did adult work, and both did it after the mainstream career the list credits them with — Joanie Laurer following her wrestling fame, Geoffreys following his run of 1980s horror leads, and Geoffreys subsequently returning to mainstream film anyway. Whatever else they are, they are not examples of the thing this article's headline asks about. They are the reverse case, which is a more interesting story about how careers actually move and does not fit the format.
The one that is a rumour
Marilyn Monroe. The documented fact is that she posed nude for Tom Kelley in 1949 for a fee of fifty dollars, and that those images later ran as a calendar and in the first issue of Playboy. That much is solid, and she acknowledged it publicly when it surfaced during her rise.
The film claim is not solid. A stag reel has been in circulation for decades attributed to her, and researchers who have looked at it identify the performer as someone else — a different model, working in the same period, with a passing resemblance. When a copy was put up for sale in 2011 it found no buyer, the estate rejected it outright, and the one institutional assessment quoted at the time went no further than saying the woman is either Monroe or a lookalike. That is not a finding.
Around it sits a haze of secondhand FBI material about a purported film and a purported attempt to buy it, which establishes that the rumour existed and was taken seriously by somebody, and nothing about whether the film is real.
Stating it as fact, as every copy of this list does, is asserting something about a real person's sexual history on the strength of an unauthenticated reel and sixty years of repetition.
The two that are somebody else's crime
Kim Kardashian. A private recording made in 2003 was acquired and commercially released by a distributor. She sued to stop it and the matter was settled. Whatever you make of what followed, the initial act was the distribution of a private recording that the person in it had not agreed to release — which is not a career move, and describing it as "doing porn" quietly converts a thing done to her into a thing she did.
Cameron Diaz. She modelled for photographer John Rutter in 1992, aged 19, in a shoot that produced some topless images and video. Eleven years later, timed to a film release, Rutter demanded $3.5 million. He was prosecuted, convicted in 2005 of attempted grand theft, forgery and perjury, and sentenced to more than three years in prison; the material has never been published and a court order bars its release.
The list version reports the $3.5 million as a rumoured payment she made to bury it. It was an extortion demand that ended in a conviction. Most versions also credit her with a sex tape with Jason Segel, who is her co-star in a 2014 comedy called Sex Tape. A film plot has been transcribed into a list of real events and repeated for over a decade.
What the list is actually for
The genre depends on the premise it claims to be debunking. It only works as a hook if adult work is a secret worth exposing — which is why the entries never include the people who did it openly, and why nobody assembling one has felt the need to check whether the person consented to what is being reported about them.
The genuinely interesting cases are the ones where the crossing was public and cost something anyway. Traci Lords is the best-known, and the circumstances of her adult work — she was underage, which is a crime committed against her and the reason most of that material was pulled from circulation — she has written about herself, at length, rather than leaving it to lists like this one.
Three names out of ten survive checking. It is a bad list, and it has been a bad list for a very long time.