Mrs Minor agrees, adding: ‘Miriam’s a
beautiful girl, half Indian, half American. Nothing has happened with
the family that I know. They wouldn’t have any idea what was wrong with
their daughter and this is happening.
‘The
kids are their pride and joy. The sisters are brilliant, articulate,
wonderful girls. They were so proud that she was going to Duke
University. They worshipped her. If they had stopped paying, they would
have had good reason for it. But they’d never abandon her, ever.’
Mrs
Minor is one of many family members trying to come to grips with why
Miriam would hurt her parents by appearing in porn movies.
Besides
money, one possible explanation is that the family has been under
stress due to Dr Weeks’s deployment to Afghanistan and this is Miriam’s
way of dealing with it.
Dr Weeks has been a serving army doctor in hematology for over 19 years and has travelled the globe serving his country.
Miriam
wrote on a blog that she’s ‘lived all over the world because I’m an
Army Brat!’. Dr Weeks has served in some of the bloodiest war zones and
only recently returned from the war-torn country.
'You
may find that the family has been under some stress recently for heroic
reasons, said Mrs Minor, who lives in Lacey, Washington. ‘Your dad
being away from home in a war zone, that’s going to put some stress on
everyone else.’
Going under
the guise of Belle Knox, Miriam began her thriving porn career quietly,
until she was outed by a fellow student a couple of weeks ago.
The
18-year-old appeared on front pages across the globe and sat down with
Piers Morgan for a CNN interview using only her stage name and claiming
that she was not ashamed of what she was doing and, in fact, felt
‘empowered’ by her career.
I’m not being exploited. I love what I’m doing and I’m safe,’ insists the women’s studies major.
While
Miriam seemed to be flourishing in her fifteen minutes of fame, she did
admit to one pang of conscience – keeping it all from her parents. 'I
regret not telling my family from the get-go. I think that was a really
big mistake,' Miriam told Morgan.
Considering her background, it’s difficult to believe that Miriam was cut off by her parents, say family members.
It seems more likely that she enjoyed
the money she was starting to take home - around $1,200 ‘a session’,
which consists of an afternoon of sex before the cameras. So far Miriam
has made around a dozen films.
John Steven’s, Miriam’s agent who spoke to MailOnline, insists her family is at fault for all of this.
He
says: ‘She’s not done anything wrong. Her parents have cut her off
financially. In the first semester, her parents worked out a payment
plan with the university for tuition of $5,000 a month. But that lasted
until the month of January, and then they cut her off.
‘So starting February 1, she owed the school $5,000 a month. Where is an 18-year-old girl supposed to get that?’
Steven,
who runs Matrix Models in Beverly Hills, said he had ‘Belle Knox’
booked up for four days solid of shoots in New York, Phoenix and Los
Angeles during the media frenzy.
‘If she hadn’t done porn, she’d have been thrown out of school, as she
would have missed the monthly payments. I have no idea why they cut her
off, as far as I know her parents were running into financial problems.
‘She
makes a lot of money from porn. She could easily make $10-15,000 a
month, that’s for multiple shoots. She gets $1,500-2,000 per shoot, then
I get a cut, which is less than 20 percent and then it’s taxed. It’s a
legitimate business I run.
‘She
simply had to make a decision whether she wanted to continue with her
college career or drop out of school. She wants a college education, so
had no other option. She tried to apply for government grants,
scholarships, but the irony is that her parents make enough money so
that she’s not eligible for anything.
'She’s
not poor enough, but they’re not paying for her, so they’re doubly
screwing her because she’s not viable for financial aid and they’re not
helping her.
‘My question is that if she wants to become a lawyer and stay at Duke, what else could she possibly do?’
Steven
says Miriam comes to LA during her breaks, or if she has a weekend off.
She’s planning to go out to LA for the whole summer, and hopefully pay
for the rest of her next semester.
‘I
talk to her hourly and she’s kind of overwhelmed by the whole thing,
she’s trying to figure out what her options are. To give up porn, that’s
not an option, unless a rich benefactor wants to give her $200,000 to
continue her education,’ Steven said.
‘I
stay out of the personal side with her parents. I imagine they are
furious that they’ve been dragged into all this. But she’s kind of
defiant, she feels they’ve brought it on themselves.
‘She’s
level headed, 100 per cent, probably one of most intelligent,
levelheaded 18-year-olds I’ve ever met. She’s never regretted doing
porn.
'Financially she’ll keep on doing what
she’s doing. Emotionally, she would love to have her parents support
and only time will tell if her parents are going to come around.’
Mrs
Minor, who spoke to son-in-law Paul just as the news broke and said he
was ‘devastated’, added: ‘I think she’s taken this woman empowerment a
bit too seriously. She’s left home for the first time, and at the age of
18, she’s seeing how much she can earn.
‘She
saw that she could earn $1,200 a session, whatever that means, that
must be a lot of money to an 18-year-old, the lure of that sort of cash
must be very strong at that age.
‘But she knows that the family still love her, and she’ll always have that.’
Her
brother Paul and his wife Anna Minor-Weeks are ‘extremely religious’,
according to Anna’s mother, and both do good in their communities.
Anna teaches autistic children and Paul volunteers with various church ministries.
Miriam
herself has helped at the local Catholic Charities Organization and was
even featured in their newsletter last August for helping
underprivileged kids in the area.
It’s
not the sort of upbringing that usually has an ending where the
daughter becomes a porn actress, but it’s obvious that Miriam has felt
caged in by her strict religious upbringing.
She told her student newspaper in an
interview last
week: ‘My entire life, I have, along with millions of
other girls, been told that sex is a degrading and shameful act. When I
was five-years-old and beginning to discover the wonders of my body, my
mother, completely horrified, told me that if I masturbated, my vagina
would fall off.
‘The most
striking view I was indoctrinated with was that sex is something women
“have,” but that they shouldn’t “give it away” too soon -– as though
there’s only so much sex in any one woman, and sex is something she does
for a man that necessarily requires losing something of herself, and so
she should be really careful who she “gives” it to.’
It’s
even more galling for the family that she shows no sign of repentance.
But, as most family members have confirmed, ‘the family see it as a
phase, something that she’ll grow out of, the ultimate act of rebellion
against her upbringing.’
The
revelation that has shaken Miriam's family to the core, has also
brought her death threats, claims her agent, Stevens. But he says she’s
so determined to follow her new career that she’s willing to take all
the personal abuse she’s been suffering at Duke.
‘She
was getting death threats, so she’s been on break,’ says the agent.
‘Everyone was talking behind her back; it was a nasty environment. Going
back to that is probably not the most enjoyable, but she wants an
education that much.
‘I don’t think she suffers any guilt
at all from her background; she’s totally OK with her sexuality. All of
these people turned against her, well too bad, that’s your opinion,
that’s what she thinks anyway.
‘I tell her to do what she’s comfortable doing and then, if she’s not comfortable, stop immediately.’
So what happens next? One thing is for certain, Miriam
is going to find it difficult to integrate back in the classroom.
On Twitter, she’s been the subject of death threats and ridicule, which is likely to take years before it goes away, if ever.
Even
though they’re the most spurned party in this entire heartbreaking
episode, there are two people she’s sure to be able to count on – her
parents.
Mrs Minor adds:
‘I’m sure the family is going to rally round and love her. She did wrong
by the family but they are still going to love her. They’re
heartbroken, but it’s not irreparable. Nothing is irreparable when it
comes to the Weeks family and their love for each other.’
