I Go To College With The Duke Porn Star, And I’m Kind Of Jealous

Before she was the “Duke freshmen porn star,” Belle Knox’s title simply was “the freshman porn star.”

I found out about “the freshman porn star” a few weeks after the beginning of this semester. My best friend, my roommate and I had heard the rumor and the pseudonym, and one night somehow managed to find a video of our fellow Dukie innocently riding a bike. Before we could mentally prepare ourselves, images of incredibly rough, seemingly very painful sex appeared on the screen.

Horrified, we returned to the slightly more innocent pastime of Facebook stalking her instead. Each of us had around 30 mutual friends with this girl. All of them, obviously, were male.

I had heard other murmurs about the “freshmen porn star” on campus, but I wasn’t aware of any enormous outburst until the article about her in our newspaper came out. It made the front page, which in many ways is both hilarious and awful, but that was the turning point of this girl’s career. The freshmen porn star was here to stay.

It’s awful to hear that she’s getting ostracized by people in her hometown and that this happened while she was at Duke. I do sympathize with her plight and with her family. But I can’t scroll through my Twitter feed without seeing some HuffPost article about her. I can’t go through my Facebook homepage without seeing someone, even people not at Duke, post something related to her situation. I’m not saying I’m sick of reading about my university’s resident adult film star, because it’s currently taking the attention off of our basketball team’s “March Sadness” disaster. But I am on the verge of starting an outrageous rumor about myself in order to get people to talk about something different for a change. (Maybe I’ll have an affair with Jimmy Fallon. Or Obama. The possibilities for absurdity are endless!)

“Belle Knox,” after being outed by a classmate, and then the Internet, appeared on CNN. She appeared on Piers Morgan. She appeared on The View. She did a FREAKING STRIP SHOW IN NEW YORK.

She’s probably the most famous porn star right now, and definitely the most famous Duke student.

Belle Knox alone is probably more popular than the entire Duke basketball team — at this moment during March Sadness, definitely. She’s sparking discussions on major news networks. Almost everyone I know has felt the need to weigh in on her decision or criticize her supposed feminist reasons for performing in adult films.

It’s been nearly six weeks since that first article in our newspaper was published, and still the Internet buzzes incessantly with updates on her situation: whether she’s going back to Duke, if she’s doing more porn, etc. I can continue to attend Duke and maintain my 3.85 GPA, but even if Mindy Kaling does read the letter I wrote to her and hires me as her soul double and even if I do find some national scandal to partake in, I will never attain the kind of fame the Duke freshmen porn star has gained.

This nineteen year old, who hasn’t even spent a year at our university, has already upstaged and overshadowed myself and thousands of other successful, ambitious undergraduates. She can continue to talk about feminism and praise the porn community for being so open and inviting, but her moniker will always be “the Duke porn star.” Maybe she hasn’t made her mark on the world in the most desirable fashion, but no one can deny that she’s certainly staked her claim. Infamous or famous both have the word “famous” in them; at least until the next international scandal we have here unfolds, Belle Knox will be the most popular student at Duke for a while.

Kind of makes you kick yourself for not thinking of it first, huh?