Actress Maitland Ward was perhaps once best known for her two-season stint on the teen sitcom Boy Meets World, or for her role in the 2004 comedy White Chicks. But after spending a number of years cosplaying and building an online following with risqué photos, Ward eventually made the transition to adult entertainment in 2019 and has apparently never looked back.
The 45-year-old details this personal journey in her new sex-positive memoir, Rated X: How Porn Liberated Me From Hollywood. But despite the fact that Ward may have no regrets about her career path, that hasn’t stopped her from being stigmatized by the entertainment industry. In a new op-ed with the Daily Beast, the AVN award-winning actress claims that she was “shunned” by Hollywood after becoming a “porn superstar,” and yes, she names names — including her former White Chicks co-star Terry Crews.
In addition to an unfortunate run-in with former Saved by the Bell star Elizabeth Berkley at Whole Foods, Ward drags everyone from Tori Spelling’s on-again, off-again husband Dean McDermott and NFL star Terrell Owens — who she says both propositioned her online — to other colleagues whom she says now avoid her like the plague.
I’ve been unfollowed a lot. The reasons may be different but it all stems from the same place. I’m a sex worker now. Matthew Lillard, who starred alongside me in the indie film Dish Dogs, found out I did porn and dodged me like a bullet about to hit him. No explanations, no goodbyes. Terry Crews, who I starred in White Chicks with, did that too. But he’s been an anti-porn crusader for years, so I am the target of his cause. It’s so disheartening to me that grown, intelligent men can’t feel comfortable enough in their own skin to be friends with a sex worker. As if me being in porn now changed who I was as a person. That my value is virtue. I am not alone in this; this is something sex workers deal with on a daily basis.
Crews famously opened up about his pornography addiction in his 2014 autobiography, Manhood: How to Be a Better Man or Just Live with One, so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that he’d want to distance himself. As for the rest of the tea, Ward’s memoir hits shelves today, and one would have to imagine her book has plenty to spill.