The XXX She Wolf of Wall Street

Porn's latest overnight sensation was creating mainstream headlines well before filming her first scene—all thanks to the power of social media. What started off as a conscious marketing ploy for the 23-year-old finance intern formerly known as Paige A. Jennings catapulted her to instant notoriety. “Veronica Vain” is an ex-Wall Street neophyte and Fordham University graduate with a degree in finance that traded a potential career at the financial firm Lazard Asset Management for one in porn. And she has big plans for porn. Not just as a performer, either. Her end game is bigger than most up-and-coming XXX starlets.

Unlike the case of Belle Knox, the “Duke University freshman” who was forced to take ownership of her public outing by her classmates, Veronica Vain capitalized on outing herself, creating a precursor to the career she desired and tapping into a fan base even before she had a specific product to sell. She was a woman with a plan.

Her Twitter bio might sum it up best: “I just left a job on Wall Street for a porn career because I can't stop masturbating at work and would rather get cum all over my face. Is that cool with you?”

Vain has carefully crafted her image from the very beginning, and it's with this same foresight that Vain hopes to change the landscape of adult entertainment. She just finished shooting her first film, the aptly-titled Screwing Wall Street: The ArrangementFinders IPO, and wants to bring profitability back to the adult industry—one porno at a time.

THE DAILY BEAST: So before porn you were an intern on Wall Street. What type of work did you do?

Veronica Vain: I was more like an analyst with the position I was in. The group I was in didn't have a lot of infrastructure built up because they were new. They had a huge amount of data and they needed a way to centralize it and analyze it efficiently and effectively and I was—I was figuring out how to do that because the associates were busy doing actual sales support and marketing trying to raise assets. But in the meantime they had this mess and I was kind of the disrupter and the innovator. Every time I had an idea it was usually good and so I kept getting more and more responsibility. They wanted me to stay on full-time but I choose a different path.

What lured you away?

Aside from having a life? A life outside sitting under fluorescent lights for 8-12 hours a day getting ordered around by people playing all these power games with me because I was low man on the totem pole? Honestly, I'm not that great with authority and I'm not good with monotony, either. I just didn't want to sit at a desk all day. I didn't want to sit at a desk for 5-10 years before I really had any definable success.

But why go from a potentially lucrative position on Wall Street to porn? Even with the downsides you just described, why go into porn and not something else?

It's highly personal. I feel like my decision is not representative of what's best for someone else in a similar situation. First of all, I did a lot of research into different industries and when I started looking into porn, I saw an industry that's really ripe for something different. They're doing business the same way they did it two decades ago in a completely different technological climate. There's only one company that's really capitalizing on that. And that in itself is causing problems for the industry. So it seems very opportunistic and a place where someone like me could thrive by being disruptive and noisy and having a big personality and a get-out-of-my-way attitude. Along with that I really like sex.

Are there any similarities between your porn career and former job on Wall Street?

[Laughs] Um, no. Either way you're screwing somebody. No, on Wall Street it's not like everybody is ripping off everybody. Wall Street is much more corporate and lawsuit-cautious.

Did you have any Wolf of Wall Street experiences? Any wild office parties?

I knew those people but it wasn't in connection with my job. They exist. There is a lot of money there and when you take those kinds of dudes with the financial power and resources and libido and testosterone and you give them everything on a silver platter chaos will ensue.

Why were you taking sexy selfies from your bathroom at work? Why did you decide to do that? Were you just bored?

No, I wasn't bored. I was purposefully doing that. I had a marketing element in mind of being this educated woman working from an office on Wall Street. Men love dichotomy. I was a stripper for 4 years so I know this; I know what they like. They like the girls that are somewhat unobtainable and different. They want to fantasize about the chick at the office whose ass they stare at. So I knew that and purposefully took those pictures there because I wanted to get into porn and I wanted that to be a part of my image.

That was a clever marketing move.

I was doing it consciously but I didn't think it was going to blow up like this. I thought it would get me an interesting following to the point where I could keep from having to do the super amateur porn just to get my foot in the door, but I did not know it would catapult me to where I am.

Yes, you've become quite the sensation in a short amount of time. Speaking of which, I heard you filmed your first scene recently. How did that go?

It was really fun. The scene itself was the shortest part of the day. The day was mostly makeup, set up, photo shoots, going over dialogue, and shooting dialogue, and then shooting it five different ways so they have options. But the actual sex part was 35 minutes long. I had a blast, there were no nerves, and I felt very comfortable for a girl in her first scene. It was hardcore. It was not timid or introductory in any way and I felt really excited by having the camera crew there. I loved it. I felt like this is what I am supposed to be doing, not Excel spreadsheets.

I also noticed you'll be feature dancing at New York's HeadQuarters strip club on February 12^th. Is feature dancing part of your master plan?

Absolutely. There is actually more money in feature dancing than doing scenes for the average girl. For me right now, everything has money in it. This is my first official feature gig but I was stripper for 4 years and I was always a really good performer. The clubs I worked with would usually treat me like a better performer by putting me on at better times and making more of a thing out of it when I went up. I practiced really hard on the pole; it was one of my hobbies. It’s not my first rodeo.

So what do you have planned for your career in porn? Do you plan to implement your business background?

Yeah. I didn't get into this just to be your typical successful porn star who has a lot of good content and makes appearances. I tried to take it a few steps further than that because I do have a business background and I see very clearly what needs to happen in the industry to increase overall revenues and general prosperity for everybody.

What needs to happen?

Companies are doing well but nobody really knows their numbers and they don't know their profit margin on every product they make, so they could be making all of the wrong product. Sales don't always mean profitability. And with rampant piracy, revenues are permanently down and that's just how it's going to be. The margins have been cut.

How do you hope to change this?

One way is very obvious to me but when I bring it up to other people in porn they say they don't see how it's going to change anything; they don't fully get it. If you think about it, the reason Facebook and Twitter and social media companies as a whole are valued the way they are is their user base—their views and viewership. That's why they're a big deal because they have a huge marketing channel, generally speaking. Porn is absolutely the same thing. It has tremendous viewership—viewership that's at an all-time high. The appetite for porn content is at an all-time high and yet revenues are somewhere close to an all-time low, and it's because this channel is not being fully utilized. Part of what I want to do with my career is bring this business to it.

And how do you propose to do that?

My first step into the porn world is consistent with that strategy in my deal with ArrangementFinders.com. This will be the first time, that we know of, where a non-porn company has product placement in a porn movie. Maybe they've used toys in movies before and count that as product placement, but this is a dating site owned by AshleyMadison.com—a company with huge annual revenues. They're a big company and they are paying a significant amount of money to have an adult video centered around their product—maybe not centered, but its definitely a big part of it. Their name will be in there and everything. A shortened version will air on a tube site and next to the clip will be an ad to the site. To me this seems so obvious. This is the answer.

So you want to create product placement in porn?

It's about getting companies like this to see the value of a marketing opportunity and paying to have that viewership. That will make it so that before the companies even release the video, it’s profitable. It's not that expensive to make a porn and viewership is valuable. The money these companies are willing to pay to get viewership is more than it would cost the production companies to actually make the video, so right out the gate they are profitable before they even sell to video-on-demand, DVDs and adult stores. It could be huge for the industry as a whole to get this ball rolling. And that is what I intend to do.