An Inside Look at the Celebrity Sex Tape Industry
June 3, 2010 — -- In the season finale Monday of her reality show, "Kendra," former Playboy Playmate Kendra Wilkinson reacted to the release last month of a sex tape that -- apparently to her surprise -- she starred in.
"It just sucks," Wilkinson said on the show. "It's the hardest thing to deal with right now. It's going to be really hard. It's going to probably be the hardest time of our lives."
Wilkinson said she was furious.
"I just hope to God nobody looks at me like a porn star," she said on her show. "I just hope they don't press 'play,' because that's not me. I mean, that was me, but that's not me now."
Released on May 26, the video is already breaking sales records, according to distributor Vivid Entertainment. Which proves once again that in an era where the public's appetite for all things celebrity seems insatiable, nothing, it seems, is off limits.
That includes the barest of celebrity commodities, a phenomenon so widespread it's now commonly known as the "celebrity sex tape."
Whether the stars of the tapes are socialites or reality stars, musicians or actors, the sex tape business -- which by all appearances is based on videos released against a person's will -- is actually strategically and shrewdly run, and thriving.
David Joseph is the president of Red Light District, the company that put out the mother of all celebrity sex tapes, featuring socialite Paris Hilton.
"One Night in Paris," he told "Nightline," has shown staying power.
"It's still selling," Joseph said. He said he knew, the second he saw it that sales would be off the charts.
"At first I was afraid of the Hilton family, and I heard at one point Donald Trump was really upset about it because he knows the family really well, and he was going to get involved and do whatever it took to stop it," said Joseph. "And so, yes, it definitely crossed my mind and I had to be very careful on how this was dealt with."
