One student from last year’s graduating class no longer goes by the name she did at Rose Hill. Now, she is Veronica Vain — and hers is one of the most popular names in the porn industry today.
As a cash-strapped student at the University of Florida, Paige Jennings looked past internships and work-study programs as ways to make money. Instead, she looked to the far corners of Craigslist and ultimately turned to a sugar daddy dating site.
“I was going on dates with wealthy men just looking for a little spice in their life who had no problem covering things like textbooks and rent and even buying me a new car,” she wrote in a tell-all for xoJane.
“For some who are less interested in having a normal dating life due to academic or career concerns, it’s a fabulous arrangement,” she said. But, in pursuit of that classic “college experience,” Jennings said she cut ties with her gentlemen friends — and became a stripper.
She paid her bills, got a boyfriend her own age and maintained at 3.7 GPA at the University of Florida. But, alas: “I still had a huge chip on my shoulder that I had to even do any of it in the first place while these upper-class white kids got to skate through their college careers out of touch with the real world and its struggles.”
That’s when she decided to pack her bags and transfer to Fordham as a junior with the hopes of breaking into Wall Street. While working toward a finance degree in Hughes, Jennings spent her nights off campus stripping — that is, until she realized she ran the risk of seeing potential — corporate — employers walk into the club.
So she returned to the more private, and apparently highly lucrative, sugar daddy game.
“I wasn’t particularly interested in having a boyfriend and NYC is a haven for rich, interesting, sexually frustrated men,” she said. “Many of these men offered to help me with interviews or even jobs — but I largely refused them out of principle.”
After a highly competitive application process, Jennings finally landed on Wall Street by way of an internship at Lazard Asset Management.
Graduation on Keating Steps came and went. She continued her internship, but began feeling suffocated by the normalcy of the lifestyle, she said. Last October, she began researching career paths she would be more passionate about.
“I stumbled into researching the porn industry as an offshoot of my regular porn-watching habits, and due to a particularly intense sex session with my boyfriend who afterwards asked breathlessly, ‘Babe, why have you never thought of trying porn? You’d be an amazing porn star!'”
Despite fears of not earning much money, developing STDs and succumbing to drug addiction, Jennings found: “The business can actually be quite lucrative with the right marketing, business acumen, and development of multiple revenue streams.”
“I was intrigued,” she said, itching to put that freshly earned Fordham degree to good use.
(As for STDs, Jennings said “performers” are tested every two weeks. And she has found more pot than harder drugs like meth or heroin.)
In January, she decided to take a leap and participate in an amateur reality porn competition hosted by The Sex Factor. After sending in a few selfies, she said the producer of the show called her to say she “was exactly what they were looking for and who loved my financial services background.”
She declined a full-time offer from Lazard and spent the last few weeks of her internship taking…er…risqué selfies in the bathroom.
But before she could quit, she was fired.
The bathroom photos, which were posted to her new “Veronica Vain” Twitter account, had been quickly linked to her real identity by some mistrusted coworkers. She soon found herself on the phone with a top company executive — and Human Resources.
“By the Friday after I had created my Twitter account, my boss’s boss called me to inform me that some ‘revealing pictures’ of me had surfaced on the Internet and that ‘it was best if I just did not come back to the premises,'” she said.
“Although I had already quit and the conversation was somewhat lighthearted (I think the executive in question found the situation a bit comical), I found myself suddenly anxious.”
She later tweeted: “I just left a job on Wall Street for a porn career because I can’t stop masturbating at work.”
“I thought long and hard about this, and as silly as it may seem, I could not think of anything that I love doing more than having sex, reading and learning about sex, talking about sex with other people,” she told Brobible in January. “And I knew that I would probably be most successful if I could surround myself with sex and be accepted for it.”
“I love having sex in any position, so the position is less relevant although I orgasm best in missionary and girl on top,” she said. “I’m interested in doing most types of mainstream porn, though it would be fun to try a light bondage scene with Japanese silk ropes.”
Hours after that interview was published, Jennings said The Daily News had slipped into her apartment building and was knocking on her door. “I was literally hiding in the closet, calling my boyfriend at his office and going completely insane.”
Within days, Veronica Vain’s name went viral in New York City — the intern-turned-porn-star narrative made for tabloid gold — and Jennings signed a six-figure deal to star in her first adult film, “Screwing Wall Street.”
“The world was eager to watch me have sex, and they couldn’t simply search for me on a tube site like they were able to do with previous mainstream personalities who had forayed in to the porn industry,” she said.
Jennings said she has had a “blast” entering the porn industry, and has no regrets about securing her Fordham degree before stepping in front of the camera.
She did not respond to requests for comment, as did current Fordham students who knew Jennings when she was just another student on campus. But suffice it to say plenty of students are aware of her work.
“I certainly do not advocate for 18-year-old girls entering the sex industry whatsoever and in any capacity,” she said. “I hope I do not become some sort of inspiration to women to follow in my footsteps unless they, too, struggle with an immense libido and above average interest in sexuality combined with common sense and intelligence”.
Connor Ryan
John Bonazzo
Fordham Daily 
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