Stoya says she couldn’t sleep. After arriving in Serbia on 18 November to begin work on a film, she had been woken by nightmares. Just one paparazzo waited for the internationally recognisable porn performer and writer at the airport, and even he had slunk off when the production assistant sent to meet her had told him, after he asked if this was Stoya, that it was not. Stoya couldn’t sleep in the converted attic room with the stark white wood floors where she stayed after 12-hour days on set, making a narrative, non-porn film that would keep her offline and occupied. “There’s no room for anything else,” she said. She spent her time awake rehearsing her role in the film: a woman who would be raped by someone that she knew.

She had managed to distract herself to sleep one night with a book – the third of Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay – and again the next night. The filming was bringing up a lot – memories of her ex, and their work together, the things she hadn’t spoken in public about before. She thought of saying something after that good night’s rest. But she slept on it, and then decided. “I couldn’t bear the thought any more,” Stoya said, “that there might be something terrible happening to yet another woman at his hands, or more likely, at his cock, that she didn’t want, because I kept quiet. I just … I couldn’t, I couldn’t.”

On 28 November, she tweeted: “That thing where you log in to the internet for a second and see people idolizing the guy who raped you as a feminist. That thing sucks.” And then: “James Deen held me down and fucked me while I said no, stop, used my safeword. I just can’t nod and smile when people bring him up anymore.”

Then she logged off.

In what may have felt like Stoya’s silence, reporters, critics and fans wondered for her: what did this mean, this public rape story told in 55 words, involving two of the world’s most high-profile porn performers, who were once in a very public relationship with each other? (James Deen posted some tweets of his own, denying Stoya’s story. A request for comment from Deen was not returned by the time of publication.)

That silence was filled almost immediately by other porn performers, some with allegations similar to Stoya’s, and about the same man, and saying that, despite what the reporters and critics and fans might have been wondering, yes, no matter what you see on screen, a porn performer has a right to her boundaries, on-set and off – and that yes, they believed her. That chorus of voices that followed Stoya’s shook the porn industry. They reverberated, and now the public is hearing, perhaps as loudly as ever, about the particular structural problems the porn industry contends with, and the persistent and pernicious idea that sex workers are by definition unrapeable. So what change has Stoya’s intervention made – and what remains?

When the story broke, said Arabelle Raphael, a porn performer who told me she had followed it very closely, “It was a big relief. Finally, someone had put it out there.” The porn scene isn’t all that huge, and this was especially close to home, she told me. Back in 2010, Raphael had done her first scene in porn with James Deen. Some years later, one of her close friends in the industry told her Deen had assaulted her.

“People knew,” Raphael said. “A lot of people knew. I don’t think everyone knew. And some people had really good experiences with him, but that doesn’t mean anything.” Performers let each other know what they had heard about Deen, she said. “I remember getting ready for my first gang bang, and I was talking to people – what should I know, I’ve never done this before, I was really nervous, do you have any tips? And two people were like: put James Deen on your ‘no’ list” – the performers she would not do scenes with.

James Deen and Stoya at the Venice film festival in 2013. Photograph: AGF/Rex

“I was proud of her,” porn performer Sydney Leathers told me, after reading Stoya’s tweets. “That’s a bold thing to do.” Leathers started performing in porn not long after the press outed her as the sexting partner of then US congressman Anthony Weiner. When she got into the business, she was advised about Deen, too, she said. At a convention in 2013, Leathers spoke with porn performer and producer Joanna Angel. “I remember one specific sentence she said: ‘He likes to try to break women.’ I found that troubling. And I knew that Joanna was serious. He’s always been on my ‘no’ list for that reason.”

In the few days since Stoya’s tweets, eight other women have also gone public. Tori Lux, Ashley Fires, Amber Rayne, Kora Peters, Nicki Blue, Lily LaBeau, and a woman writing as T.M., all say Deen has assaulted them, too. In the aftermath of those allegations, Deen’s career is crumbling. (He has not commented on any of them, to any of the outlets that have approached him.) Porn companies severed ties and website The Frisky killed his column for ever. Fans razed his GIFs from Tumblr. A sex toy in his likeness was pulled from production.

On 2 December, Joanna Angel spoke out about Deen, using a radio appearance to accuse Deen of assaulting her multiple times, and saying that once she thought to herself, “I am going to die here.”

“This is the first time that there have been not only so many women coming out about one person, but so many people are actually having this conversation,” Raphael said. “Because we don’t want to talk about it. Everybody thinks this is already happening, because we’re doing sex work. And we don’t want to talk about having been assaulted, because of the stereotypes that all sex workers are assaulted.”

Deen has, for some time, occupied a peculiar niche. His looks were read as atypical for porn – boyish and approachable, passably hipster. Female commentators held him up as the porn star even a feminist could like, while he insisted he was not a feminist himself. In the business, whispers and rumours about Deen had been out there, Stoya said – the private, off-set warnings. But in public? “Nobody was saying anything. And I didn’t feel like I could say anything. But from what I hear – because I am not looking at my Twitter mentions – the way the public conversation is going is shockingly good in some ways. But also there is ‘Well, you know you can’t rape a sex worker,’ or ‘She still defends porn when she was raped by a pornographer’ – everybody has got their own fucking agenda, and that’s why I was scared to say something. I don’t know the reasons for other women, why they felt they had to keep quiet, but it just got to be too much.”

The stigma fuelling those messages – that no one would do porn willingly, so the line between porn and rape doesn’t matter, but also that porn performers who are raped are at fault – is responsible for keeping porn performers silent. It is what puts them at risk. As Stoya, Raphael, Leathers and other performers told me, the stigma is the reason so few come forward about sexual assault. Whether you are a porn performer or not, for anyone who speaks out about rape, often it’s one’s sexual history that becomes the object of inquiry, not the rape. The difference for porn performers is that what is seen as their sexual history – their performances at work – is already a matter of public record and debate.

‘I was proud of her. That’s a bold thing to do’ … porn performer Sydney Leathers on Stoya’s tweets about James Deen

Stoya, though, like other porn performers of her generation, has her own direct access to the public. She chose Twitter “because that’s where the record needed to be updated”. On Twitter and on Tumblr, she would still see posts from fans: “James and Stoya #relationshipgoals! That frightens me. That’s also something I don’t have any more control over than I have over what happened after I posted that tweet.”

The distance afforded by the film shoot created some safety, but Stoya was also tired of being silent, she said. “If I don’t say it now, then, when am I? Am I just going to carry it around for the rest of my life and keep it secret? Because secrets aren’t really a thing that I do.”

She was in San Francisco when it happened, Stoya said. She and Deen were not at work. I asked her what words she would use to describe it now. “If you hold someone down and fuck them while they say ‘no’ and ‘stop’ and use their fucking safeword, that is rape. But when it first happened, I felt numb. And I went to work the next day. And I went to work the day after that. And I did a scene with him two days after, maybe three days after, I’m not sure. Then I felt like I’d been violated by someone I trusted.” She said this was relationship violence. She said she would try to bring it up with him: what happened, what had he been thinking? He would tell her, she said, that her tears were “abusive”.

“It took me months and months and months,” she said, “over a year of months to be able to be able to call it what it was – which was rape.”

After Stoya’s tweets about Deen, anti-porn critics also took to Twitter, to hold her story up as a symbol of what is wrong about porn. Leathers was one of several porn performers who challenged these kinds of attacks, from anti-porn feminists in particular, arguing that they weren’t standing with and listening to Stoya as they would any other woman. Other sex worker activists, such as Chanelle Gallant writing at MTV, see the case as part of larger pattern of disbelieving sex workers when they come forward with accusations of sexual assaults.

These tactics and rhetoric – the unrapeable sex worker, the acceptable target – can silence porn performers; as Leathers said, “The industry is so marginalised that people get fearful of talking about its problems, because we already feel so attacked in so many different ways.” Though she had seen some negative reactions in the industry, too, Leathers said, “almost everyone seems to be supportive of her. We all hope if we were in Stoya’s shoes we’d be treated the same way.”

Those critics looking for something to blame in the porn industry for a culture of silence around rape will need to look past the porn. When performers are fearful or hesitant to discuss sexual assault, porn performer and director Tobi Hill-Meyer said, “I’d say the big dynamics fuelling that are that porn performers are contractors,” like other workers in many fields, living gig to gig. For porn performers, Hill-Meyer said, “your payment is not based the work you do, but how well you monetise the work you do, and being able to sell yourself means public perception is super-important. Anyone working in the industry is going to be very aware of that.”

“You’re told you can work with anyone you like, but the reality is that it’s a really small industry,” Leathers said. If you turn down work with a performer, even for safety reasons, industry colleagues might just tell themselves it’s your fault – that you ‘can’t get along’ or you’re ‘dramatic’,” she said. “You’re going to look like the bad guy, even if you’re just trying to keep yourself safe.” When performers are fearful that they will lose work by coming forward about sexual assault, “it’s not safe for performers”, Raphael said.

The contract status of the work and the pressure to get along are magnified by the demands to present a positive image in public – the flipside of the direct access to the public that porn performers now have through social media. “You won’t even get a gig,” said Hill-Meyer, “unless you maintain a social media presence and have your own personal brand and image, and do significant work in maintaining that branding.” Some performers have expressed concern that they may lose work if they shared their support of Stoya publicly, Raphael said, even by retweeting her. “Just showing solidarity is something people are having to talk about and question.”

“I think about how much it took her to disclose that, and disclose it online,” porn performer and writer Conner Habib told me, “and I thought, what’s going to happen with this story? How is it going to affect my community? When something like this happens in the porn community, it ends up affecting everybody.” Habib is vice-president of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee (Apac), who “work to support performer safety, health, quality of experience, transparency for wages” in the porn industry, and on whose board Stoya had served; until recently, so did James Deen. “We knew as a board that many of our members may feel unsafe having James on board as a chairperson,” Habib said. Before they could tell him, Habib said, Deen stepped down voluntarily.

“People say: ‘Fuck like a porn star,’” Habib said, “I say, OK: do you want to fuck for like, eight hours, with five people standing around us with lights on our testicles?” One of the things Apac does is help educate porn performers about what to expect on the set. As Habib said: “People aren’t porn stars until they do porn.”

‘Secrets aren’t really a thing that I do’ … Stoya. Photograph: Kate Black/The Guardian

“People outside of sex work are not equipped to understand all the things that happen when you do this kind of work,” and those people, he pointed out, include new porn performers. There are some exceptions to this – if you happen to know someone who does porn – but, for the most part, he said, “there’s such a cultural commitment to keep us from knowing what happens in sex work”.

In media responses to Stoya, “all these misconceptions about porn are what are leading the stories right now,” Habib said. “Writers need to get their mind around sex work in a compassionate, thoughtful and wise way before reporting on it.” Otherwise, he said, “when something like this happens, we feel preyed upon. We as performers should not have to somehow overcome it – it’s not our responsibility and it’s not our duty.”

“It’s hard to understand the weight of that stigma, and how heavy that burden is, unless you’ve been in it,” Leathers said. “I’ve gotten death threats, for instance, just for doing porn.” This stigma is also of a piece with what some feminists have termed rape culture. “And sadly rape and rape culture exist everywhere,” said Raphael. “Look at how colleges deal with on-campus rapes. Cops get away with raping sex workers. Look at Hollywood.”

Stoya’s inbox, on the first day after she tweeted her story, was filled with emails from other women, she said – not only from porn, but from across the media – thanking her, and telling her that they, too, had been sexually assaulted by men they knew, and had stayed silent. “It’s not just a porn problem,” said Stoya. “It’s not just an entertainment problem. It’s easy to look at Bill Cosby and think, oh, he had access. No. It happens fucking everywhere.”

The work that must be done, then, to end violence against porn performers isn’t up to the porn industry alone, as performers told me, if at all. “In order for this stuff to stop happening in porn,” Raphael said, “we have to get it to stop happening in society.”