Emily Willis Was Porn’s Biggest Star. A $3M Settlement Won’t Answer What Happened to Her

On July 15, a Santa Monica judge approved a $3 million settlement in a lawsuit brought by former adult performer Emily Willis’ mother and legal guardian against Malibu Lighthouse Treatment, the company that owns the exclusive Southern California rehab center Summit Malibu.

After fees, Willis will reportedly receive $1.26 million, funds which she herself cannot access or spend without her family’s help. According to the complaint, Willis has been left completely incapacitated since a brief stint at Summit Malibu in early 2024, unable to move or communicate beyond occasionally opening her eyes and sometimes grunting.

She was 25 years old when the paramedics tried to revive her after she was found unresponsive at the facility.

Only three years before that, Willis was among the most prominent adult performers in the world, having received the 2021 AVN Female Performer of the Year award — the adult industry’s Oscars equivalent — in a remote ceremony forced by pandemic regulations. She had also been awarded the top XBIZ award, a feat she would replicate in 2022, becoming an incredibly rare back-to-back winner.

Having entered the industry as a starlet in 2018, Willis had reached its apex in less than three years — and was already looking past the glass ceiling that separates adult performers from mainstream recognition. By 2023, she was at the Sundance Film Festival as part of the cast of the Steven Soderbergh-produced experimental sci-fi film Divinity, co-starring alongside Scott Bakula, Stephen Dorff and former Disney star turned OnlyFans pioneer Bella Thorne. The Soderbergh connection was not trivial. The last time the Sex, Lies and Videotape auteur had helped a porn star transition into mainstream, it had been global sensation Sasha Grey, star of The Girlfriend Experience. Willis was treading a storied path.

Like Grey, Willis was a petite brunette with penetrating eyes. She was also an immigrant: born in Argentina’s wine region of San Rafael, Mendoza (also the home for decades to a thriving Mormon community), Willis relocated as a child with her mom to Utah, where she was raised — like a surprisingly large percentage of performers and behind-the-scenes figures in the adult industry — in the LDS Church.

Willis grew up as a dancer, excelling in ballet, contemporary, jazz and hip-hop, and dancing competitively at a private dance studio and throughout high school. She studied to be a nurse’s assistant, but eventually realized there was more money in door-to-door sales, peddling DirectTV and other products.

“While I had been doing sales in the summertime in L.A. — they call it ‘seasons’ and send you to different states to sell locally — I had met an amateur [porn] producer on Tinder who I shot for a couple times,” she told trade publication XBIZ in 2021. “Then, when I moved back home to Utah, I realized I really loved doing that. I just wasn’t sure if I wanted to do porn seriously, since once it’s out there, it’s there forever.”

The “amateur producer” turned out to be “Dré” Garcia, the notorious recruiter and male talent for GirlsDoPorn, which was later proven to be a criminal enterprise targeting young women seeking to shoot amateur content. Garcia is serving a 20-year federal sentence for conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion. 

“I knew from the start that I was being lied to about the scenes,” Willis told XBIZ in 2019 as the website was starting to be taken down by the feds. “Everything they tried to say was a lie. It was pretty obvious to be honest. It just didn’t matter to me, I wanted to do porn regardless.”

Her debut scenes, shot in dodgy San Diego hotel rooms by truly dangerous characters, were for her just an entry point into an industry that she then pursued deliberately, and professionally, on her own terms. Mormons may lapse in their faith, but their work ethic is steadfast. At least it was in her case. By 2019, Willis was signed to the Motley Models agency and beginning her unstoppable rise to the top of the industry. In a world where there are always debates about who gets to call herself a “porn star” (as opposed to a performer), Willis made herself undeniable.

By the time Willis checked herself into Summit Malibu on January 27, 2024, however, she was deliberately distancing herself from the adult industry. Her dreams were bigger.

She had not shot professional content for several months (her agency had imploded since her awards run) and she felt the pressure of having to continue feeding her OnlyFans with self-produced content. Willis had been one of the platform’s breakaway moneymakers during its pandemic-era boom. She was also one of the first porn stars to engage one of the now ubiquitous third-party “management agencies” to maximize OF profits and deal with the volume of fan demand. Critics within the industry have raised concerns about fee structures and the degree of control some of these agencies exercise over creators’ subscriber relationships and content output.

Willis knew the money was too good to give up, and her management agency needed to be fed more content from her, but she really wanted to pursue several non-porn ventures being offered to her. Besides Divinity, directed by Soderbergh protégé Eddie Alcazar, Willis used her own money to launch a clothing line, a venture that fizzled out after an initial drop.

These pressures were also compounded by more personal struggles that made her the subject of persistent rumors in the tight-knit adult community in Los Angeles. According to her family’s complaint, Willis checked herself into the rehab center seeking treatment for ketamine addiction. She paid $45,500 cash for 21 days of care. On admission she was documented as 5’6″ and 100 pounds — 16 pounds underweight, according to the facility’s own nutritional screening conducted on admission — and, the family alleges, she was not referred to a nutritionist or physician.

The complaint alleges that over the following nine days an increasingly frail Willis faced a systematic failure to respond to a visible and worsening crisis. By January 28 she had refused medications and was showing multiple withdrawal symptoms. By January 30 she was described in facility notes as “disheveled, frail, disoriented” with “poor” insight and “difficulty walking.” She was classified as “extremely” medically impaired. The lawsuit alleged that she was never seen by a physician during her stay.

Staff repeatedly noted she should be transferred to urgent care, but she declined. On February 3, paramedics were called when she had difficulty breathing. Willis allegedly refused transport to the hospital.

On February 4, the complaint continues, at approximately 12:10 p.m., a nurse found her unresponsive, not breathing, without a pulse, eyes open and pupils fixed. The clinician assigned to monitor her had left for lunch at 11:40 a.m. and did not return until 12:30 p.m. His initials appear on the 15-minute observation logs in a copy submitted with the complaint, as if he had checked on her at 11:45, 12:00, 12:15 and 12:30 — all times when he was allegedly off-site. 

By the time paramedics had worked on her for nearly an hour before restoring a pulse, the oxygen deprivation left Willis with irreversible brain damage. With those closest to her attempting to protect her privacy, the adult community — many of them friends and set colleagues — pondered over periodic news about Willis’ health, including reports that she was in “a vegetative coma,” and that her family had relocated her back to Utah for continuing care. “Any news about Emily?” became a recurring question in adult industry gatherings.

Summit Malibu denied wrongdoing. In court filings, the facility argued Willis had repeatedly refused medical advice and declined medications, and that staff lacked the legal authority to force her to seek outside treatment. 

The $3 million settlement was approved July 15 by Santa Monica Superior Court Judge Susan Bryant-Deason. Because Willis is incapacitated and cannot manage her own affairs, judicial approval was required. Her own attorney James A. Morris Jr. acknowledged in court filings that the case “was no slam dunk” and that no one knows exactly what happened before she stopped breathing, or whether the facility could have prevented her injuries.

Now the settlement closes the legal chapter. It does not establish what Summit Malibu could or should have done differently, and it does not answer the question of why a promising young woman who had figured out the extremely tricky porn game by age 22, left a licensed facility for addiction treatment with irreversible brain damage.

The Hollywood Reporter phoned the number listed on the Summit Malibu website and a rep identifying themselves as the facility’s Program Director declined to provide any comments.

In the 2021 interview, Willis told XBIZ that she had an agent, a dedicated manager within her agency, an accountant, a personal trainer, a 401k, a business manager. She was proud of being not only successful, but among the most professionally organized and motivated performers of her generation. Soon after that, she had even managed to cross over into mainstream film.

What she did not have — what few adult performers and creators in Los Angeles have — is a support infrastructure that follows them when the camera stops. Now at least she has a $1.26 million settlement, which will mostly go to caretaking bills for the rest of her life.

Most other questions surrounding the Emily Willis story, unfortunately, cannot be settled by money.