On July 15, a Santa Monica judge approved a $3 million settlement in a lawsuit filed 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 the fee, Willis will reportedly receive $1.26 million, money that she herself cannot access or spend without her family’s help. According to the complaint, Willis has been left completely incapacitated since her brief stint at the Malibu Summit in early 2024, unable to move or communicate other than occasionally opening her eyes and occasionally snoring.
She was 25 years old when paramedics tried to resuscitate her after she was found unresponsive at the facility.
Just three years earlier, Willis was among the world’s most prominent adult performers, having taken home the 2021 AVN Award for Female Performer of the Year — the adult industry’s equivalent of the Oscars — in a remote ceremony forced by pandemic regulations. She also took home XBIZ’s top award, a feat she will repeat in 2022, becoming an incredibly rare winner.
Having broken into the industry as a star in 2018, Willis has reached her peak in less than three years — and was already looking beyond 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 Steven Soderbergh’s experimental sci-fi film. Divinityco-starring alongside Scott Bakula, Stephen Dorff, and former Disney star turned OnlyFans pioneer Bella Thorne. Soderbergh’s relationship was not trivial. last time Sex, Lies and Videotape The author has helped a porn star move into the mainstream, and international sensation Sasha Grey, is a star Girlfriend experience. Willis was on a storied path.
Like Gray, Willis was a petite brunette with piercing eyes. She was also an immigrant: Born in the Argentine wine region of San Rafael, Mendoza (which was also home for decades to a thriving Mormon community), Willis moved as a child with her mother to Utah, where she — like a surprisingly large percentage of performers and behind-the-scenes figures in the adult industry — grew up in the LDS Church.
Willis grew up as a dancer, excelling in ballet, contemporary, jazz, and hip-hop, dancing competitively in a private dance studio and throughout high school. She studied to become a nurse’s assistant, but eventually realized there was more money in door-to-door sales, selling DirectTV and other products.
“While I was doing summer sales in Los Angeles — they call them ‘seasons’ and they send you to different states to sell locally — I met an amateur… [porn] “A producer on Tinder that I’ve photographed a few times,” she told trade publication XBIZ in 2021. “Then, when I got back home to Utah, I realized I really liked doing it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do porn seriously, because once it was there, it was there forever.”
The “amateur producer” turned out to be “Dre” Garcia, the notorious recruiter and male talent for GirlsDoPorn, which was later proven to be a criminal enterprise targeting young women wanting to film amateur content. Garcia is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence for conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion.
“I knew from the beginning that I was being lied to behind the scenes,” Willis told XBIZ in 2019 when the feds began taking down the site. “Everything they tried to say was a lie. It was too obvious to be honest. It didn’t matter to me, I wanted to do porn regardless.”
Her first scenes, filmed in dodgy San Diego hotel rooms by truly menacing characters, were for her merely an entry point into an industry that she then sought to deliberately and professionally pursue on her own terms. Mormons may be declining in their faith, but their work ethic is steadfast. At least it was in her case. By 2019, Willis was signed to the Motley Fool Models agency and began her unstoppable rise to the top of the industry. In a world where there are always debates about who can call themselves a “porn star” (instead of an actress), Willis has made herself undeniably sexy.
By the time Willis signed herself up for Summit Malibu on January 27, 2024, she was deliberately distancing herself from the adult industry. Her dreams were bigger.
She hadn’t shot professional content for months (her agency had collapsed since her awards) and felt the pressure of having to keep feeding her fans content she produced herself. Willis was one of the moneymakers separated from the platform during its pandemic-era boom. She was also one of the first porn stars to engage one of the ubiquitous third party “management agencies” to maximize profits and handle 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 subscriber relationships between creators and content outputs.
Willis knew the money was too good to pass up, and her management agency needed to feed her more content, but she really wanted to pursue the many non-porn projects offered to her. next to divinity, Directed by Soderbergh’s protégé, Eddie Alcazar, Willis used her own money to launch a clothing line, a venture that fizzled after the initial decline.
These pressures were also compounded by further personal conflicts that made her the subject of persistent rumors in Los Angeles’ tight-knit adult community. According to her family’s complaint, Willis checked herself into rehab seeking treatment for ketamine addiction. She paid $45,500 cash for 21 days of care. Upon admission, she was documented as 5’6″ and 100 pounds — 16 pounds underweight, according to the facility’s nutritional screening done upon admission — and, the family claims, she was not referred to a dietitian or doctor.
The complaint alleges that over the next nine days, an increasingly vulnerable Willis experienced a systematic failure to respond to an apparent and worsening crisis. By January 28, she had rejected the medications and was exhibiting multiple withdrawal symptoms. By January 30, she was described in facility notes as “disheveled, frail, and disoriented” with “poor” vision and “difficulty walking.” She was classified as having a “severe” medical disability. She was never seen by a doctor during her stay, the suit alleged.
Staff repeatedly indicated that she should be taken to urgent care, but she refused. On February 3, paramedics were called when she was having trouble breathing. Willis allegedly refused transport to hospital.
On February 4, the complaint continues, at approximately 12:10 p.m., the nurse found her unresponsive, not breathing, without a pulse, with her eyes open and pupils fixed. The doctor assigned to monitor her left for lunch at 11:40 a.m. and did not return until 12:30 p.m., and his initials appear on the 15-minute monitoring records in a copy filed with the complaint, as if he had examined her at 11:45, 12:00, 12:15, and 12:30 — all times when he was allegedly off-site.
By the time paramedics worked on her for nearly an hour before a pulse was restored, oxygen deprivation had left Willis with irreversible brain damage. As the people closest to her tried to protect her privacy, the adult community — many of them friends and colleagues — weighed in on periodic news about Willis’s health, including reports that she was in a “vegetative coma,” and that her family had returned her to Utah for continued care. “Any news about Emily?” It has become a frequent question at adult industry gatherings.
Summit Malibu denied any wrongdoing. In court filings, the facility alleged that Willis repeatedly refused medical advice and refused medications, and that staff lacked the legal authority to force her to seek outside treatment.
Done The $3 million settlement was approved on July 15 by Santa Monica Superior Court Judge Susan Bryant Deason. Because Willis was incapacitated and could not manage her affairs on her own, judicial approval was required. Her attorney, James A. Morris Jr. said in court filings that the case “was not a 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 determine what Summit Malibu could have done or should have done differently, nor does it answer the question of why a promising young woman who discovered the extremely difficult game of porn at the age of 22 left a licensed addiction treatment facility with irreversible brain damage.
Hollywood Reporter Call the number listed on Summit Malibu’s website and a representative who identified himself as the facility’s program manager declined to provide any comment.
In a 2021 interview, Willis told XBIZ that she has an agent, a dedicated manager within her agency, an accountant, a personal trainer, and a business manager. Not only was she proud to be successful, but she was among the most organized and motivated artists of her generation. Soon after, she was able to cross over into mainstream cinema.
What she didn’t have — which few adult artists and creatives in Los Angeles have — was a support infrastructure that follows them around when the camera stops. Now she has at least a $1.26 million settlement, which will mostly go toward care bills for the rest of her life.
Unfortunately, most of the other questions surrounding Emily Willis’ story cannot be settled with money.
