We all feel like we know celebrities thanks to all that time we spend staring at their fascinatingly symmetrical faces, but the truth is that sometimes, a public persona is just that. The TV Don Juan all the women swoon over might be extremely awkward in person, the tough-guy rapper might have learned everything he knows on the mean streets of his high school debate team, and that suburban mom type who encourages people to vote for Ted Cruz even though he’s kind of funny looking might actually be an ex-softcore porn actress. And, as anyone who’s even glimpsed his face knows intuitively, women who are comfortable with their bodies make Ted Cruz nervous.
That’s what happened to a California woman named Amy Lindsay, who appeared in dozens of softcore movies throughout the ’90s and early 2000s under her own name as well as such lusty pseudonyms as Leah Riley, Julie Snow, and Summer Leeds. Since then, Lindsay has stepped back from the Skinemax game to appear in more mainstream fare, like an episode of Star Trek: Voyager and, most recently, a Ted Cruz commercial where she delivers the line, “Maybe you should vote for more than just a pretty face next time.” (She also, probably not coincidentally, became a Christian.) She’s not embarrassed by her past, though, and told BuzzFeed News of the gig, “In a cool way, then hey, then it’s not just some old, white Christian bigot that people want to say, ‘It could be, maybe, a cool kind of open-minded woman like me.’” Cruz’s campaign is not cool, though, and after Lindsay’s identity was discovered, Cruz’s campaign pulled the ad, saying, “Had the campaign known of her full filmography, we obviously would not have let her appear in the ad.”
Why not, though? There’s nothing inherently inconsistent between taking your clothes off for a living and being a Republican. Just take 2003’s Bikini Airways, where Lindsay helps save a struggling airline by stripping for its passengers. Talk about the free market in action! And that’s just one of the countless struggling, independently owned spas, massage parlors, car washes, erotic bakeries, and modeling agencies that have been saved through the heroic, bare-chested efforts of softcore starlets over the years. Really, politicians should be taking tips from women like Lindsay—after all, they know how to fake it better than anyone.
Lindsay, for the record, is a Republican, although she says she hasn’t decided yet whether to vote for Cruz or Trump—who is totally down with women in bikinis, as long as they’re not immigrants.