Maitland Ward’s Porn Career Grants Her “More Respect” After Leaving Hollywood 18 Years Ago
Boy Meets World alum Maitland Ward is continuing to bare it all about her move to working in porn.
Ward opened up an interview with Fox News Digital, telling the outlet of her transition to the pornography industry, “I really think people treat me with more respect now, honestly, especially even in Hollywood right now.”
“I’m pitching my memoir into a TV format and talking with people,” she explained, referring to her 2022 book Rated X: How Porn Liberated Me From Hollywood. “They’re so respectful, and they’re so positive about my story, especially younger people and different people that I speak to in Hollywood and stuff. They’re just much more receptive to the story. And I really feel like I have a lot of positivity around it.”
She also addressed the sense of agency she’s adopted since entering the porn industry in 2019, noting, “I’m able to create my own brand, my own content, the way I want to create it.”
Ward said that she “didn’t get anybody coming out hating [her] for it or anything,” once again praising the surprising “positivity” she has received in her career switch-up.
“Everybody thought people were just going to rip me apart, and I was going to be judged and raked across the coals, but I got so much positivity and I think it’s because I was so positive about it, and I was so happy about it,” she added.
Other acting credits of Ward’s include The Bold and the Beautiful, Home Improvement, Boston Public and White Chicks. The former actress has previously made headlines for her move to porn, telling The Daily Beast in 2019 that “it feels natural” to her. She later published an opinion piece for them in 2022, revealing that she once hid from Boy Meets World executive producer Michael Jacobs and his wife when she spotted them out on the street.
“I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being able to give me that smug, fatherly look and tell me all the reasons he thought I had failed, when I was succeeding on my own terms more than ever,” she recalled, claiming that to Jacobs, she had “ruined the image of the show.”
While she remembered a more positive interaction with co-star Will Friedle, Ward had a tense experience on his, Danielle Fishel and Rider Strong‘s Pod Meets World podcast in February, where she ultimately questioned whether the co-hosts criticized Jacobs “just to get listens.”
Nonetheless, Ward, who is “creating full-length movies,” told Fox News Digital that porn has given her confidence and empowerment.
“Porn has really given that to me, that empowerment, to be able to stand in my own skin, to be able to create projects that I want to create and be proud of, to go against the mold and do something that other people haven’t done or have been too scared to do and to have the courage and confidence to do that,” she elaborated. “When you succeed at it, it’s like you feel so much more confident, because you’ve done something like nobody else has done.”
