Relentlessly cruel taunts bombarded a beautiful Minnesota college freshman honor student after she made a porn video to pay for her education, prompting her to shoot herself to death.
Alyssa Funke, 19, a former freshman at the University of Wisconsin, was raised in a turbulent and dysfunctional home full of criminals but had finally found a way out of her dead-end and miserable existence because of her illustrious scholastic accomplishments.
The problem was that she could not afford to go to college and was using the money made from the amateur sex tape to pay for tuition. Porn is a $10 billion-a-year business, more profitable than the NFL, the NBA and Major League Baseball. Yet, despite its lucrative intake, the business still carries a crippling stigma. And when the troubled young adult was submerged under cruel jokes from classmates, she drowned in misery. 
Funke bought a shotgun and committed suicide on her family’s boat on a suburban St. Paul, Minn., lake in April just two weeks after the skin flick hit porn site Casting Couch.
The straight-A student at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls was inundated with taunts on Twitter and Facebook after former classmates at Stillwater High School found the flick and huddled around in groups to see her baring it all, KMSP-TV reported.
“I’m Stella Ann. I’m 18, from Minnesota, and I’m really looking forward to get started,” the unsure Funke tells an unseen camera operator as she sat on the “casting couch” during filming in Las Vegas earlier this year. “I want to be a major in biology, minor in chemistry, and I want to be an anesthesiologist,”
Shortly after, she strips naked and has on-camera sex.
Not long after returning to Wisconsin from Vegas, her classmates slashed her open emotionally with damning jokes, taunts and penetrating criticisms that caused permanent damage.
“Wow your (sic) a thot,” wrote one, including a slang acronym for “that ho over there.”
Another person wrote: “Does her dad know?”
“Nothing brings a school together like a pornstar who graduated last year,” chimed in a third.
Funke tried to camouflage the pain the taunts were inflicting on her psyche with the following retorts:
“Pornstar Status,” she tweeted alongside an emoticon showing the “A-OK” symbol. Another read “FAMOUS for dayzzzzzzz.”
Outwardly, Funke made everyone think she was okay. On the inside, she sunk to the depths of despair. April 16, she drove out to Big Carnelia Lake and took her own life, the TV station reported.
The teen had a tough time growing up: Her father has criminal convictions for thefts, while her mother and mother’s boyfriend were convicted for drug dealing and child neglect, reports KMSP.
Funke spent the balance of her childhood with her grandmother and struggled with money. She was forced to transfer from a private college to public last year as she tried to raise cash for her education.
Funke’s fate directly contrasts with Duke University freshman Miriam Weeks, 18, aka “Belle Knox”, who also starred in a Casting Couch porn. Weeks was even bold enough to go on TV morning shows and sat across from some of the country’s biggest news anchors to defend her decision to join the porn world as a way to make money for school and to feel “empowered.”
But as social scientist attests, there are drastic ramifications for young people doing porn and peers can be savag
“This is permanent, she can’t erase this. Now, it goes into your family, it goes into your friends, it goes into your career,” Joy Friedman, a social worker at a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps sex workers escape the industry. “In the future, this is what you’re known for and this is who you’re labeled as. That affects you.
“The fact is: If this is such a glamorous, okay job/lifestyle/career, why’d she kill herself?” Friedman added.
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