When I was 18, my biggest worries were final exams and getting into the college I wanted to get into — and I had only applied to one. And looking back, I can easily see just how insanely fortunate I was that that was the most I had on my mind.
It’s safe to say that Caitlin Fink has more worries than I did at that age, and she’s also handling her worries in her own ways.
It’s also safe to say that Caitlin probably never saw herself being the topic of national news.
Back on New Year’s Eve, the Bear Creek High School senior had a falling out with her parents, one bad enough that she left home for good. To pay her bills, she started taking on work as an adult entertainer.
Now, that’s not unheard of.
And it’s certainly not so uncommon that it should be national news. No, Caitlin made headlines because of an article about her in her school’s newspaper, The Bruin Voice .
Of course, teenagers like to gossip, and high school is a festering ground for that.
As Caitlin recalls, when word got out about how she was supporting herself, rumors started spreading around the school.
“When people found out I was doing that, they assumed all these things about me, and I was like, ‘oh no, that’s not true,'” she said.
As she explained to CBS13 , that was when she agreed to an interview with the paper so she could clear up those rumors.
She was trying to tell her story in a truthful way.
However, Caitlin’s attempt to set the record straight turned into a debate about free speech when the school district found out about the story — and nobody knows for sure how the district found out — and, concerned about obscenity laws, tried to quash it.
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The teacher in charge of the school paper, Kathi Duffel, refused to let the story die.
Which, to be clear, could have cost Duffel her job. That’s pretty much when the wider story started to take hold.
Everything changed very quickly for Caitlin.
The San Francisco Chronicle picked up the story of the dispute between Duffel and the district, and then the Associated Press did as well. Suddenly, Caitlin was a national story.
Duffel eventually managed to get an independent attorney to review the matter and determine if it could be considered obscene.
In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review , Duffel said that details about Caitlin’s adult film career weren’t the point of the article.
It wasn’t intended to be overly salacious or scandalous.
Quoting the article’s writer, Bailey Kirkeby, she said the story’s focus was “on the hardships that Caitlin has experienced, such as failing her freshman year and having to leave her house, and how she managed to overcome those obstacles and create a successful, self-sustaining career for herself.”
The writer of the article believes people are focusing on the wrong part of the story.
“My story does contain material about her adult entertainment career, but the focus is not on her videos themselves. Rather, the content is informative material about the industry, including its pay scale and its occupational risks, ” Kirkeby continued.
The story did finally run in the school paper.
And in the aftermath, Caitlin did have a few things to say about the district’s attempts to silence the story .
There are a number of supportive comments on the article.
“I feel like the district sees it as a taboo thing that should be swept under the rug, but it’s really not a taboo topic,” Caitlin told CBS13 . “It’s just a topic that people don’t like to talk about because it makes them feel uncomfortable.”
What she really wants people to understand is that adult performers are real people.
“Adult entertainers aren’t just objects, they are actual people,” she said. “They have feelings; they have goals; they have motivation.”
And even after all the controversy, Caitlin has no plans to stop performing, hoping to eventually become a model.
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
“I’m 18, what I’m doing is legal, and I don’t see why everyone is making such a big deal out of it,” she told the Associated Press.
“I like the positive attention I get from it,” she said to CBS. “Even though I know what their intentions are it’s still nice to know that they think that about me because I don’t believe it sometimes.”
h/t CBS13