“She looks very similar to Dakota Fanning and that was part of the niche she was working,” says Alana Evans, Skye’s friend and the president of the Adult Performance Artists’ Guild. Skye enjoyed her work, and by all accounts was good at it. (O’Byrne denied any memory of this, saying Skye had requested to do boy/girl scenes off the bat.) “It was certainly a bait-and-switch,” says Lecompte-Goble. We want to book her for four more scenes.'” Within the first six months, he says, she was on more than 100 box covers.Īccording to Lecompte-Goble, Skye told him that when she first entered the industry, she had expressed to O’Byrne that she was only comfortable with booking girl/girl shoots - a fairly common ask for young women new to porn - only for her agent to immediately start booking her roles in boy/girl scenes. She’d show up and shoot and they’d be like ‘Oh my god, she killed it. She had a great work ethic in the beginning.
“The industry likes the of tiny girl/big penis. “ Smaller models end up doing well - the petite girls do well,” O’Byrne says. When she was 19, she launched her porn career in Florida after being recruited by her first agent, John O’Byrne of East Coast Talent. When she was in her early teens, she went to live with her father’s family in southern Ohio, which is where she met an older boyfriend who encouraged her to start camming when she was just 16, below the legal age of entry, according to Lecompte-Goble. “She had a very, very bad upbringing,” her husband, Zachary Lecompte-Goble, tells Rolling Stone. Her childhood was marked by sexual abuse, and her mother sporadically going on alcohol binges. Skye was born in Clearwater, Florida to an alcoholic mother who would later die in her 40s and a father whom she barely knew. We’ll put you in rehab and give you help,'” says Bradley. “When I was Dakota’s age, I was so fucked up, I was missing shoots and they finally told me, ‘We’re not hiring you anymore. Others, however, argue that Skye’s fate is reflective of issues inherent to the adult industry, such as the lack of systemic, institutional support for those struggling with mental illness and substance abuse. “It’s a sad person with drug problems who died, by all accounts I’ve heard.” It happens daily in Los Angeles,” one insider told me. “A person with known addiction issues overdosed. “ And she died in someone’s RV with a man she did not know, because she had nowhere else to go.”Ĭonsidering she had not been highly active in porn for years, some members of the adult community, sensitive to how they are depicted in mainstream media, were careful to separate themselves from Skye, arguing that hers was a tragic yet all too common story across the city - not just for those involved in porn. “She was so big in our industry,” says Kianna Bradley, an adult actress who befriended and later mentored Skye. She also struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, leading her to ping-pong around for years, borrowing money and capitalizing on favors for work. But over the past few years, she hadn’t been booking many roles, garnering headlines mostly for her arrests (including for domestic violence in 2017, a charge that was later dropped) and her erratic behavior on social media, including, most recently, flashing her breasts in front of a George Floyd mural in May 2021. At the peak of her time in porn, Skye was represented by one of the profession’s top agents, appeared on hundreds of DVD box covers, and had been nominated for a number of awards, including the prestigious AVN Best New Starlet award in 2015.