Rachel Steele made a name for herself pioneering stepmom and stepson fauxcest scenes more than two decades ago. But after her husband died in 2014, Steele decided to take a step back and exit the limelight. She retreated to her hometown in Maine, taking time to mourn and to focus on her well-being. But it was when she was searching for solitude in New England that she found herself falling in love and stepping back into porn.

In 2014, my husband Frank and I were going strong. We were doing really well, and we were being so successful working together in the adult content industry. We had so much freedom. We were able to travel all over the world and create content wherever we traveled to.

My husband was a diver, so he went on a trip to Southeast Asia to do a solo bucket-list diving trip that only a few people could do. He was able to do that, but that was his last trip. A few months after he came back, he was diagnosed with colon cancer at age 47, and three months later, he died. The cancer was so aggressive that it just took him like that.

When he was gone, I felt as if someone had cut off my right arm. We were a two-person team, and he did everything behind the curtain. He was the Wizard of Oz, and I was Dorothy out in front doing the little dance. I decided I needed to take some time off to mourn his loss, and to figure out what the next chapter would look like for me. Luckily, I’m smart with my money, and I had enough saved up to do it.

I got my start in the adult industry by accident — and thanks to Frank. On a night out in Tampa, where I lived and owned a hair salon at the time, I smashed into a man on the dance floor and spilled red wine all over his shirt. That man was Frank. Six years into our relationship, around 2005, we were hanging out by his pool having margaritas, and I decided to get silly. I threw on a white tank top that read “lifeguard” and some red bikini bottoms. Then I jumped in the water, and when I came out, I told him to take some sexy pictures. A couple days later, he uploaded them to the computer and suggested we submit them to a porn site that was doing a hot wife contest with a $600 prize for the best photos. We submitted them, and I won.

From there, I went down the rabbit hole and learned about webcamming. At the time, I knew nothing about the adult industry, and didn’t even really watch porn. My sex life was very vanilla — and so was my existence. I soon realized I really enjoyed the webcam, and was happy with the different fetishes, kinks and desires that my clients were bringing to me. It made me feel rewarded, and I was also starting to make some decent money. That’s when I closed my hair salon and started webcamming and working for fetish producers full-time. I also started my website and gave myself the name Rachel Steele.

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I realized very quickly that I was in demand, and that my videos were selling really well for these producers. Why am I shooting for others? I thought. I should be making my own content. So I got a tripod and a camera and started selling my videos on Clips4Sale. In the meantime, I married Frank, and he decided to quit his corporate job and go full-time with me in the adult industry. For almost a decade, I stayed at number one on the site because I was the first woman to produce and create taboo MILF content on the internet. You know, family porn — like stepmom and stepson content.

But when my husband passed, I wanted out — at least for a while. I decided to go back home to Maine, where I was born and raised. I ended up purchasing a beautiful 100-year-old home and remodeled it. In total, I took off about six or seven years and enjoyed myself there, bathing in nature, enjoying hikes and having a really good time with family and friends.

Living in Maine, right on the coast, you don’t really need to have a hobby. I was just enjoying life. I lived near enough to the water that I could walk down a block and be on the beach. However, I was also very active on social media to keep my brand going and keep the fans happy. I did little solos here and there, but I wasn’t shooting any actual content.

One day in 2017, I was on the Kick app, which I used to chat with fans. I put out a post saying, “What are you doing today? If anyone gives me a really good answer, I’ll send you a free picture.” John, my current partner, responded along with hundreds of other people.

As I was scrolling through the hundreds of messages, I noticed his profile picture. It caught my eye: He was wearing a T-shirt of the metal band called At the Gates. That really blew my mind. Nobody knows of this band, I thought. Who is this guy? I clicked on his picture. He had full tattoo sleeves, and he was gorgeous. Being a porn star in Maine, my dating pool was very narrow at the time. I couldn’t just sit at a bar in Portland and go, “Hey, I just did a pretty hot boy-girl shoot today.” I couldn’t tell anyone what I did, because if I did, people would judge or shame me or they’d want to date me just because of my job. I wanted to be around genuine people, and that was really hard to find.  

But then I started talking to John. He told me that he’d been a fan of mine since he was a teenager, and that he’d been jerking off to me since before he’d like to admit. That made me laugh, and we started chatting.

I liked him right away because he wasn’t starstruck with me. He was just chatting with me with such an easy, mellow vibe; I found that to be really refreshing. He lived in New York City where he worked as a bartender, and after three weeks of chatting, I invited him to Maine to stay at my house for the weekend so we could get to know each other better. He ended up coming, and we got along really well.

I didn’t fall in love right away, though. It took over a year for me to let my walls down and trust him. Falling in love means opening up, trusting and being vulnerable, and I’ve come from a very abusive past with men who had drug and alcohol abuse issues and with experiencing domestic violence. John wasn’t like the men I was used to. He was happy, thrilled and falling in love with me on a daily basis, deeper and deeper and deeper. He’d hug and kiss me, and I’d just stand there stiff thinking, How is he so happy and nice and in love?

After a while, I started to see the pattern of his good nature. I noticed that he’d call his mom every single day at noon without fail, no matter where he was or what he was doing. He’d be like, “I got to call my mom,” and he’d step aside to make a call. She's in Istanbul, Turkey, and she’s alone. “When I left her, I promised I would always talk to her every single day,” he told me.

So I just watched that, and noticed he was that way — caring and present — with me as well. When we’d go out, or when we’d be in different situations around friends, family or anyone else, he was always the same John. He wasn’t putting on an act, and he treated me like a multidimensional human being. I’m not just what you see when you click on my website; I have more to me — more depth, more feelings and more emotions, just like all humans do — and he was treating me as such. That’s what made me start to let down my guard and fall in love: I could see that he was a real person.

After a year of dating, being long-distance was becoming a bit of an inconvenience. I also started thinking that at this stage in my life, I didn’t want to be with a guy who had a job that required working nights and weekends, with schedules that are never set in stone. I had my own schedule and could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. Did I really want to wait around for someone who could “maybe be available on Saturday”? We had a discussion around that, and I said, “I could probably keep you pretty busy with my production company.” I was paying one person to manage my content and my platforms, but I was looking to replace him.

John ended up taking over that position, and eventually he started handling my social media and OnlyFans. Today, we’re at the point where I’m looking to hire other people because we’ve grown so much that he can’t handle it all by himself anymore.

Once John was working for my production company, Red Milf Productions, I wanted to start making more content. “You and I have a great sex life,” I told him. “Why don’t you hold the camera when I’m giving you a blow job and throw it up on OnlyFans?” So that’s what we did. We started filming our “behind the scenes,” and since that was doing well, we started making storyline-based content for my website. The fans loved it, and we shot content together for a couple of years.

Personally, I haven’t found any downsides to working in the adult industry with the person I love. We’re both so grateful to be where we are in this industry. It’s providing jobs and income for both of us, it’s creative and we enjoy what we’re doing. I get to play with all these really cool people, and I get to have great sexual experiences. Plus, I’m my own boss, and I can set my own schedule. The same goes for him — we go to Turkey once a year to visit his mother, and the last time we went, he turned to me and said, “I’m so grateful that I can afford to come here and spend time with my mom and still be able to work online and keep things going.” 

Ever since John and I got together, everything in my life has gone upward. My level of production has gone up, and so has the way that I feel and look. We went from shooting together on a tripod with some cheap little light to using really nice lights and a really nice camera. Now, John is no longer in front of the camera, but he does everything else — from operating the camera to editing, as well as the administrative stuff.

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I will say, one great thing about John is that he’s very open-minded sexually. He’s not threatened by me working with others in the industry. We had a long talk about that, and I told him that I needed to expand and work with other people for the brand to grow; it couldn’t just be me and him on a tripod. He agreed, and to this day, he supports me 100 percent.

Matter of fact, he gets really turned on if I come home and tell him about a scene that I did — and that’s a turn on for me. I can just come home and say, “Oh, by the way, that guy was so hot.” Then, before I know it, we end up in the bedroom fucking. At this point, maybe I should have my house hardwired with cameras because I could just be making content every minute without even trying.