During his last year as a porn star, Broome never left his apartment. He thinks he spent around $14,000 on takeout so he wouldn’t have to go to the grocery store and interact with people. He also felt completely trapped. He could not envision any future for himself outside of the porn industry and because he believed that lie, he remained where he was.
“If you believe a lie, it will become true to you,” said Broome. “If I believe that I’m a failure, it’s going to be impossible for me to succeed.” He didn’t believe in God at the time, but even so, “I was just asking out into thin air, can I please die?”
Joshua Broome’s Journey to Freedom
Joshua Broome’s decision to leave the porn industry was the result of something one could describe as a modern-day miracle. “I had gone maybe a year without hearing my real name because I had isolated myself to the point where I was only interacting with people on set,” he said.
One day, he went to the bank. After concluding his transaction and starting to walk away, the teller called after him, using his real name, “Joshua.” She wanted to know, was there something that he needed? Could she help him with anything?
Broome was shocked. It had been so long since he had heard his actual name instead of his stage name. The teller’s questions were odd as well because there was no reason for her to ask if she could help him. He had already taken care of what he needed to do at the bank. He left so stunned that looking back, he is surprised he didn’t get hit by a car while he was walking home. When he got back to his apartment, “I looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognize the person that I saw. There was just something about hearing my name.”
For the first time since he began working in porn, Broome felt convicted and knew that his life was not right. “I felt guilty,” he said. He also thought of his mom, who had sacrificed so much for him and had gone through so much suffering and pain throughout her life. Because Broome had isolated himself, he had not been there to support her. He felt the weight of that failure and, “It absolutely crushed me.”
He immediately decided to leave the porn industry and L.A. He called his agent and everyone he could think of, breaking his contracts, and losing around $50,000. He found someone to take over his lease and left for Charlotte, N.C., where his mom picked him up for a reunion that sounds eerily similar to the one Jesus recounts at the end of Luke 15.
“I was afraid to hug her,” said Broome. But they did hug and they wept with each other. “She didn’t ask me a lot of questions because she didn’t care,” he said. “She didn’t care why I was home. She didn’t care why I quit. She was just glad that I was there.”
The next two years were difficult because Broome was no longer making a lot of money with relative ease, but he was still carrying his guilt around. He also struggled at keeping jobs because he would lie about his past; then employers would find out about it and fire him. He finally had some success working at a gym where the employers chose not to hold his past against him.
But he continued to struggle in the area of relationships. He would try to hide his history—then the women would learn about it anyway and the relationships would end. “Everything [was] going well except the inside of me,” he said.
Then he met a girl named Hope at the gym and asked her to go on a run with him. During their run, Broome decided to tell her all at once all of the terrible things he had done. Her response, he said, “changed my life.”
