Alyssa Funke: Getting Caught Between Cyberbullies And Amateur Porn

Young, beautiful and inexperienced, are some of the things that are most sought-after in the adult entertainment.

Alyssa Funke, a straight-A freshman student at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls in Wisconsin, U.S., was all that.

She took the name 'Stella Ann' as her stage name, and entered the adult entertainment industry through Casting Couch X, that recruits "fresh faces and new amateur girls who are trying to enter the xxx porno business."

"I'm Stella Ann. I'm 18, from Minnesota, and I'm really looking forward to get started," she said in the video while sitting on a casting couch, posted in March 2014. "I want to be a major in biology, minor in chemistry, and I want to be an anesthesiologist."

The casting couch genre in pornography, can be described as the practice of soliciting sexual favors from a job applicant in exchange for employment in the entertainment industry, primarily acting roles. In her debut adult video, Funke had sex in front of the camera with a supposedly total stranger.

The video began with what seemingly was an interview for a job.

But about a third into the video, which is about 45 minutes long, Funke began undressing her lowcut T-shirt and white shorts, revealing a grey and pink undergarments. She then began doing alluring poses, before finally stripping all of her clothing.

The teen went bare naked, with nothing covering her young body.

The man, who never reveal his face, began fondling her breasts, to then tell her to bend over to reveal her rear, which is recorded in full display.

Funke then began her sex acts, on both the table and the couch, receiving cunningulus, performing fellatio, and having sexual intercourse in several positions, before the man ended up inside her.

When the video was published, things were going as Funke expected.

But that was only until one of her former classmates at Stillwater High School recognized her.

It was at that time that the world fell down on her.

The students reportedly gathered around cafeteria tables at the school to watch Funke's sex tape on their phones.

"Wow, your a thot [prostitute]. Does her dad know?" one tweeted.

"Nothing brings a school together like a porn star who graduated last year. I guess you could say news spreads fast here at Stillwater hahah," another wrote. Many of the comments were too harsh that major media outlets refrained from publishing them.

Funke responded with her own tweets, "famous for dayzzz" and "pornstar status, a-okay".

But the rest of the story was inevitable as more and more internet and social media users sent continuous barrage of abusive messages.

With her real name, past and location known, an endless stream of harassments and insults were thrown at the young woman for having starred in an adult entertainment.

Feeling doxed, Funke then posted a Facebook status update about being a victim of online harassment.

And it was soon later that Funke was revealed to have suffered from depression.

After texting her mother that "I just want to die", Funke killed herself using a 12-gauge shotgun to the head at boat stop in the Big Carnelia Lake on April 16, 2014, one month after the video was first put online.

She was only 19.

She died because online commenters bombarded her Twitter and Facebook accounts with nasty comments over the porn video she made.

While Funke died from suicide, police investigators weren't treating her case as criminal harassment.

This is because her death raises questions about the consequences of harsh online comments, which may or may nor rise to the level of criminal harassment, especially when directed at a porn amateur, who may not have the experience or the ability tp deal with the internet abuse.

Following her death, her family started an online fundraising campaign, called the Alyssa Stop Bullying Fund, to raise awareness about cyberbullying, which raised only a little more than a $100.

“Social media has revolutionized the way people bully each other now days," the campaign's mission stated. "Now you can say whatever you want and not have to look the person in the face while doing it. This needs to stop!”

In the U.S. alone, the porn industry is worth billions of dollars. It's a profitable business with an extremely high demand. But the profits the people make in the business, can sometimes come at a tragic cost.

Funke's case is all about unforeseen consequences of online porn, which can happen, especially to young and impressionable woman who enters a world she knows almost nothing about. While she indeed got her fame, most of that fame happened after her death.

This unfortunate case is because she was bullied on the internet.

It was said that Funke had a sad past and had her own share of struggle in life.

Born on March 28, 1995, it was reported that Funke's biological father has a criminal records for theft and swindling. Her biological mother had a boyfriend, both of whom were busted for dealing drugs and neglecting Funke's younger siblings. Funke then lived with her grandmother when she was just a young teen.

Then there she was at the time, young and fragile, and also struggling for money.

She went into porn to earn money to cover her college expenses, her mother said. And after the video went out, "she wanted to come off as everything is fine when it is not," her mother recalled.

"She had been bullied since she was a small child," said her mother. '[Because] she didn't have the nice things... toys, a nice car" that her classmates did. "'It was so many people and she had grown so tired of the bullying…the decision she had made was causing unbearable grief."

Since Funke's suicide, there's been an outpouring of grief on social media, including tributes. Friends remember her as a sweet, bright and intelligent young woman with so much promise.

In all, Funke appeared in a very limited number of adult films during her brief career in the adult entertainment industry.

But again, the internet never forgets.

Weeks, months, and even years after her tragic death, the bullying never stopped. The internet still remembers Alyssa Funke for her pornographic video.

Funke is yet another example of how the internet can be so cruel and unforgiving.

Like other teen suicides, such as Amanda Cummings and Mitchell Henderson, her death became the subject of many conversations online about the issue of cyberbullying.

Funke's death happened after the widely covered harassment of Belle Knox, a Duke University freshman who appeared in pornographic films and was harassed by students of her campus after she was identified. Knox had even appeared on the same couch for the same website, but because she embraced her career and was open about it, the internet was more forgiving.

Knox even referred it as "a culture of slut-shaming and rape apology."