Adult film star and director Eden Alexander's crowdsourced effort to raise $4,000 for medical bills was pulled from Giveforward after the site's Palo Alto-based payment processing company WePay decided her campaign was related to pornographic items.
Local alt-lit operation The Rumpus first reported on the situation, in which Alexander had a "near fatal reaction" to a common prescription drug. When she went to be treated for the reaction, the doctors assigned to her by her insurance company (which she pays for out of pocket) assumed the reaction was due to meth or other drug use.
Alexander attempted to use Giveforward to raise $4,000 to cover the medical costs only to have her campaign pulled just before she developed a staph infection and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Alexander had raised about $1,000 of her $4,000 goal by the time Giveforward pulled the plug. The company claimed they cancelled the campaign because of its "connection to pornographic items." As the Rumpus'
Got this email from @wepay saying they CANCELLED my medical fundraiser bc ill use the money for porn. LITERALLY. pic.twitter.com/Sa8tohWaDe
— Eden Alexander (@EdenAlexanderXX) May 17, 2014
WePay is based out of Palo Alto and according to Valleywag is backed by several high-profile names including the co-founder of PayPal Max Levchin and a former Morgan Stanley CEO. The Rumpus also points out WePay didn't hesitate to take payments from a group of "religious extremists trying to ban abortion" in Minnesota.
WePay later responded with a blog post about their terms of service, claiming Alexander had tweeted from her own account about "offering adult material in exchange for donations." Although there was no mention of it on the campaign site, WePay claims this is a violation of their terms and that they have successfully worked with other adult entertainers in the past, offering to allow Alexander to open a new campaign.
Meanwhile, Alexander's friends and supporters have since moved the campaign over to competitive crowdfunding site CrowdTilt, where she has raised nearly $9,000 as of this writing. In a rude twist to the WePay story, Valleywag and the Rumpus both point to a 2010 CNN interview with WePay's founders claiming they were inspired to build the service after having a hard time pooling funds to pay for a bachelor party, which may or may not have included strippers.
Update: The situation, it seems, has been resolved. The Giveforward team has even donated to Alexander's new campaign on Crowdtilt:
Yes result! RT @chrislowrance: .@GiveForward has apologized & donated to @EdenAlexanderXX's new campaign: pic.twitter.com/RT50kxohSu
— Euphoria (@euphoria9009) May 19, 2014