Life After Porn, With Karmen Karma

An amber van de bunt story of overcoming.

- Tess Adamakos

Eleven-year-old Amber van de Bunt instantly knew she “wanted to be like those girls one day,” when she found a Playboy magazine in her grandparents’ cabin. At 18, the Michigan native was researching “best stripper names” when she was supposed to be looking up colleges. Moving to Florida to work as a topless dancer – where she loved that she would “get paid to party” – Amber van de Bunt never felt like the other girls in her “small, extremely conservative, and religious, midwest hometown.” She settled on the stage name: Karma Karmen.

“I knew I was sexual, and no one seemed to have the same interests and desires that I had inside,” Karmen Karma said. “I always felt like I didn’t belong. I wanted to explore my sexuality and get into trouble.”

Karma quickly became known as the “Deep Throat Queen” in the adult-film sphere. With accolades from AVN, “the Oscars of porn,” she has been working in the pornography industry for over six years now, with videos from all of the major porn companies, including Brazzers, Blacked, Naughty America, Bang Bros, and Burning Angel.

“I actually knew I wanted to do porn when I first found out it existed. I tried to satisfy my cravings for porn by webcamming and stripping. I even went to college for one year to try to be “normal,” Karma said. “The reason I didn’t dive into porn like I wanted to was because of fear of what my family would think.”

Regret was not an option, so Karmen Karma made the jump to perform in adult videos when she turned 21. As she says, “I knew my desire to do porn would never go away.”

Identifying as a “fempreneur,” Karmen is “proud to be a woman who creates her own businesses.”