EXCLUSIVE: 'Welcome home daddy, I'm a porn star!' 'Heartbroken' devout Catholic Army doctor returns from Afghanistan to find beloved daughter is the Duke student Belle Knox starring in X-rated films
- Dr Kevin Weeks and his Indian wife, from Spokane, Washington, had no idea their daughter Miriam is known as porn princess Belle Knox
- Miriam, 18, went to a private $11,000 a year Jesuit prep school
- She claims she has to star in porn to pay her $60,000 a year tuition
- The Weeks have three children in all and their college costs will be $1m in total for the $200,000-a-year doctor and his stay-at-home wife to pay
- She has a 'devastated' brother who does Christian outreach work
- But relatives told MailOnline there is no way they will 'abandon' Miriam
That was the shocking news Dr Kevin Weeks was greeted with as he returned from a tour of duty serving as an army doctor in Afghanistan.
Online and on TV, his beloved daughter is loudly and proudly proclaiming how she's paying for her college education by making X-rated films under the pseudonym Belle Knox after she was outed by a fellow student.
The real identity of the 18-year-old student who has caused a nationwide uproar and family heartache is Miriam Weeks, raised a devout Catholic in a loving home in Spokane, Washington.
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| Exposed: A fellow student outed Duke University porn star Belle Knox. Her real name is Miriam Weeks, 18, from Spokane, Washington, and was an A-grade student at the $11,000-a-year Jesuit prep school she attended |
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| Shocked: Dr Kevin Weeks returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan to discover his daughter was making X-rated films to fund her college studies. He and his wife Harcharan are heartbroken over what Miriam is doing |
But they won’t abandon her, a family member told MailOnline exclusively. Amanda Minor, the mother-in-law of Miriam’s brother Paul, told MailOnline: ‘This is a tragedy in the family. The father is one of the best human beings I’ve ever met. He is just back from Afghanistan; he served his country, how awesome is that?
‘He’s so proud of his daughter; there’s no way they could have known this was going on. It’s terrible. But they would never abandon their daughter. This is a nightmare what the family are going through.’
Last week, Miriam had claimed in interviews that her parents had only themselves to blame for her decision. Identified only by her porn name Belle Knox, she said that she was forced into making X-rated films because her parents suddenly cut off their financial support.
How else, she asked, was she able to find nearly $5,000 a month for the tuition fees alone?
But by the time she appeared on Piers Morgan’s CNN show last Thursday, Miriam switched her story, saying she decided to begin starring in adult movies when she received her financial aid package from Duke and found out she was going to need to pay about $47,000 a year.
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| Empowered: Miriam told CNN's Piers Morgan and millions of viewers that she loves what she does |
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Do-gooder: Miriam featured in a Catholic magazine featuring her charitable work while at Gonzaga Prep. She is far left in this picture |
'The financial aid that I was given to pay for my tuition was insufficient and just really an enormous financial burden on my family,' she said.
Dr. Weeks’s official medical Google Plus homepage had been hacked into with a picture of their daughter’s body as the main icon, and reviewers left vicious comments such as: ‘Don't know what kind of doctor he is, but he did a pretty bad job of raising his daughter.’
This is simply not the case, according to family members. Several relatives, friends and associates of the family interviewed by MailOnline painted a picture of an extremely devoted couple who have only wanted the best for their three children, Miriam, sister Anita, 20, and brother Paul, 22.
Kevin, 54, and Harcharan, 48, were dumbfounded when they learned that their daughter was a porn actress just 24 hours before the news broke.
In their suburban home in Spokane, 250 miles east of Seattle, the couple was slowly coming to grips with their daughter’s new lifestyle.
Mr Weeks, a religious Catholic, is an esteemed doctor at the Mann Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spokane, which deals only with war veterans. His Indian wife comes from a culture where pornography is generally vilified.
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| Grin and bare it: Even before emarking on her new career, sexy Miriam like to show off |
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Humiliated: Dr Weeks' official medical Google home page was hacked into, subbing this image for a photo of the doctor |
Educating their children and setting them on the right path meant everything to them, say family members, and their financial outlay on their children’s education has been staggering, even on Dr Weeks’s six-figure salary.
It was well worth the outlay. Miriam was a straight A ‘genius’ student. She was given the ‘Spokane Scholar’ in Foreign Languages during her final school year, 2012-13.
It’s hardly surprising that out of 38,000 applicants, Miriam Weeks was one of just over 3,000 students admitted to prestigious Duke University.Miriam’s siblings had also gone on to study at high-ranking universities. Paul Weeks studied percussion at St Martin’s University, which costs a minimum of $40,000-a-year. But he wasn’t it a penny in debt, as one family member reveals.
‘Education means everything to that family. The parents are so devoted. I know that they were so proud to be putting Paul through university, and paid for him,’ says Mrs Minor.
‘But they’ve worked very, very hard to put their children through college. Hershie told me that student debt cripples young people and she made sure Paul didn’t come out with a penny of debt. She doesn’t want any of her children burdened by financial debt.
‘There’s another daughter in college as well. It’s going to cost a small fortune to put all of them through. It’s a lot for any family.’
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O Brother: Miriam's oldest sibling Paul and wife Anna are very religious and are embarrassed and 'devastated' |
A doctor of Miriam’s father’s standing would earn in excess of $200,000 a year plus deployment pay.
As Miriam herself said in an interview with the website www.realcleareducation: ‘I have siblings in college, who are being supported by my parents, and my parents are paying $1,000 a month just for their own student loans and my dad graduated 20 years ago.
'One of my parents is recently unemployed. I was offered $13,000 in financial aid. That wasn't enough -- that's $47,000 still unaccounted for.’The couple also recently moved to a new house on a private estate in Spokane. They bought their four-bedroom home costing $477,730, but they are burdened with a substantial mortgage of $460,607.
In all likelihood, friends conclude, the family are going through financial hardship and cut Miriam’s funding because they couldn’t afford the tuition fees and the living expenses, which total in excess of $6,000 a month.
But many who know the Weeks say that talk of them simply abandoning their child is ridiculous, which rings true considering how much Miriam backed off her initial claims of financial abandonment.
As one family member says: ‘The more interviews she did, the more the truth came out that the family didn’t cut her funding. She just said that paying such a large amount would be a strain on any family, but it’s hard to see they’d abandoned her.
‘It seems more reasonable to suspect that she didn’t tell the family the truth as to how little aid she was getting from Duke. Ironically, she may have been trying to protect them from further financial pain,’ said one source.
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| Higher education: Tuition alone at Duke is $47,000 a year. Miriam was one of only 3,000 students accepted |
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| Big Mouth: Duke freshman Thomas Bagley outed Belle Knox. He's been harassed by fellow students |
‘The kids are their pride and joy. The sisters are brilliant, articulate, wonderful girls. They were so proud that she was going to Duke University. They worshipped her. If they had stopped paying, they would have had good reason for it. But they’d never abandon her, ever.’
Mrs Minor is one of many family members trying to come to grips with why Miriam would hurt her parents by appearing in porn movies.
Besides money, one possible explanation is that the family has been under stress due to Dr Weeks’s deployment to Afghanistan and this is Miriam’s way of dealing with it.
Dr Weeks has been a serving army doctor in hematology for over 19 years and has travelled the globe serving his country. Miriam wrote on a blog that she’s ‘lived all over the world because I’m an Army Brat!’. Dr Weeks has served in some of the bloodiest war zones and only recently returned from the war-torn country.
'You may find that the family has been under some stress recently for heroic reasons, said Mrs Minor, who lives in Lacey, Washington. ‘Your dad being away from home in a war zone, that’s going to put some stress on everyone else.’
Going under the guise of Belle Knox, Miriam began her thriving porn career quietly, until she was outed by a fellow student a couple of weeks ago.
The 18-year-old appeared on front pages across the globe and sat down with Piers Morgan for a CNN interview using only her stage name and claiming that she was not ashamed of what she was doing and, in fact, felt ‘empowered’ by her career.
I’m not being exploited. I love what I’m doing and I’m safe,’ insists the women’s studies major.
While Miriam seemed to be flourishing in her fifteen minutes of fame, she did admit to one pang of conscience – keeping it all from her parents. 'I regret not telling my family from the get-go. I think that was a really big mistake,' Miriam told Morgan.
Considering her background, it’s difficult to believe that Miriam was cut off by her parents, say family members.
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To the hilt: The Weeks paid $477.730 for their four-bedroom Spokane home. Their mortgage is a hefty $460,607 |
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Paradise Cost: Wandermere Heights is a pricey upscale community. The Weeks family moved only months ago |
It seems more likely that she enjoyed the money she was starting to take home - around $1,200 ‘a session’, which consists of an afternoon of sex before the cameras. So far Miriam has made around a dozen films.
John Steven’s, Miriam’s agent who spoke to MailOnline, insists her family is at fault for all of this.
He says: ‘She’s not done anything wrong. Her parents have cut her off financially. In the first semester, her parents worked out a payment plan with the university for tuition of $5,000 a month. But that lasted until the month of January, and then they cut her off.
‘So starting February 1, she owed the school $5,000 a month. Where is an 18-year-old girl supposed to get that?’
Steven, who runs Matrix Models in Beverly Hills, said he had ‘Belle Knox’ booked up for four days solid of shoots in New York, Phoenix and Los Angeles during the media frenzy.
‘If she hadn’t done porn, she’d have been thrown out of school, as she would have missed the monthly payments. I have no idea why they cut her off, as far as I know her parents were running into financial problems.
‘She makes a lot of money from porn. She could easily make $10-15,000 a month, that’s for multiple shoots. She gets $1,500-2,000 per shoot, then I get a cut, which is less than 20 percent and then it’s taxed. It’s a legitimate business I run.
‘She simply had to make a decision whether she wanted to continue with her college career or drop out of school. She wants a college education, so had no other option.
She tried to apply for government grants, scholarships, but the irony is that her parents make enough money so that she’s not eligible for anything.
'She’s not poor enough, but they’re not paying for her, so they’re doubly screwing her because she’s not viable for financial aid and they’re not helping her.
‘My question is that if she wants to become a lawyer and stay at Duke, what else could she possibly do?’
Steven says Miriam comes to LA during her breaks, or if she has a weekend off. She’s planning to go out to LA for the whole summer, and hopefully pay for the rest of her next semester.
‘I talk to her hourly and she’s kind of overwhelmed by the whole thing, she’s trying to figure out what her options are. To give up porn, that’s not an option, unless a rich benefactor wants to give her $200,000 to continue her education,’ Steven said.
‘I stay out of the personal side with her parents. I imagine they are furious that they’ve been dragged into all this. But she’s kind of defiant, she feels they’ve brought it on themselves.
‘She’s level headed, 100 per cent, probably one of most intelligent, levelheaded 18-year-olds I’ve ever met. She’s never regretted doing porn.
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Ties that bind: 'Nothing is irreparable when it comes to their love for each other,' says family member Minor |
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No regrets: Her agent insisted to MailOnline that she is 'level-headed, intelligent' and 'never regretted doing porn'. For now, at least |
'Financially she’ll keep on doing what she’s doing. Emotionally, she would love to have her parents support and only time will tell if her parents are going to come around.’
Mrs Minor, who spoke to son-in-law Paul just as the news broke and said he was ‘devastated’, added: ‘I think she’s taken this woman empowerment a bit too seriously. She’s left home for the first time, and at the age of 18, she’s seeing how much she can earn.
‘She saw that she could earn $1,200 a session, whatever that means, that must be a lot of money to an 18-year-old, the lure of that sort of cash must be very strong at that age.
‘But she knows that the family still love her, and she’ll always have that.’
Her brother Paul and his wife Anna Minor-Weeks are ‘extremely religious’, according to Anna’s mother, and both do good in their communities.
Anna teaches autistic children and Paul volunteers with various church ministries. Miriam herself has helped at the local Catholic Charities Organization and was even featured in their newsletter last August for helping underprivileged kids in the area.
It’s not the sort of upbringing that usually has an ending where the daughter becomes a porn actress, but it’s obvious that Miriam has felt caged in by her strict religious upbringing.
She told her student newspaper in an interview last week: ‘My entire life, I have, along with millions of other girls, been told that sex is a degrading and shameful act. When I was five-years-old and beginning to discover the wonders of my body, my mother, completely horrified, told me that if I masturbated, my vagina would fall off.
‘The most striking view I was indoctrinated with was that sex is something women “have,” but that they shouldn’t “give it away” too soon -– as though there’s only so much sex in any one woman, and sex is something she does for a man that necessarily requires losing something of herself, and so she should be really careful who she “gives” it to.’
It’s even more galling for the family that she shows no sign of repentance. But, as most family members have confirmed, ‘the family see it as a phase, something that she’ll grow out of, the ultimate act of rebellion against her upbringing.’
The revelation that has shaken Miriam's family to the core, has also brought her death threats, claims her agent, Stevens. But he says she’s so determined to follow her new career that she’s willing to take all the personal abuse she’s been suffering at Duke.
‘She was getting death threats, so she’s been on break,’ says the agent. ‘Everyone was talking behind her back; it was a nasty environment. Going back to that is probably not the most enjoyable, but she wants an education that much.
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Smackdown: Miriam smooches with a fellow pron star, a prelude of more to come in one of her racy flicks |
‘I don’t think she suffers any guilt at all from her background; she’s totally OK with her sexuality. All of these people turned against her, well too bad, that’s your opinion, that’s what she thinks anyway.
So what happens next? One thing is for certain, Miriam is going to find it difficult to integrate back in the classroom.
On Twitter, she’s been the subject of death threats and ridicule, which is likely to take years before it goes away, if ever.
Even though they’re the most spurned party in this entire heartbreaking episode, there are two people she’s sure to be able to count on – her parents.
Mrs Minor adds: ‘I’m sure the family is going to rally round and love her. She did wrong by the family but they are still going to love her. They’re heartbroken, but it’s not irreparable. Nothing is irreparable when it comes to the Weeks family and their love for each other.’
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