The Friendship That Helped Me Leave the Sex Industry
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2026
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, as a young woman, Harmony Dust Grillo found herself pulled into the commercial sex industry, a world that promised independence but delivered something far more complicated. One friendship, however, changed everything. Here’s Harmony with the story.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.3 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.4 | This is our American stories, and you're about to hear an incredible story of hope and redemption. Here's Madison |
| 0:23.7 | to bring you the story. You might think that it would be crazy that an intelligent, |
| 0:32.1 | beautiful, and driven girl would enter the sex industry. It might make a little more sense if we heard a bit about her |
| 0:38.4 | childhood. I was raised in a pretty violent neighborhood in a really chaotic home. In the |
| 0:46.9 | neighborhood I grew up in, Dominoes wouldn't deliver a pizza after dark, and the police actually |
| 0:53.1 | wouldn't even come to my house after dark. |
| 0:56.3 | My mother and my stepdad had a very tumultuous relationship, so there was a lot of screaming |
| 1:02.2 | and fighting and yelling. I also was sexually abused throughout my life by multiple people, |
| 1:07.8 | both men and women, and raped. I wrote my first suicide note when I was eight years old. |
| 1:14.2 | One of my first attempts was around 12, and I figured it was just a matter of, like, finding |
| 1:21.9 | the right method. |
| 1:23.1 | One of my abusers was my mother's boyfriend, at that time I was 13 and I finally started |
| 1:29.5 | standing up for myself a little bit more and getting a little feisty and hormonal as teenagers |
| 1:33.6 | do and so I actually ran away from home to get away from the situation and my mom called |
| 1:39.8 | me and said okay Harmony you can come home it It'll be fine. He's gone. He left. |
| 1:46.8 | And I came home, and she actually followed him to Canada and left my brother and I with $20 and a book of food stamps. |
| 1:55.7 | And the food stamps and the $20 ran out very quickly and I remember I would buy tortillas and butter |
| 2:02.5 | because it was the cheapest thing that I could get in my neighborhood. |
| 2:05.5 | But once the money was gone, I started stealing from the liquor store to support my brother |
| 2:09.9 | and I. And I remember, you know, every time I did it, I felt really afraid that I was going to |
... |
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