The family of adult star and actress Emily Willis has reached a $3 million legal settlement after Willis was left ‘permanently disabled’ while in rehab for ketamine addiction.
Willis’ mother and legal guardian, Yesenia Cooper, brought a civil lawsuit against Malibu Lighthouse Treatment last year after Willis ended up with ‘irreversible brain damage’ while being treated at the exclusive rehab center Summit Malibu in early 2024.
According to E! News, Willis, now 27, will receive approximately $1.25 million after attorney’s fees and liens while her mom will continue to act as her conservator.
Malibu Lighthouse Treatment has not admitted to any liability or wrongdoing.
Willis was at one point the biggest name in adult entertainment, starring in around 700 X-rated films before her 25th birthday and sweeping the AVN Awards (porn’s equivalent of the Oscars).
The Argentinian immigrant was also on the cusp of a mainstream acting career, after Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh cast her in a sci-fi film. She had retired from porn shortly before ending up in a vegetative coma.
The family of adult star and actress Emily Willis has reached a $3 million legal settlement after Willis was left ‘permanently disabled’ while in rehab for ketamine addiction
The 27-year-old is still unable to move or speak and now lives in a care home in Utah
She checked into Summit Malibu on January 27, 2024, seeking treatment for a serious ketamine addiction.
Willis had been consuming ‘five to six grams daily’ of the drug for an entire year, which led to serious side effects including urinary incontinence and night terrors.
According to court documents cited by the Daily Star, Willis had already been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder and PTSD, and was on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds.
But drug tests conducted upon her admission to the facility revealed that she didn’t have ketamine or other substances in her system, and she continued to test clean over the following days despite her ‘rapidly failing health.’
The lawsuit claims that Willis soon became ‘disheveled, frail, and disoriented’ and was struggling to walk while in the facility.
She was also allegedly ‘barely eating, not showering or getting dressed’ and ‘suffered from aches, tremors, spasms, weakness, appeared to be in pain, and experienced vaginal pain.’
James A. Morris Jr. from Morris Law Firm, who represented Willis and her mother (who is her legal guardian), said in the complaint, ‘Eventually [Emily] grew so dehydrated that a nurse could not measure her blood pressure.
‘By this time her acute medical distress had been recorded and yet they left the decision to go to an urgent care up to a patient who was suffering incredible pain and could not care for her own well-being. There is no excuse for their failure to obtain medical and psychological care.’
Willis was at one point the biggest name in adult entertainment, starring in around 700 X-rated films before her 25th birthday
She previously swept the AVN Awards, which is the adult industry’s answer to the Oscars
She became an adult performer at age 18 after being recruited by a producer she met on Tinder who encouraged her to film scenes with him
According to the lawsuit, Willis was discovered unconscious by a nurse practitioner on February 4, 2024.
Paramedics performed CPR on Willis for 30 to 40 minutes until they restored a heartbeat, but at that point, the lack of oxygen to her brain had left her comatose.
She reportedly regained some consciousness since then and was able to track things with her eyes, but is unable to move or speak and is in a care home in Utah.
Morris stated in the complaint, ‘Had the staff followed standard medical protocols, Emily would have had the opportunity to regain control of her life.
‘No patient should ever be subjected to such a horrendous breakdown in clinical care. Her health was ignored until it was too late, and now her life is forever changed.’
The Daily Mail has contacted the Morris Law Firm and Malibu Lighthouse Treatment for comment.
Willis first joined the adult industry in 2018, shortly after turning 18.
She was encouraged to do sex work by a producer she met on Tinder, who ran the adult website GirlsDoPorn and suggested that they film a scene together.
That producer turned out to be Ruben ‘Dre’ Garcia, who in 2020 was sentenced in federal court to 20 years in prison for conspiring with the owners of GirlsDoPorn ‘to recruit young women to appear in sex videos for adult websites using force, fraud, and coercion’, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of California.
Within a year of joining the industry under Garcia, Willis had been named Penthouse Pet of the Month and her fame was skyrocketing.
In 2021, Willis took home the top honor – Performer of the Year – at the AVN Awards, which is known as the ‘Oscars of porn.’
Willis had retired from porn before her incapacitation and was working as a mainstream actress after appearing in the sc-fi film Divinity with Karrueche Tran and Bella Thorne
She later made the jump into mainstream films by starring in Eddie Alcazar’s sci-fi film Divinity alongside Stephen Dorff and Bella Thorne.
In one of her final interviews, Willis said that she was excited to continue acting and working on her own fashion line.
‘It’s my first big film — and it’s actually brilliant,’ she told XBIZ while promoting Divinity.
‘I’m so happy that I was a part of it. It’s definitely an arthouse film and it could become a cult classic. It’s edgy, and it’s mysterious — somewhere between sci-fi and horror. It really is like a trip.’
In another interview released just two months before she entered rehab, Willis said that she had quit the porn industry and was focused solely on acting.
‘I’m now only doing mainstream acting,’ she gushed. ‘I absolutely love it.’
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