Rayveness

About Rayveness

Born Gina-Raye Carter, Rayveness grew up in the Quaker faith and married a year before she left high school. Before her career in adult films, she worked in various fast-food restaurants. She started working at age 15 doing various jobs such as selling Avon, babysitting before moving on to fast food. She entered pornography at age 18, after she and her husband watched an episode about amateur porn films on the Sally Jessy Raphaël show, afterwhich they made one of themselves and submitted it.

She started in the porn industry at age 18 and initially performed only with her then-husband (who went by the pseudonym of Red Bone) and other female stars. Her stage name is of Indian origin and means "of the spirit". In 1997, she divorced Red Bone and started working with other male performers. By 2000, she had remarried, this time to fellow porn star Tod Alexander, but they divorced in 2003.

In 2000, she took a break from the adult film business to try the mainstream film industry. She dyed her hair red and wore brown contacts to minimize the chance of someone recognizing her. She appeared in a speaking role on NYPD Blue and was in Path to War as LBJ’s eldest daughter. She returned to the porn industry in 2003 after John Frankenheimer's death, as most of her connections had gone.

In 2004, she filed a petition with Congressman Brad Sherman requesting that the age requirement for adult performers be raised from 18 to 21, saying that "People right out of high school in this country don't seem to have the foresight to make such life-altering decisions." In 2006 she was nominated at the XRCO awards for "MILF of the year".

RayVeness took a second break from the adult industry — from June ’06 to Aug. ’07 — to have a child via in vitro fertilization.

In July 2009 she became the first contract star for the all-girl studio Girlfriends Films, although the contract allowed her to continue boy-girl work elsewhere. She has since left Girlfriends Films.

In February 2011, she announced via twitter that she had retired from the adult industry.

She announced her comeback on twitter in September 2021, before retiring again in 2023.

Rayveness posed for 101 covers, 24 photosets and 77 videos over the course of her long and varied career.