Now, is it KatsuMi or KatsuNi!? The answer is simple: KATSUMI. The explanation, however, is a bit more complicated. And it is tied up with lots of emotional baggage, mainly grief and anger. Needless to say, such a name change demands a thorough investigation. Here's what happened: a newcomer to the adult industry picks the Japanese first name 'Katsumi' as her porn alias – because it sounds both beautiful and mysterious at the same time. And it has different meanings, too, one of them being 'enchanting beauty'. It is hard to imagine that anyone could object to this choice. But that's exactly what happened in France. A young woman called Mary Katsumi went to court because she felt the name violated her personal rights. And, believe it or not, she actually won. The judges didn't even care that Katsumi had already moved to the USA to shoot porn. They ruled that her namesake's rather dubious line of work had a negative effect on Mary Katsumi's private life. Apparently, this had more weight than the fact that 'Katsumi' was a brand name that generated money all over the world. Now it was actually beginning to lose money – because the judges declared that the name was not to be used again in connection with the production of adult entertainment. Clearly, Katsumi wasn't just in it for the money, but losing her name was still a disaster.
Let's turn back the wheel of time to the year 2001: the daughter of a Vietnamese father and a French mother appears in the pages of Penthouse Magazine for the first time. The 21-year-old student is more than happy about the additional income. One year later she decides to give up studying Political Sciences and Contemporary Literature. Instead she wants to become a porn star. COLMAX-VIDEO offers her a lucrative deal. A year later, in 2003, she wins the Brussels Erotic Festival Jury Award. More prizes follow but the best one is yet to come: an exclusive contract with DIGITAL PLAYGROUND – every adult performer's dream!
When the French court forced her to drop the name Katsumi, the sensitive Eurasian girl could have easily decided to end her career right then and there. No name, no brand, no money. But instead she decided to simply change her name from KatsuMi to KatsuNi. Of course this meant that her name didn't have any meaning anymore but at least it was close enough to the original alias and it made the situation look a lot less grim. And let's not forget that in the end the whole incident gave her an amazing amount of publicity too. |
