“It was like, here I am, outed as a supposedly sexually impulsive rich girl who’s into kink.”
Cosmopolitan
At 17, Alissa Afonina was a bright, studious college student. But that year, on a drive with her mother and her mom’s then-boyfriend, the car she was riding in sped around a curve and flipped three times; Afonina hit her head, suffering four lesions to the frontal lobe of her brain. The accident changed her life forever.
After the accident in 2009, Afonina battled exhaustion, depression and anxiety. She dropped out of college and struggled to find or keep a job. Her frontal lobe injury also caused her to become more sexually promiscuous — a common side effect of frontal lobe injuries — but in turn, her relationships became purely physical obsessions and she lost her social support system. To cope with her new personality and to make ends meet, Afonina became a professional dominatrix under the pseudonym Sasha Mizaree.
After years of medical testing and analysis, Afonina and her mother went to trial, seeking compensation for their injuries. In late 2014, a judge agreed the driver (her mom’s then-boyfriend) had been going too fast and was thus negligent; heawarded Afonina nearly 1.5 million Canadian dollars. To her, the award was a vindication for people with invisible disabilities everywhere.
But when media outlets started picking up her story, Afonina was horrified: they claimed she was a sex-obsessed woman who only won her case because she was a sex worker, completely devaluing the struggles of brain injury sufferers everywhere. They also outed her; overnight, her real name had become immutably linked to her sex work identity.
Now, in her first major interview since the case, Cosmopolitan.com spoke to Afonina about her life after the crash, her work as a dominatrix, and how she’s learning to deal with media, fame, and disability.
After the accident, when did you begin to realize that something was different?
I felt different right away, really fuzzy; [the doctors] had said I had a concussion at first. They said, “This is normal — you’re going to feel fuzzy, you’re going to feel out of it.” My mom was definitely noticing more anger in me. I felt depression; I felt anxiety, including social anxiety. That was really new to me — I was completely a social butterfly before that, and then, all of a sudden, I just had no social life.
I didn’t know that I actually had a brain injury until I did an MRI about a year after it happened. I found out from the doctors, like, “Hey, your symptoms happen to be not your fault! You’re not lazy, you’re not fucked up, but in fact, these are very consistent with a frontal lobe brain injury.” That was kind of big news at the time.
Were you interested in kink and BDSM before your accident?
No, it wasn’t something I practiced or knew anything about. I was kind of goth, but I wasn’t kinky or sexual before the accident. I didn’t really have sex in high school, and I wasn’t somebody that dated much.
During your trial, it was mentioned that you experienced an increased interest in sex and sexuality after the accident, and the media has made a big deal of that detail. What was your sexuality actually like?
I remember being completely into this guy that I was dating, just completely obsessed with him; this was a new feeling all of a sudden — an addictive kind of need for this guy’s attention and touching him. I began to notice that my whole self-presentation and my personality had become sexualized, to the point where I didn’t feel like there was anything else to me. And if I didn’t have a partner to be obsessed with, I felt empty. Everything felt dull and boring, and the only thing that made me alive was flirting with men. When you’re not experiencing pleasure in things, that’s like dying on the inside.
Whenever I did get into any relationship — and that’s a generous word for the kind of interactions I’ve had with men — I wasn’t able to form any loving relationship. And what I want, at my core, is not casual sex. I want to be loved. …