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A lot has been made of Penny Flame’s impending appearance on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. A lot of people, myself included, wondered whether she’d hit rock bottom or was trying to improve her mainstream name-recognition. Her new blog is being promoted on industry boards (not by her), and after reading it, the answer might be “both.”

Penny’s real name is Jennie Ketcham, and now that she’s left porn, it makes sense to refer to her as Jennie going forward. In fact, she’s actively trying to leave the Penny Flame persona behind her because it’s the only way to move forward with a new life:

…I apologize for speaking about Penny as though she is a different girl than me, but fundamentally, she is. I don’t want to keep separating my actions from hers, but at this point I feel I must in order to separate myself from the little monster created. Because she is a monster, one that has gone tearing through this town crushing everything in her path.

After reading Jennie’s blog, I was really filled with hope for her and her future. Unlike some other stars who leave the business and proceed to trash it (Sierra Sinn, for example), Jennie doesn’t blame porn or anyone in it for her circumstances. She’s an alcoholic and a sex addict and she’s taking it a day at a time. I hope she’s able to maintain her sobriety and I’ll be looking forward to whatever she does next.

Penny Flame is, without a doubt, one of the freest spirits in porn right now. She’s built a career and a following by inhabiting the persona of a crazy party girl who likes to fuck random guys (see: Shane’s World) and it seems to have worked out pretty well for her.

It was announced a couple of weeks ago that Penny would be one of the cast members on the upcoming season of the VH1 reality show, Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. The two prior seasons have featured mostly C and D list “celebrities” attempting to deal with their substance abuse issues and possibly trying to breathe a little life into their careers. The season that began filming this month focuses on a much more titillating subject: sex addiction.

Sex addiction is a relatively controversial topic and I’m not surprised that VH1 wants to capitalize on it. This is the same channel that’s cast Ron Jeremy, Mary Carey and various assorted lesser stars on a variety of its reality shows and knows what a draw they are. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing for them and the industry as a whole is up for debate, but tough times call for tough decisions.

Penny has blogged about what the recession has done to the porn business:

The funny thing about the industry, right now, (and we all saw this coming for quite sometime) is that NOBODY IS WORKING. I mean fucking nobody. I was still getting little gigs here and there, but certainly not the 10-15 scenes a month I was used to. And the girls that were doing 15-30 scenes a month aren’t doing a goddamn thing, a ton have resorted to hooking to pay the bills, and seeing as how I can barely commit to something to wear for the day, committing to this kind of “hooker” lifestyle is just not something I can muster my whoriness up to do.

She needed to pay the bills and wanted a post-pornstar career path, so she took a desk job at Metro that she sounded pretty happy with back in February. That’s partially why I was surprised to hear that she’d been cast in this show. My guess is that either not getting to fuck on camera every 2-3 days got to her and she truly has a problem or she’s bored sitting behind a desk and figures that starring in a show on VH1 will add enough notoriety to get her more jobs. The second one seems more likely, but who am I to say? Either way, I hope it works out the way she wants it to.