Ruby Danielle Collins was born five days before Christmas in 1987 to a very young and very scared teenager. Barbara was just 15 years old when she gave birth to her first daughter; an unwanted pregnancy to say the least. She was still in high school and her parents refused to let their daughter give up her child. It was their form of punishment. She did the crime, so she’d do the time. That crime was giving it up to some guy in the area for Spring break; a guy she would never see or hear from again. So she was on her own, with only the help of her parents, and from that point on it was as if she resented her daughter; she wanted nothing to do with her.

The first few months of Ruby’s life she was taken care of by her grandparents, who took over when they realized their daughter wasn’t doing her job. She’d let Ruby cry for hours at a time while she talked on the phone or did her school work. It was blamed on post-partum depression by her doctor, but Ruby’s grandmother knew it was her daughter’s usual selfishness. By the time her mother had a change of heart; Ruby had already developed a strong bond with her grandmother and grandfather. She was close to two years old and used to having her grandmother take care of her and play with her. Occasionally her mother would play with her, but there was no mother-daughter bond like there should have been.

As Ruby began to get older, she continued to look to her grandmother for the care her mother was supposed to be giving her, but her mother was too busy taking college classes or she was too busy going out with her friends to be bothered with a five year old. At a very young age, Ruby knew she couldn’t count on her mother for much of anything and that had a hand in shaping her independent nature. Her grandmother knew that she wasn’t going to be around forever and she wanted to be sure that Ruby knew how to fend for herself and not rely heavily on someone else no matter what kind of situation she was in.

By junior high, Ruby was her own person. She lived with her mother in a nice home and had all the things she could ever want. It was her mother’s way of trying to make up for not being the mother she should have been when Ruby was a baby. Ruby always wanted that close relationship with her mother, so she forgave her and started getting to know her. Despite her efforts to become closer to the woman who gave birth to her, the two bumped heads more often than not. It was as if Barbara was trying too hard to be a mother-figure and as a result of that, she became almost smothering. The independent nature that Ruby had didn’t like it. She wanted to do for herself and she wanted to think for herself, as well.

At the age of fourteen, Ruby’s grandmother was killed in a car accident and it devastated her. It was as if she lost her mother and not her grandmother since she was the one who took care of her and raised her. Everything that she knew and everything she had become up until that point in life had been because of her grandmother. Though her death was an accident, it made Ruby very angry and the young girl began to act out. She had acted mature for her age for a long time, but she began using it to her advantage—or disadvantage depending on how one would look at it. Ruby began experimenting with drugs, alcohol, and sexual activity. Her grades began to drop and it didn’t matter to her then. Her mother, more focused on her own work, seemed to be oblivious to her daughter’s actions or she just didn’t care one way or another. A year or so later, Ruby began to slow down and regain her focus, but not without maintaining her wild persona.

High school was an eye-opening experience for Ruby after she became close friends with her French teacher. Their relationship crossed that line between a regular teacher and student relationship to a friendship. He was a young teacher at only twenty-three and she was a very well-developed and mature fifteen year old. Her teacher knew how she was and he also knew how men were, so he warned her. He told her to be careful or she’d be following in her mother’s footsteps. Having told him about her past, it angered her to some degree, and a few days later she lost her virginity to one of her close guy friends who had always shown an interest. It meant nothing to her, but she did it out of anger as a way to prove to everyone that she did what she wanted, when she wanted.

Living with her mother, Ruby witnessed all of her attempts at meeting the right person and finally get Ruby that father-figure she never had. It didn’t matter to her one way or another because she had done well without having a father in her life, but her mother was dead set on having the illusion of a “perfect family”. Ruby never really gave her mother’s boyfriends the time of day because she never expected any of them to stick around for more than a few weeks. One, however, did stick around and after four months of dating he proposed and three months after that she had a new step-father. He was a nice guy, but there was something off about the way he looked at Ruby…

Only five months into being married to her mother, her step father began to heavily flirt with Ruby. At seventeen years old, Ruby liked the attention and thought flirting back was harmless; that they were just playing around. More often than not she would even end one of her flirty statements with a little laugh. She had no intention of ever crossing the line with her mother’s new husband; of it getting at all physical. With her mother traveling for work, she invited over a few girlfriends for a slumber party one night. There was food, horror movies, and the usual sneaking alcohol from the bar they had in the basement of their home.

Ruby drank a little more than she had intended and when most of her friends passed out, she was left awake and nursing a bottle of green apple vodka. Stumbling up the stairs from the basement had proven to be a bad move on her part when she stumbled right into her step-father’s path. Right away the man began touching her in a way that a step-father wasn’t supposed to touch his step-daughter and when Ruby pushed him off, he threatened to tell her mother the things her and her friends had gotten into. She should have let him, but instead she kept quiet and let him take advantage of the situation and of her.

Ruby felt sick and ashamed and it weighed on her conscious for months. The night before her eighteenth birthday, she couldn’t take it anymore and she told her mother what happened. What happened next took her by complete surprise; her mother smacked her across the face and told her to get out. She couldn’t believe that her own mother didn’t believe that she had been taken advantage of. Ruby didn’t even try to explain or fight, what was the point if her mother wouldn’t believe her anyway? So she went to her bedroom, packed up all of her clothes, and left in the car that her grandfather had given her for her sixteenth birthday.

From that point on, Ruby began doing what she needed to do in order to survive on her own. She started working on a cam site to make extra money and that lead into her staring in her first adult film. At the age of nineteen she moved out to California to be closer to the action, so to speak, and her career as an adult film actress took off. By the age of twenty she won the Best New Starlet award at the AVN Awards and it only went up from there. She moved to New York City when she was twenty one and continued to fly between there and Los Angeles, occasionally Miami. By the age of twenty-five she was self-made and needed no help from anyone. A year later she decided to retire from the business when she was offered a job on Playboy Radio.

Ruby is still involved in the adult film industry as she still makes appearances at public events and even in some films. She currently lives in Brooklyn and hosts Vivid Radio on XM five to six nights a week.