Cruz kills anti-Rubio ad over porn connection

It was a clever set-up for a negative ad from Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential campaign - one that took aim at one of his rivals, Sen. Marco Rubio: Seven people sitting in a circle, group-therapy style, talking about their past ballot box regrets.

"Has anyone else here struggled with being lied to?" the group's leader asks.

"Well, I voted for a guy who was a tea party hero on the campaign trail," a man in the circle replies. "Then he went to D.C. and played patty-cake with Chuck Schumer and cut a deal on amnesty."

"Maybe you should vote for more than just a pretty face next time," a woman advises.

Cruz puts in an appearance at the end, offering the usual disclaimer: "I'm Ted Cruz, and I approved this message."

But Cruz soon decided that he definitely did not approve this message, and the ad was pulled - because Amy Lindsay, the actress warning about voting for a "pretty face," wasn't exactly what she seemed to some viewers. In fact, she is perhaps best known for her roles in softcore pornography films.

In a telephone interview with the Washington Post, Lindsay said she understood. "I didn't want to hurt the Ted Cruz campaign," she said. "Everyone is trying to tear down Ted Cruz."

On Twitter, she appeared more frustrated, declaring that she was "Extremely disappointed" the ad was pulled.

The Cruz campaign, however, was not looking back.

"The actress responded to an open casting call," Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier told the New York Times. "She passed her audition and got the job. Unfortunately, she was not vetted by the casting company. Had the campaign known of her full filmography, we obviously would not have let her appear in the ad."

Lindsay, it should be noted, doesn't just appear in soft-core projects. She appeared in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, for example, and will be traveling the globe this year for the 50th anniversary of Star Trek.

"I'm just an actress in Los Angeles doing what I'm doing," she said. "Going up against 400 actresses to do a job." She added: "You guys have all painted me as this big porn star, which I am not." She stressed that she has never had sex on camera, and said she hasn't done softcore in seven years.

The GOP and porn are not strangers. The industry has a libertarian streak.

"I think that my work and being in the porn industry definitely hits on so many libertarian themes like free speech, and censorship, and, you know, choice and autonomy over our bodies," Miriam Weeks, a Duke University student outed as a porn star in 2014, said last year.

And Cruz, it turns out, is no stranger to pornography. He had to watch some while clerking for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist as the bench contemplated a law regulating porn online. "A slew of hard-core, explicit images showed up onscreen," he wrote in a memoir.

And Lindsay, it turns out, is no stranger to Cruz - she said she is a Cruz supporter, though some might find her politics unusual. She is pro-gay marriage, she said. She is pro-gun. She is pro-life. And late Thursday, she was laughing about the ad imbroglio, drinking wine with her father, an open-carry advocate.