Naomi Swartzentruber ended her 20-year dancing career after becoming a mom and published a memoir about her escape into the modern world
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2):format(webp)/Naomi-Swartzentruber-tout-120224-e1346434971b4a5bb9ea5e99e62a53d3.jpg)
- Naomi Swartzentruber escaped her Amish community at age 17 after rebelling against the lifestyle’s restrictive values throughout her teen years.
- Two years later, she started dancing in strip clubs to pay her bills. On stage, she found an unexpected sense of empowerment that fueled her 20-year career as a stripper.
- Swartzentruber, now 44, stopped stripping when she welcomed a child in 2021. She published a memoir in 2023 and now posts social media content to share her life story.
It was March of 1999, and Naomi Swartzentruber was on her own for the first time. She had no one to call — no parents, no siblings nor the ex-boyfriend who coaxed her out to Minnesota in the first place. They met just after Swartzentruber left home in Michigan. She followed him westward, and he left her several states away from the family and community that once claimed her as a member.
There’s nothing particularly novel about a 19-year-old woman on her own for the first time, and like anyone in that situation, she was plagued by anxiety. She worried about how she’d manage to pay her bills on the slim salary she made working at a factory.
That November, taken along by a friend, she found herself at a strip club, first in the back of the venue, then suddenly on the stage. Wearing lingerie and dancing for a crowd felt strange that first time, Swartzentruber tells PEOPLE exclusively. “It was really hard. I just fell into it,” she recalls.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2):format(webp)/Naomi-Swartzentruber-1-120224-cbdbf96582324f58881cca9f810a0855.jpg)
Her entry into strip shows may have initially felt like a fall, but then Swartzentruber dove in head first. That first, “really scary” performance led to an unexpected 20-year career of dancing on stage.
Her story takes remarkable shape only as it casts a shadow over her past.
Swartzentruber was a teenager when she started to rebel against the traditionalist Amish lifestyle upheld by her parents, seven brothers, four sisters and the rest of their community. She and her cousins would sneak out at night and meet up with some non-Amish boys who lived nearby.
Swartzentruber, now age 44, reflects on her rule-breaking behavior decades later from her home in Arizona, where she lives with her partner, Nick, and their 3-year-old child.
“We would go drive around and smoke cigarettes and drink beer and have sex,” she says. “It’s crazy. I don’t know, if my daughter did that, I would probably have a heart attack.”
One unlucky night clarified her future. Swartzentruber was caught sneaking out for another illicit escapade, and at just 17 years old, she realized she would never know true independence in the place she called home for so long.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(399x0:401x2):format(webp)/Naomi-Swartzentruber-4-120224-fa472ec9bc1640dcb095215d67a5b93e.jpg)
“When I got caught, it was like the final straw,” she explains. “I knew for sure that I wanted to keep having fun the rest of my life, but I didn’t want to sneak [out] to have fun.”
She was just a teenager, but her path was clear: “I decided then that it was best for me to leave,” she tells PEOPLE. “I wanted freedom and technology, and there was this fire inside of me that felt like there was more to my journey than being Amish.”
About two years later, she lit a match to that instinct and sparked something new on the stage, stripping for an audience that showered her in tips. At first, she was reluctant; she didn’t know she was going to that Minnesota strip club when someone offered to take her out on a Friday night. She followed under the pretenses of learning there are “lots of ways to make money,” as Swartzentruber remembers her friend saying.
“She didn’t tell me where we were going, and before I knew it, I was on stage,” the ex-luddite recalls. Some of the women working at the club took Swartzentruber backstage, stripped off her clothes and picked out revealing attire for her debut.
“They all agreed on this hot pink bikini. They wrestled it on me, and then they pushed me through the door off the stage,” she explains. “And I don’t know, it was like no looking back after that.”
The profit Swartzentruber gathered after a single, amateur dance astonished her: $55 in tips. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought that was so much money,” she says 25 years later.
Her sneaky friend had already introduced Swartzentruber to the manager when they entered the strip club that night. He said he knew she was looking for work, but before getting on stage, the 19-year-old ex-Amish adamantly rejected his intended job offer. “Absolutely not. I could never do that,” she remembers telling him.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(534x0:536x2):format(webp)/Naomi-Swartzentruber-3-120224-3ddd171560f54147af4610d737ebb183.jpg)
But that was before she collected her tips. And moreover, that was before she realized all that dancing could offer her — namely a long-sought feeling of freedom.
“When I stepped on that stage, something would come alive inside of me, like this empowerment and this fire that I didn’t know that I had, and I loved it,” she says. “I went and told the manager, ‘I think I could work here after all.’ He was like, ‘Okay. You can start tomorrow.’ And I was a dancer for 20 years.”
Even during the peak of her teen rebellion, Swartzentruber still shrouded herself in head coverings and long-sleeved, full-skirted garb when daylight shone and communal eyes were on her. For the first 17 years of her life, even the essence of stripping — dancing freely, revealing some skin, listening to modern music — was well past the periphery of Swartzentruber’s reality.
“We weren’t allowed to show our bodies or embrace our sexuality or anything like that,” she tells PEOPLE of the strict Amish values that ruled her life until the night she fled.
After she was caught sneaking out to see the non-Amish boys, it was no longer a question of if she’d leave; when she planned to escape was yet to be determined. In fact, timing was never something she formally planned out. She took her first step on an impulse, as if “a light bulb went off in my head,” she describes.
It was broad daylight, and Swartzentruber was spending her morning picking strawberries when she met a familiar face. A man who delivered logs to her father’s farm arrived to buy some of the fruits she foraged, and she decided that he could be her lifeline.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(421x0:423x2):format(webp)/Naomi-Swartzentruber-5-120224-7ad4a9aa14c9471fbcb795ef1052143b.jpg)
“I just blurted it out. I was like, ‘I want to run away and live with you.’ He was like, ‘You can’t do that. You’re crazy. Your parents will hate me,'” she remembers of their conversation. She persisted, telling him, “I don’t care if they hate you. They probably will. And yes, I might be crazy, but I really want to run away.”
A week later the man returned and relented. He told Swartzentruber that he would aid her escape, and she said she’d find a way to call him when she was ready to go. In Swartzentruber’s “erotic memoir” titled The Amazing Adventures of an Amish Stripper, she said that there were some days when she felt conflicted about her decision to flee the community, but if she was going to leave, she only had so much time to do so.
“I knew I needed to leave before I was eighteen and they forced me to get baptized. Once baptized, I’d be shunned for life if I did something the elders didn’t approve of,” she wrote in her book.
Knowing her desires would always make her an Amish outcast, Swartzentruber ultimately resolved to go. After stealing her birth certificate from her father’s desk, she took an opportunity to access a phone while delivering fresh strawberries to a non-Amish household. There, she rang the man who promised to help.
“I didn’t even know about answering machines, but I was talking on [an] answering machine,” she tells PEOPLE. In her voicemail, she detailed the location of her home and specified that he pick her up at midnight. The 17-year-old hoped he’d receive her message and help her leave in the late, dark evening after her entire family fell asleep.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(421x0:423x2):format(webp)/Naomi-Swartzentruber-8-120224-4756adb7add1478f944198d36bfe3921.jpg)
But at 9 p.m., the man and his wife pulled their truck into the driveway of Swartzentruber’s family farm. “My whole family went outside,” she tells PEOPLE. “I was freaking out. I was like, ‘Why are they coming? I wasn’t leaving until midnight.’
In her book, she describes how her father asked why they were visiting at such an advanced hour. Much to Swartzentruber’s relief, they claimed they were there to buy strawberries. And while the family crowded around the driver’s side to talk to the man, the teen took the opportunity to slip around and chat with the passenger, his wife, whom Swartzentruber had never met before.
“I whispered to her, ‘Please pick me up at the crossroads at midnight,’ and I was like, ‘Don’t tell anyone,'” she tells PEOPLE. The woman agreed and reassured Swartzentruber not to worry.
Because of the couple’s surprisingly early visit, the Amish family didn’t go to bed until around 11 p.m., at which point Swartzentruber became anxious. She ascended to the attic to get some of her belongings and woke up her older sister. She asked if Swartzentruber was running away.
“I lied,” she admits. Her suspicious sister made the escape all the more difficult, insisting that she wouldn’t go to sleep because their family would be “too upset” if Swartzentruber did indeed leave for a new life.
“Finally at 2:30 [a.m.], she gave up and went to her bed, and I realized she was sleeping,” she remembers. “I pushed a screen in my window to the side, and I climbed onto the roof and jumped 12 feet to the ground and ran into the darkness.”
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(511x0:513x2):format(webp)/Naomi-Swartzentruber-2-120224-068fd2d2bf484871ac3283f6e2ffb6ca.jpg)
The man and his wife had already left, so Swartzentruber found shelter in an old shed up the road trying to decide what to do next. In her memoir, she described how she deliberated for three hours. She doubted her decision to leave but knew if she went back, she would probably stay among the Amish forever.
At sunrise, she heard her family waking up to do their morning chores. Knowing they’d come looking for her, Swartzentruber dashed through the woods to use her non-Amish neighbor’s phone. She arranged a new pickup spot with the couple. It was nearly half a mile away, and she had to hide from passing Amish buggies as she bolted to their waiting truck.
Once settled into their home, the couple decided Swartzentruber needed to learn the ways of the modern world, though they supported her financially until she was legal. She turned 18 on a Sunday, and Monday was busy. Her second day of adulthood was entirely dedicated to starting her new life. The wife took Swartzentruber to get her driver’s permit, then they put in applications at McDonald’s and Burger King. The latter chain hired her.
Swartzentruber left the Amish in July of 1997, and in October, one of her sisters ended up leaving as well. Because she was never baptized and therefore never shunned, Swartzentruber could go see her family if she wanted, though for a while she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The following January, her ex-Amish sister persuaded her to pay a visit.
“I went there to see them, and it was really hard because they said I couldn’t come in unless I was there to stay or wearing my Amish dress,” the author tells PEOPLE. She rejected her family’s restrictions and told them, “Fine, I’ll just leave then because I’m not doing either of those things. It’s not me anymore.”
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(495x0:497x2):format(webp)/Naomi-Swartzentruber-11-120224-2ee1b1452a3944ca885367e7952858b1.jpg)
But her parents succumbed and allowed her to come in for a brief stay. Those few hours were “very uncomfortable,” says Swartzentruber, but her younger siblings were delighted to see her. Their joy proved enough to incentivize future visits.
“Over time we repaired the relationship, and now I have a great relationship with my family,” she shares. Her parents don’t accept her partner, Nick, but she’s been amazed to see how the rest of her Amish family show their support and welcome her significant other.
“I have a sister and three brothers in Michigan, and they are so awesome. They accept [Nick],” Swartzentruber says. “We eat there, they invite us for dinner … The Amish boys even helped us clean up the trees that we cut down on our new property.”
She’s rarely ever spoken to her family about her career as a stripper, even after she paused the work during the COVID-19 pandemic and eventually left the industry altogether when she got pregnant. Swartzentruber says she told some of her brothers and sisters about it when she first started dancing, but it wasn’t received well.
“They would always pick on me and make fun of me. So I just started lying to them after that. I would tell them that I worked at a restaurant, that I was a waitress,” she explains.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2):format(webp)/Naomi-Swartzentruber-10-120224-61f66c9de0394e3abdcf40dc1d3efc6c.jpg)
From then on, she kept it to herself, despite a frequent urge to speak about her work. “I felt like I wanted to talk to them about it, but I felt like they wouldn’t understand and that they would just judge me so hard,” she says. “I know, looking back, I took the easy way out by lying to them.”
Swartzentruber admits that she too judged herself at first. Yes, she was proud of the money she was earning and happy to be dancing, but the harsh tenets of her upbringing tinged her confidence.
“Even though in my heart I enjoyed it, at the same time I always felt guilty for a long time because of the way I grew up,” she tells PEOPLE. “I thought that I was going to go to hell because I was sinning, because I was showing my body and performing on stage.”
As she continued to perform, the spirit of liberation — from her financial struggles, from her lingering Amish restrictions, from her once-learned modesty — overpowered her self-criticism.
“I loved doing cool tricks. It took a lot of strength and coordination, and I was very athletic, and it was like finally I got to use that part of my body that I [had not before],” she tells PEOPLE, reflecting on her time as a stripper. “Going on stage made me feel empowered, and it made me feel free.”
There are pieces of her past that Swartzentruber misses now that she’s lived 27 years in the modern world. She appreciates the Amish’s simple, family-oriented lives. Having found ways to stay bonded with her beloved siblings, Swartzentruber is now focusing her efforts on the former quality: simplicity.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(507x0:509x2):format(webp)/Naomi-Swartzentruber-6-120224-09a50cc208204e7984a6a3370a2011a3.jpg)
“They live off the land and make all their things, and it’s just a healthier lifestyle,” she explains. Swartzentruber spent this past summer in Michigan with her family, and she harkened back to the basics of home.
“I feel like going back closer to my roots and living off the land and stuff. I’m finding a balance of having freedom and simplicity in my life,” she reflects. “I’ve definitely found the freedom that I went searching for when I left, but it took me a really long time and a lot of trial and error.”
She also visited her parents during those warmer months in the Midwest. They told her they know about her book “but they have no desire to find it or read it,” Swartzentruber says. Some of her Amish siblings have read parts of the memoir, but the topic of dancing remains largely undiscussed.
With so many years between her Amish past and her current place in the world, her family’s reluctance hasn’t deterred Swartzentruber from sharing all that she’s been through. In addition to her published memoir, she also shares content on social media. Between her Instagram and TikTok platforms, Swartzentruber has over 400,000 followers who tune in to hear about the experiences that shaped who she is today.
View this post on Instagram
“I wanted to share my story to hopefully inspire others,” she says. “I am enjoying life now, but it took me a really long time to get to where I am … I’ve gone through so many challenging times and I overcame them. I know there are other people that are going through hard times. There have to be. Maybe if they hear some of my story, maybe it inspires them or gives them hope to not give up.”
Releasing her memoir in 2023 emboldened Swartzentruber with a new sense of power and strength to speak about her journey. Prior to the publication, Swartzentruber still found herself struggling to discuss her career path, even after two decades of stripping and a few years since stepping off the stage. Her trepidation wasn’t grounded in fear of religious punishment, but it stifled her voice all the same.
“I was still not comfortable talking to people about it. Even non-Amish people, I often felt like they were just going to judge me,” she says. “Ever since I published my book, I feel so relieved because I know my story is out there, and I feel like it’s really helped me let go and to be open and just to be okay with it.”
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(561x0:563x2):format(webp)/Naomi-Swartzentruber-9-120224-9788c4d3e2944e29ae3450254febcd34.jpg)
She tells PEOPLE that she’s come to terms with the fact that there will always be readers and social media viewers who are quick to criticize. She expects it — that’s just what happens after “huge change,” she observes.
“Being Amish and then being a stripper is such a contrast, and I’ve just had to learn people are going to be negative, and that’s okay. I’m not trying to please people or to make everyone happy,” says Swartzentruber.
“I don’t regret it because all the experiences that I’ve had in my life have made me the person I am today,” she adds. “I do not regret it.”
