Stacey Donovan is an American former pornographic actress born Kelley Howell in Encino, California in 1964. Howell started performing in adult films when she was eighteen. Howell did not set out professionally to be an adult film star. "I don't enjoy [working in pornography]", Howell once told The Baltimore Sun during October 1985 in an article reprinted in the San Diego Union-Tribune. She noted that she earned about $1,000 a day. "But I don't like to take my clothes off in front of everyone." She entered pornography as she badly needed money, and continued doing it strictly as the money was too good to give up. In 1984, she was a centerfold in Hustler. While working in porn, she also was on the cover of Seventeen and starred in commercials for Swatch.
In April 1987, Howell testified in the San Fernando Municipal Court, in a publicized case of two men charged with the felony pandering of the production of sex videotape. Donovan and five other performers, among them Steve Drake and Tracey Adams, testified that they were paid to go to a Sand Canyon home on June 18, 1986, and perform sex acts before cameras. She testified that she was acting as an informant for federal and county law-enforcement agencies in other pandering cases involving film producers. She was subsequently blacklisted from the industry after turning state's evidence.