She was born Mollena Lee Williams on 20 June 1969 at New York Hospital in Manhattan. The later name is Mollena Lee Williams-Haas. She has also been known as Mollena Williams. Her parents, Marion Williams and James Williams, met in 1968 through Project TACT, one of the earliest dating services in the United States. In 1973 her father took her to the Broadway musical Hair, over her mother’s objection. After the show she told them she wanted to act. Within three years she had a professional agent. In 1978 she sang backup to Lena Horne on the reprise of “Believe In Yourself” on the soundtrack of The Wiz. In 1992 she moved to Los Angeles and worked in independent film. She appeared in Skin and Bone, and she co-starred in the cult film America’s Deadliest Home Video, often cited among the early found-footage movies, earlier than Man Bites Dog and The Blair Witch Project. Her performance in it has been praised. She developed the script with Jack Perez.
In Los Angeles she also went further into BDSM. She subscribed to the Society of Janus newsletter and tried kink through the online chat forums that were new then. From 1996 she was part of leather subculture and BDSM. Titles followed: Ms. San Francisco Leather in 2009, then International Ms. Leather in 2010. Those titles put her on stages and panels as a public educator, after years of playing in private.
The writing and the film work take erotic material that is hard to handle and treat it as something adults can negotiate, with some structure. In 2010 she wrote “BDSM and Race Play” for Rachel Kramer Bussel’s anthology Best Sex Writing 2010. The next year she published The Toybag Guide to Playing With Taboo, a short practical book for people who want a frame around edged erotic content. In 2012 the short film IMPACT, in which she takes part in BDSM scenes, was released. That same year Black Rose gave her the Jack McGeorge Excellence in Education Award. For the essays “Tables Briefly Turned” and “On Collars And Closure and Owning Myself,” she won the National Leather Association International’s Cynthia Slater Non-Fiction Article Award in 2012 and again in 2013. In 2013 she and Lee Harrington shared the NLA International Geoff Mains nonfiction book award for Playing Well With Others: Your Field Guide to Discovering, Exploring and Navigating the Kink, Leather and BDSM Communities, which they wrote together. The book is about etiquette, how to read an event, and how to talk about risk. It is not a fantasy text. Newcomers still use it as a standard way in.
On camera and at home, the same subjects stayed public. In 2014 she was a guest on season 1, episode 6 of the Sunny Megatron show on Showtime, talking about and demonstrating race play: the fetish of making racial power dynamics erotic, under consent that has actually been negotiated. In 2016 The New York Times published a widely read article about her BDSM relationship with her husband, the composer Georg Friedrich Haas. In that dynamic, Haas is the dominant. She has also been inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Society of Janus, which marks her as an educator and as a community elder.
For adult readers trying to map leather leadership and edge education, Williams-Haas is an unusual combination: an early acting career, an international title, practical books on taboo and on how to move through community, and a willingness to talk about race, collars, and power exchange without pretending any of that is simple. The emphasis is informed risk, aftercare, and negotiation. Some of this material needs more of that, not less. Nothing here is a set of steps.
