Behind the Scenes of Deep Throat with Linda Lovelace

Linda Marchiano, known as Linda Lovelace, is the star of perhaps the most famous porn film of all time, Deep Throat (1972). She gave this testimony to the Minneapolis Government Operations Committee on December 12, 1983. It is published in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.60-68).

I literally became a prisoner. I was not allowed out of [husband Charles Traynor’s] sight, not even to use the bathroom. Why, you may ask? Because there was a window in the bathroom. When speaking to either of my friends or parents, he was on the extension with a .45 automatic 8 shot pointed at me. I was beaten physically and suffered mental abuse each and every day thereafter…

I have seen the kind of people involved in pornography and how they will use anyone to get what they want…

I tried to tell my story several times. Once to a reporter, Vernon Scott, who works for the UPI. He said he couldn’t print it. Again on the Regis Philbin Show, and when I started to explain what happened to me, that I was beaten and forced into it, he laughed…

I also called the Beverly Hills Police Department on my final escape, and I told them that Mr. Traynor was walking around looking for me with an M-16. When they first told me that they couldn’t become involved in domestic affairs, I accepted that, and asked them and told them that he was illegally possessing these weapons, and they simply told me to call back when he was in the room.

During the filming of Deep Throat, actually after the first day, I suffered a brutal beating in my room for smiling on the set. It was a hotel room and the whole crew was in one room. There was at least 20 people partying, music going, laughing, and having a good time. Mr. Traynor started to bounce me off the walls. I figured out of 20 people, there might be one human being that would do something to help me and I was screaming for help, I was being beaten, I was being kicked around and again, bounced off of walls. And all of a sudden the room next door became very quiet. Nobody, not one person came to help me.

The greatest complaint the next day is the fact that there was bruises on my body. So many people say that, in Deep Throat, I have a smile on my face, and I look as though I am really enjoying myself. No one ever asked me how those bruises got on my body.

Mr. Traynor stopped searching for me because he acquired Marilyn Chambers, who I believe is also being held against her will. A reporter from a Philadelphia newspaper did an interview. His name is Larry Fields. During the course of the interview, Ms. Chambers asked for permission to go to the bathroom and he refused it. Mr. Fields objected and said, why don’t you let the poor girl go to the bathroom, she is about to go on stage? And he came back with, “I don’t tell you how to write your newspaper, don’t tell me how to treat my broads…”

It is time for something to be done about the civil rights of the victims and not criminals…

Prior to [a bestiality] film being made, about a week, Mr. Traynor suggested the thought that I do films with a D-O-G, and I told him that I wouldn’t do it. I suffered a brutal beating. He claims he suffered embarrassment because I wouldn’t do it.

We then went to another porno studio, one of the sleaziest ones I have ever seen, and then this guy walked in with his animal, and I again started crying. I started crying. I said, I am not going to do this, and they were all very persistent, the two men involved in making this pornographic film and Mr. Traynor himself. And I started to leave and go outside of the room where they make these films, and when I turned around there was all of a sudden a gun displayed on the desk and having seen the coarseness and the callousness of the people involved in pornography, I knew that I would have been shot and killed. Needless to say, the film was shot and still is one of the hardest ones for me to deal with today…

Catharine MacKinnon: How do you feel about the existence of the film Deep Throat and its continually being shown?

I feel very hurt and very disappointed in my society and my country for allowing the fact that I was raped, I was beaten, I was put through two and a half years of what I was put through. And it’s taken me almost ten years to overcome the damage that he caused. And the fact that this film is still being shown and that my three children will one day walk down the street and see their mother being abused, it makes me angry, makes me sad. Virtually every time someone watches that film, they are watching me being raped…

Andrea Dworkin: I will tell you we have a letter here from a New York crisis worker about the increased existence of rape of the throat since the distribution of the movie Deep Throat. And in addition the increased use of cameras in actual rape situations. [Exh. 5]

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See also Linda Lovelace: When people see the movie Deep Throat, “they’re watching me being raped” (explicit language)

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Capital Video sells Deep Throat here, calling it “the funniest sexually explicit romp to come along in motion picture history.”

——————- (added on 2/25/07, explicit language)

“Linda Marchiano (a.k.a. Linda Lovelace) submitted to an 11 hour lie detector test to try to convince publishers that her story of torture was genuine. Her manuscript (Ordeal) was rejected by most major publishers.[24] Marchiano traveled to campuses to speak out about her two and a half year imprisonment by her husband/manager Chuck Traynor. Linda’s speech encouraged women on the campus to protest outside the fraternity-sponsored showing of Deep Throat. She said that in this movie there are visible bruises all over her body that attest to part of her torture. The fraternity brothers’ response, was to shout out during Deep Throat: ‘Fuck her, hurt her, rip her.’ Toward the other females on the screen they screamed comments such as ‘Ugly bitch and whore.’ They chanted, ‘Bruises, Bruises, Bruises!’ continually during the film.[25] It is unlikely to imagine a male political prisoner, who describes his abuse, to be so taunted and publicly humiliated.”

(“Censored Truth” by Ann J. Simonton, Media Watch)