Interview with Ex-Porn Star Traci Lords: Abused as a Child; High on the Set; Power, Not Arousal; Bad Pay

Larry King interviewed Traci Lords on CNN in 2003. Lords was born in 1968 under the name Nora Louise Kuzma. According to Wikipedia, Lords “achieved notoriety for her underage appearances in pornographic films and Penthouse magazine (she was 16 years old in her first film).”

LORDS: …I started going by Traci Lords in 1984, and that was after I had run away from home. I came from a small town in Steubenville, Ohio, and early on, I had a lot of sexual abuse that had happened to me. I was raped when I was 10 years old, and then my mother’s boyfriend started molesting me from the time I was, like, 10 until I was about 15. So I was…

KING: Were you overdeveloped at 10?

LORDS: I was.

…[I]t was definitely a curse. At least, I saw it like that when I was a little girl because I had all of this sexual energy thrown toward me. I didn’t really know what to do with it. And then, you know, the very traumatic experience of being raped as a child, you know, filled me with shame and a lot of guilt. And ultimately, it was one of the reasons that I ran away from home.

KING: And got rid of the name.

LORDS: Yes, and got rid of the name. I think I was trying to get rid of a part of myself that I saw as being very painful.

…there is such a huge epidemic in this country right now, with teenage prostitution and pornography, that I think that the other side of the story really needs to come across and be told…

KING: What age did it start, your abuse?

LORDS: Ten…

KING: Did you report it?

LORDS: No. I didn’t tell anyone. That was one of the huge things that I talk about in the book. I took on that shame for so long and thought that it really was all my fault…

KING: You don’t think of it as love, though, do you?

LORDS: What’s that, sex?

KING: Yes. When you’re abused…

LORDS: Oh, God, no…

LORDS: There’s nothing loving about it, no. Absolutely not. For me, porn was about my pain in my life as a child. And I was completely acting out. I was a wild kid. I was angry at the world. And I was very rebellious, and I wanted to show everybody…

I was looking for a job [in Hollywood], and I answered this ad for models. And the boyfriend, my mother’s ex-boyfriend, actually took me there and convinced me that, Hey, Marilyn Monroe started out doing nudes. This is the way it works.

…[I]t was never intentional. I never set out to be a porn star… I was stoned. I was on a set. I was supposed to be a girl in a bikini walking around the pool. And you know, I got high enough, a guy hit on me, and it was a filmed thing. And that was the beginning of my career in that world…

KING: Was it hard the first time to pose nude?

LORDS: Yes, it was. It was. And cocaine was, like, courage…

KING: Who tuned you on to that?

LORDS: The same agent that signed me up to do it, and the boyfriend, my mother’s ex-boyfriend.

KING: So in many of the porn films, you’d be stoned while doing them?

LORDS: Oh, yes. As often as possible. I was stoned for about three years, from 15 to 18, almost constantly. I was suicidal. I was wild…

KING: I’m just trying to wonder what it’s like to do that. In other words, do you feel like an actress?

LORDS: No.

KING: What do you feel like?…

LORDS: For me, what do I feel like? I felt disconnected from my body, and I felt high a lot and I felt angry. I felt…

KING: Were you turned on or not turned on?

LORDS: It was never about being turned on. What it was about was about venting. It was about rage. It was about release. It was about, you know, a kid getting off on power, if anything. That’s what it was about…

KING: What was the pay like?

LORDS: Very bad…

I wrote about in this book is there’s this whole myth about how I became, you know, the highest-paid woman in that industry and that, you know, I had plotted to do all of this. But you know, I never made a lot of money in that business…

Oh, you know, the entire–that whole three-year period, you know, I maybe made $40,000 or something…

KING: Were you ever whacked out?

LORDS: I was always whacked out.

KING: I mean, ever where you needed help or you had to go to the hospital?

LORDS: Oh, yes. I was extremely suicidal. I was…

KING: Oh, really?

LORDS: … you know, killing myself slowly. At the end of it all, in 1986, when the FBI actually raided my apartment, I was stoned on cocaine. And I was 90 pounds, and I’m 5-foot-7. So I mean, I was pretty much wasting away. That was really, like, the end of it. Yes, so I was pretty bad off.

KING: Always be able to afford it?

LORDS: No, it was always really hard to afford it. I think that that’s what–one of the reasons that I stayed in porn for as long as I did. You know, it was…

KING: To pay for the cocaine.

LORDS: Yes, it was my drug habit…

I work with Children of the Night…

Dr. Lois Lee (ph)–yes, she founded this organization in Los Angeles, and she helps–she has a hotline that goes all across the United States. And it’s, you know, child prostitutes. And these girls–I’ve been working with her for about 12 years. But these girls, they’re all Traci Lords. You know, they have all been molested in some way or another, and they’ve all been child prostitutes. They’re between 12 and 16 years old, the ones that are in the house at the moment. And the one thing–they’ve all read my book, which is really wild. But the one thing that they have all said to me is, Wow, you’re OK now. That’s their dream…

You had a lot of people in the porn industry coming out and saying, you know, she manipulated us and she ruined our industry and she caused us all this money, but yet weeks after it had been announced that these films were all illegal, they were caught by feds for selling them, advertising them as child pornography…

I really am very grateful now that it ultimately [the FBI] raiding my apartment and whatever they did, however I feel about the way that they handled things, which they didn’t handle them very well in my opinion, I’m still really glad that they did it, because ultimately it did save my life…

KING: Has anybody asked you to do a film, a mature film, not a porno film in which you were asked to be nude or in a sexual scene?

LORDS: Yes, that has come up a lot. Yes.

KING: You don’t do it or will do it?

LORDS: You know, I haven’t done it. The last time–my first film that I did for Roger Corman in ’86 after the scandal, right after “Wise Guy” was the last time that I was, you know, topless in a film. And the reason for that was that I wanted people to, you know, look at me as an actress. As naive as that was at the time, because it just wasn’t happening. That’s really what I wanted.

But in a way, I think that that really worked for me because people did start to take me more seriously. I kept my clothes on…

KING: Do you know why young girls prostitute themselves?

LORDS: I have never met one that hasn’t been sexually abused by an uncle, by a father, by a boyfriend, by somebody. They all have that in common. That’s what I meant earlier when I said there’s so many Traci Lords out there. My story is so completely typical, by the book, profile. It’s scary…

[W]ho are the good guys here? Is it the FBI that waited three years, they were telling me they were gathering evidence, is it the news people who are saying this poor victim and then putting pictures of me half naked, of the victim, revictimizing me? Is it, you know, these pornographers that are saying, well, she lied to us? Well, yes, I lied to them, but then they went and sold the tapes for three times as much money.

See the full transcript of this interview.

See also:

The Science Behind Pornography Addiction
[Performers in the sex industry] have high rates of substance abuse, typically alcohol and cocaine, depression, borderline personality disorder which is a particularly serious disorder and dissociative identity disorder which used to be called multiple personality disorder. The experience I find most common among the performers is that they have to be drunk, high or dissociated in order to go to work. Their work environment is particularly toxic.

Lizzy Borden: We don’t shoot “all the lovey-dovey stuff that there’s not a big market for” (explicit language)
Lizzy Borden, porn producer: “When I was a child, my step-father was an alcoholic. So I think I had deep issues, and this is kind of therapeutic for me, to take my aggression out on other people. So in a way, I’m exploiting people, taking all my inner demons and aggression on them.”

Jenna Jameson’s Tragic Backstory; Seeking Virgins with Paris Hilton
COOPER: …[I]f you had a daughter, if she came to you and said that she wanted to get into that industry?
JAMESON:
I’d tie her in the closet. Only because this is such a hard industry
for a woman to get ahead and get the respect that she deserves. I
fought tooth and nail to get to where I am, and it’s not something that
I would want my daughter to go through. It’s not something that any
parent would choose for their child.

Behind the Scenes of Deep Throat with Linda Lovelace

Testimony in Minneapolis: Likeness of TV Star “Rhoda” Misappropriated by Pornographers; Aspiring Actresses Vulnerable to Being Enticed into Porn
As a young dancer-actress-singer in New York City, I experienced first-hand (and have heard countless accounts from many other women in these fields and modeling) continual attempts to convince, that pornography, photography, films, et cetera were a stepping stone to stardom. Young people and children are particularly vulnerable to this kind of enticement in New York City and Los Angeles as they are show business centers. A common statement was, and may still be, “Marilyn Monroe did that calendar and look what she became.”

Also, during the audition process, actresses, singers, dancers, models are extremely vulnerable. I know of instances when women have entered the audition room to find the man who would be giving the job completely nude. Point blank proposals of sexual service as part of getting the job are extremely common.

Porn Actresses: Most Careers Are Short, Few Are Lucrative (explicit language)
Popular beliefs maintain that the lure of “easy money” draws people, particularly the young, to the world of pornography. This belief is supported by trade and fan magazines that glamorize the industry by focusing on the lavish lifestyles of its members. While the industry cultivates the idea of porn as profitable, income varies greatly by individual. Furthermore, rather than “easy money”, respondents reported that most of the work is tiring, boring, and physically exhausting. Like prostitutes, a few make a great deal of money while most make a modest or meager living…

Penn State Law Professors Trot Out ‘Female Porn Leaders’ to Whitewash Realities of Adult Industry (explicit language)
“So how does all of this make the women who actually work in the adult
entertainment industry feel about their chosen profession?” the authors
ask (p.260). Simply framing the question this way already subtly skews
the debate. Now the pornographers are the victims, not the aggressors.
Those nasty anti-porn feminists are hurting their feelings! It is also
far from proven that the women interviewed by the authors are
representative of “women who actually work in the adult entertainment
industry” in terms of power, privilege and viewpoint. Performing in
porn films, the authors suggest, is a “chosen profession”, like going
to law school–not, as is more often the case, a choice influenced (if
not predetermined) by childhood sexual abuse, poverty, coercion, addictions, or sex-trafficking.

Certified Sex Therapist Marty Klein Wants You to Believe Porn Is Harmless
…We can’t let the Dr. Klein’s doublespeak pass without further mention. For him, child porn is “children’s eroticism” and abusive practices are “erotic predilections”. Dr. Klein’s approach is one of the most invalidating we’ve ever encountered. People and communities report suffering from porn and he responds with ridicule rather than compassion. It’s remarkable for someone who holds himself out as a therapist and a trainer of clinical skills.