by Traci Lords
I got high to forget, but after a while even that didn’t quiet the storm in my head or stop the film loop of my life from tormenting me with its perfect memory. The sex dreams were the worst. They had become a montage of body parts and I could never seem to separate fantasy from reality. I saw dicks everywhere—dicks and fat faces and beady, Ron Jeremy eyes. It made me crazy.
I was losing my mind.
21
A Man Named Meese
Forty-eight hours later, facedown on my water bed, I watched the hands on the bedside clock move. It was 4:23 A.M. and the stench of an all-night binge hung thick in the air. Sprawling across the water bed, I searched the overflowing ashtray for one last puff of a used cigarette. My hand shook as I sorted through the butts, desperate for a toke as the remnants of the cocaine I’d snorted started to wear off.
“I fucking hate this part,” I mumbled loudly in the direction of Scott’s passed-out form.
He’d shown up unannounced late the night before and promptly fallen asleep. He was no doubt fighting with his “ex” again. I glared at him as I ground my teeth, turning to watch the dead fish in the aquarium next to my bed floating belly up in the murky water. I pictured myself floating alongside them, my lungs slowly filling with water. I pushed the image out of my head. My mouth was so dry I could hardly swallow and I couldn’t seem to move.
Lying there miserably in the darkness, I contemplated scraping my tongue when suddenly the whole apartment shook violently. What the hell is that? The noise thundered closer toward me and I bolted upright thinking it was an earthquake. My bedroom door burst open and three men stormed in pointing shiny black guns at me. Not believing what I was seeing, I tried to focus my eyes. The dim light from the aquarium cast a blue glow over the surreal creatures, lighting up the yellow FBI letters across their backs.
FBI! I gasped, wondering if it was a hallucination. Had I died and gone to hell? I spoke to the blue men and demanded to know if this was a dream.
Scott was dragged roughly to the floor and slammed facedown into the carpet when reality finally hit me. Pushing myself into the corner of the bed, I pulled the covers protectively over my body.
“Stop it!” I screamed as the armed men surrounded me and aimed their guns in my direction. Oh my God…Oh my God.…I closed my eyes and waited for bullets to tear into my flesh. I felt the sweat roll down my body. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF BED NOW!” I was ordered. My legs trembled as I tried to obey. My eyes darted around the room and took in their smirking faces as I was tightly handcuffed and led down the hallway out the front door. I tried to remember where I’d hidden my stash, certain that it had to be a drug bust. What else could it be? That motherfucking dealer ratted me out! But how did he know where I lived? He’d never been to my place…. Ouch! I hit my head as I was stuffed into an unmarked car, shoeless and naked beneath the knee-length Metallica T-shirt I’d worn to bed.
“WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU TAKING ME?!” I demanded. “What am I being arrested for?” I wailed as the car took off. “You can’t do this!”
I was being kidnapped and I didn’t know why.
The sun started to blind me as it came up on the long drive. I had no idea where we were going and no one was talking. I hadn’t been read my rights. I wasn’t even sure I was being arrested and I certainly wasn’t convinced they were really FBI agents. I was on the verge of hysteria, questions pounding through my mind. Who would want me dead? Could this be my ex-agent North’s doing? He was furious when I went into business with Scott. He’d sworn he’d get even. Was this payback time?
“WHY ARE YOU PEOPLE DOING THIS! ANSWER ME!” My heart raced, but everything else remained silent. I sank helplessly in the backseat, the handcuffs digging into my flesh.
Utterly spent, I sat scared and defeated as the car wound through traffic toward the tall buildings downtown. I pictured myself escaping, running through the streets in my long night-shirt, helicopters chasing me, but I didn’t move a muscle—I just sat there, thinking of my mom hanging clean clothes on the line, the wind in her hair, laughing. I was so little then, maybe four or five….
The federal building in downtown Los Angeles wasn’t as glamorous as I’d seen in the movies. They took me in the back way and led me toward an elevator. By now I was certain I was in serious trouble. They must have found my drugs, I thought. Would Scott rat me out? Was he here too? Staring down at my chipped red toenail polish in the filthy freight elevator, I wondered what would happen next.
A ding of the elevator signaled our arrival. The monstrous army of blue men walked me out and into a cramped white room with a VCR, stacks of videos, and a lady with a tiny typewriter. A fat-faced man told me to sit in a yellow plastic chair in the center of the room and I did, crossing my legs extra tight. They were all gawking at me and I glared at every one of them, memorizing their faces: one…two…three…seven—seven of them in one room with me.
The fat-faced man stepped forward and introduced himself as Detective Rooker. Then he said the words I’d been longing to hear for the past three years: “We know who you are, Nora. We’re here to help you; but first, you’re going to have to help us.” And then the bottom fell out of my world.
My stomach dropped and I wanted to scream, both in outraged grief and in relief I cannot explain. Someone had finally stopped me. It was over. But it wasn’t the rescue I’d dreamed of. I was in a room full of leering men who seemed to be getting off on my hysteria. If they were trying to help me, why were they doing this? I looked Rooker dead in the eyes, trying to see if he was a good guy or a bad guy, but before I could even make up my mind he sealed his own fate by popping a triple-X video of me having sex into the VCR. Someone in the back of the room whistled and Rooker scolded them. I exploded, remembering how my mother had gently scolded Roger years ago for looking at my “poached eggs.”
“Fuck you people!” I spat. “You’re not here to help me! You just want your piece.” I was livid—all the pain and rage I’d felt for years shot out of my mouth in the shape of four-letter words. The lady with the tin typewriter pecked nervously in the background. I felt like a caged animal ready to attack, but as we watched film after film of me having sex with strangers, my fury gave way to numbness.
“What took you so long?” I asked the fat-faced man.
He told me I was part of a sting operation that had something to do with a man named Meese and that they’d been gathering information on me for a while.
The Traci Lords case was three years old.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “YOU PEOPLE KNEW THE WHOLE TIME?” I went berserk.
“Hey,” Rooker said, trying to calm me down, “what are you crying for? Tomorrow we’re all going to be famous. Isn’t that what you want?”
I just looked at him, not understanding. “Famous for what?”
22
Running on Empty
As unexpectedly as I’d been ripped from my bed in the wee hours that morning, I was returned home later that afternoon. The police dropped me off unceremoniously on the sidewalk in front of my apartment and sped away.
I forced myself forward toward the apartment, ignoring the curious stares of my neighbors. The front door was hanging on its hinges, and as I walked through it, I cautiously listened for voices.
Rounding the corner into the living room, I was confronted by Scott Bell. He demanded to “hear it all come out of my mouth.” I broke down and collapsed in a sobbing heap in the corner of my living room, the fight totally beaten out of me.
I had no idea how to begin to explain myself, but I had nothing left to hide. “Look,” I started, “I never meant for any of this to happen.” Scott rolled his eyes and that set me off. “I WAS TIRED OF BEING RAPED IN MY FUCKING SLEEP, OKAY! CAN YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?” I screamed. I went nuts, punching walls, sobbing. I curled up in a sad little ball and looked him right in the eye. “I was out of porn when I met you,” I whimpered, watching him turn white. He softened, moved closer. He was scared. “We have a lot of people to answe
r to,” he said, but I wasn’t really listening. I was too tired. I just needed the world to stop for a minute…to rest.
Elegant, shiny black shoes walked right up to my head, and I stared eyes-to-laces as I awoke from my momentary slumber. As I started to get up, a shoe stepped on my hair and held me to the ground. It belonged to one of two porn producers I’d seen in Scott’s office days before, and one of them got right in Scott’s face, telling him he better make sure his little girl kept her mouth shut.
“Please let me go,” I pleaded from the ground. “I don’t know anything.” What did everyone think I was going to say?
“Listen, Kristie,” the one accosting Scott said, “you better just keep as quiet as a fucking church mouse or that pretty little face of yours won’t be pretty for long.” With that he kicked me in the mouth and left me bleeding all over the beige carpet.
Later on I learned that the porn industry thought I had turned myself in. They believed I could identify certain individuals by their real names (apparently I wasn’t the only one with an alias), but in truth I had told the FBI nothing. I knew nothing.
I didn’t know who had produced which film. I had to rely on the porn box covers for answers. I didn’t understand why, but the cops were really annoyed that I didn’t have personal relationships with these people and didn’t even know who they were. Why was I even being asked these questions? None of it made sense at the time.
Once I was alone, I packed my remaining personal possessions into big brown boxes. The feds had confiscated every photograph I had of my family, and I felt even more alone without my mother’s picture to talk to. I had to speak to her. But how? Was she still close by? Did she hate me? It didn’t matter. I was no longer safe living in her backyard. King Harbor had become the dead zone. I’d have to leave first and find her later.
I found a new apartment the next day. It was in a large complex by the sea in Marina Del Rey, the kind of sprawling building I could get lost in—and that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I was hiding out and licking my wounds. Fighting to survive. I had no credit, a couple thousand dollars in cash, and no ID, since the feds had confiscated the Kristie one. Nora was gone in my heart and I couldn’t be Kristie anymore, so only Traci remained. But was that who I was? Was I Traci Lords? But I just made her up. How could she be real?
Scott was civil toward me as the days passed. He cosigned for the apartment in the Marina. I was surprised that he stuck around after all that had gone down. For a while I entertained the idea that he really must love me, but I soon realized his motives were more complex than that. There was the very important matter of the only legal X-rated film I ever made, the one in Paris. In the middle of all this chaos it hadn’t occurred to me that the countless news reports about me and the sex scandal would give it added value. The fact that I owned it (it was a Traci Lords Company production) only helped to solidify my reputation as a brilliant Machiavellian businesswoman.
The following weeks were torturous.
I woke up and took long walks along the ocean, the wind stripping some of the haze of my life away. But every day was a new challenge. It was hard to stay sober at a time when everything hurt so much. The massive amount of media attention I got needled me on a daily basis and I was so vulnerable to the cruel titles with which seemingly intelligent reporters crowned me. I was called a porn queen, a naughty Lolita, the princess of pornography. Hypocrisy runs deep in our society, so it’s no surprise that the same news channels that reported on the teenage runaway victim Traci Lords now followed that story with nearly nude images from my porn films. The media frenzy drove the price of the now illegal tapes up, and while those in the porn industry complained bitterly that I had cost them a fortune, in reality they became richer than ever. Thanks to the news coverage they were given a free advertising campaign and I was further exploited, left to gather the broken pieces of my life. It was hard not to be bitter.
I’d made about thirty-five thousand dollars during my three years in the porn business, and all that money was now gone—spent on rent and drugs. And despite what the media reported, I had never looked for porn stardom. My life had simply led me there, and my emotional hunger had made me a prime target for that kind of exploitation.
I went into therapy the summer of 1986 and began the long, painful process of unraveling the web of my life. There I learned, much to my surprise, that it isn’t uncommon for children of sexual abuse to act out in many of the ways that I had. I was told I wasn’t a sex-crazed freak but an abused child, and that was very hard for me to accept. I didn’t want that title. Those words were painful to hear and they stabbed at me. I knew my therapist was onto something, but it would take me years before I could allow myself to be that vulnerable in therapy, where I could actually let those words in and see the truth for what it was.
I had to strip away all the masks I’d been wearing for years to protect myself, and it was heartbreaking to confront my demons. I was angry about Ricky, my father, the abortion, dirty Roger, my mother’s blindness, and the ugliness and poverty I grew up in. But most of all I was angry with myself. I felt that I should have found another way. I should have been stronger. At eighteen, I blamed myself for everything, and I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. I condemned myself, and it took me years in therapy before I finally began to see that I wasn’t the only one who was guilty of abusing me.
On one sunny afternoon toward the end of the summer of 1986, Scott visited my Marina Del Rey apartment. Months had passed since the FBI bust, and the paperwork for the distribution deal for the final porn movie I owned was ready to be signed. I had serious issues about signing over the rights, but my world had closed in on me and once again it was about survival. I was being bombarded by subpoenas from the federal government, which wanted to use me as the poster child for the Reagan administration’s task force on child pornography. Apparently, in the countless cases of child pornography across the United States most of the young victims were unknown and I was the only one who was readily identifiable. And although I didn’t want another soul on this planet to go through what I had, I was a shattered mess myself. I was so fragile at that time I just couldn’t imagine surviving the ordeal of looking at images of myself and other children engaging in sexual acts. It was just too much. I was broken, raw, bleeding from my own battles with drug withdrawal and the undeniable shame I was wallowing in. And I was unnerved by the unpredictability of the subpoenas. It seemed every kiddie porn case in America had suddenly requested me as a witness. No matter what the intentions of the prosecutors were, I felt like I was being thrown to the wolves.
I was a drug addict, only months clean, and battling to remain drug free at a time when the last thing I wanted to do was stay conscious. And the subpoenas just kept coming. I knew the prosecutors of these child pornography cases had a job to protect other children from being abused. I was all for that. But I had someone to protect too: me. Struggling to regain my own sanity, I was hit from every angle. With the federal government, the still-circulating death threats from the porn industry, the IRS, and the local media who hid out in my bushes and stalked me daily, I was going down fast. I don’t know exactly where I found the strength to stay off drugs, but somehow I did. Looking back, I think there was something about the feds’ constant presence at my doorstep that served as a powerful drug deterrent.
As miserable as I felt in those days I knew something was changing in me. I’ve heard people call it a survival instinct and I think that’s exactly what it was. I had two very clear choices: get on with living or die. I chose to live. I don’t know exactly how or when, but sometime over those next few weeks I started fighting back—not lashing out but fighting for my life. I was so far down I could only go up, so I started climbing out of the hell I’d been sentenced to years before at the hands of perverts and pedophiles. Yes, my life was a mess. But I was still standing. I was not another statistic. I was the one who got away and I was going to fucking make it all count. So I did what I thought best. I
sold that fucking movie for a period of ten years and with it bought myself some shelter from the storm. It was an agonizing decision, and one that made me a harder person, but it had to be done. I hated the fact that I had made it possible for someone to go into a video store and rent it. But selling that film gave me some control over my life. I made two other life-changing decisions that afternoon: I doubled my therapy sessions, and I hired a high-powered lawyer named Leslie Abramson.
23
My Hero
Leslie Abramson was the first protector in my life. Ironically, I found her through a lawyer Scott knew named John Weston, who represented porn clients and was one of the first people to publicly state that I was washed up and would “never make anything” out of myself. I thought he must really hate me to say such cruel things, especially since I’d never met him, but his words only fueled my determination to prove him wrong. Weirdly, he turned around weeks later and recommended the lawyer who gave me my life back, and although I’ve never understood his motive, I’ve always been grateful that he led me to Leslie.
The FBI was relentless in its disruption of my life. After giving the initial statement at the federal building downtown and never being booked or read my rights, I had good reason to question authority. I couldn’t walk outside my apartment without being stopped and served subpoena after subpoena to appear for prosecutions around the country, and I saw these prosecutors all over the news talking about the Traci Lords case. There was no longer any doubt in my mind about why they wanted me to appear. It wasn’t only because I was the most readily identifiable child in porn but also because wherever I went, the media followed.
