Underneath It All (11 page)

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 answer 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 fells 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 bitter* 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 Kw 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 fells' 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 /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 hi re( I a high-powered lawyer named Leslie Abramson.

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.
A dozen cases popped up out of nowhere, mainly involving distributors selling my underage movies after it was publicly announced they were illegal. Certain individuals were actually advertising them as kiddie porn and selling them at hugely inflated amounts to federal agents involved in sting operations all over the country. Then these same distributors gave interviews claiming they were victims of the lies of the teenager who said she was of legal age, swearing they were family men who would never use minors in their movies. This went on for months. I wasn't interested in protecting the people who had exploited me. But I wasn't going to be victimized by a politically motivated administration either. I felt raped by all of them as well as a hostage to everything that was going on, and that's when I met Leslie.
When I walked into her office on Wilshire Boulevard, I was a nervous wreck and out of cigarettes. She was sitting behind a huge desk overflowing with stacks of folders. All I could see was a mound of curly white-blond hair sticking out over the papers and books. Smoke drifted over the desk and circled me, and her big blue eyes suddenly peered over the mountain of work and sized me up.
"Come on in here, close the door," her raspy voice demanded. "You," she said to Scott, "wait outside." I felt like I was in the principal's office. Shaking, I did what she told me and sat down in a big brown chair. "Can I have a cigarette?" I asked her in a small, tentative voice. "Yeah," she said, leaning forward with the pack. "You can even have one if you ask in a big girl's voice."
I swallowed hard, fighting the tears that had been building all day. I sure didn't feel like a big girl.
Then she looked at me, really looked at me, and what was left of my tough-girl façade crumbled. The cat was out of the bag. Tears welled up in my eyes as she handed me the whole pack of smokes. This woman was a fireball. She was a hard-ass and I don't believe she feared anything. But she also had a heart, and it was her kindness that ultimately undid me. For the first time since I'd been abducted by the feds, I felt like someone really got the magnitude of what I'd been through. No matter how much life experience I had, she realized I was still an eighteen-year-old girl, and she was the only person who seemed to truly get how fragile I was.
Years later, she told me that when I had walked into her office she immediately understood how it had all happened. She said the first thing she thought was "My God, what a beautiful young girl—those assholes."
Leslie got on the phone right away, barking at the various prosecutors to call off the hounds. They didn't need me to testify in their cases, she said. It was a dog-and-pony show. She demanded that they use my mother instead of me if they truly needed my identification in those movies, and when the prosecutors weren't satisfied and said they needed me, Leslie shot back that they needed a cold shower. Launching into them, she said she couldn't believe it took so many agents to bring in one little girl. She slammed them for not allowing me to get dressed before taking me downtown, and then warned them she was an excellent public speaker and not at all media shy.
I sat there taking it all in. It hadn't occurred to me until that very moment how inappropriately those agents had handled everything. This woman I didn't even know was defending me, protecting me, and I was so used to getting the short end of the stick that I didn't know how to respond. But I can say it touched me to my core. I was indebted to Leslie Abramson for what she did, and I always will be. It was because of her that I had a chance.
The months went by and I crawled into a protective shell, isolating myself from the judgments of the outside world. I spent most of my time in therapy, trying to figure out what had happened to me. More than once, I felt like I was losing the battle to recover from my past, and years later I realized my feelings were totally justified. What had happened to me is not something a person can recover from. You can only make peace with your past and move On. And man, that takes a lot of time.
I must have cried a thousand tears, wishing I could take it all hack. It tortured me morning, noon, and night—craving and resisting the solace one lousy gram of coke would surely bring me. Life was hard, but time went on. I started running on the beach and painting vivid pictures in my living room when I couldn't sleep. Unknowingly, I was learning how to cope in life without the crutches of sex and drugs to hold me up.
The trials and subpoenas continued. Every day was another battle and it became clear to me that I couldn't survive much longer without a bigger army.
It was time to call my mother.
The first thing I said to my mother was "I'm so sorry." I told her I wanted the madness to stop and I wanted my life back. It was an intense reunion. I wasn't ready to discuss Roger or porn or any of it, and she didn't push me to. But for everything I didn't say, I know she saw it plainly on my face. I told her about the trials and subpoenas and how crazy it all was. And she told me I was going to be okay. But I wasn't so sure. I knew I couldn't be okay with prosecutors torturing me on a daily basis, and my mother volunteered to testify in my place.
"You would do that for me?"
"Absolutely," she said. "I'm here for you." My mother's willingness to testify in my place gave me room to heal and proved to me that I really did matter to her. After all the battles we'd fought against each other, we were finally on the same side.