More Traci Lords

07/19/86

Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner said Friday that his office is not planning to file criminal charges against sex film star Traci Lords, even though she was underage when she made many of her 75 movies and videos.

Reiner, however, said he would press charges against the pornographic film makers who employed Lords, if he could prove that they knew she was not yet 18 when she acted in the sexually explicit productions.

"The thrust of the investigation is directed toward the pornographic film industry that exploited her," Reiner said. "There are no charges that we're considering (against Lords)."

Explaining his position, Reiner told reporters:

"She may very well be a hard professional now, but she was 15 . . . when the pornographic film industry got a hold of her. She tells us that she was told, `Just get some kind of ID.'

"And it was, according to her, done with more of a wink and a nod than any serious effort to determine what her real age was."

However, Lords, through her attorney, Leslie H. Abramson, denied late Friday that she ever made such statements.

Abramson said Reiner's remarks must have come "off the top of his head-not out of her (Lords') mouth." Abramson would not allow reporters to interview Lords, who she said was secluded in an undisclosed location.

According to Reiner, the case first came to his attention two months ago, when an informant told the prosecutor's office that Lords had been acting in pornographic films, even though she was underage. The matter, he said, was then turned over to juvenile investigators.

During the subsequent investigation, authorities determined that Lords had sought employment using identification stating that her name was Kristie Nussman and that her birth date was Nov. 17, 1962.

When investigators, using her birth certificate and state identification cards, located the real Kristie Nussman, she said her birth certificate had been stolen a couple years earlier and that an imposter had apparently forged her name on state forms.

Through the bogus ID card, investigators were able to locate Lords, who lives in Redondo Beach, and interviewed her early this week.

Reiner said Lords told the investigators that sex film producers had told her to "go out and get some kind of ID."

"She did not, she tells us, take it all seriously, the manner of the request. That it was very clear to her that they were not interested in her age. They were interested in her just having something that could be shown. . . . They were using an attractive 15-year-old girl, and she was, I'm sure, grist for the mill, as far as they were concerned."

Lords, whose real name is Nora Kuzma, was born in Steubenville, Ohio, on May 7, 1968, authorities confirmed.

In 1982, after her parents' divorce, her mother took Nora and her three sisters to California and settled in Redondo Beach, The Times learned. Nora attended Redondo Union High School for two years, leaving school while a sophomore.

Two adults who knew Nora but who requested anonymity described her as "a cute and giggly sort of girl," who began posing for adult magazines while still in high school.

In July, 1984, they said, they saw her picture in the adult magazine Velvet, and they called the district attorney's office to inform authorities that she was underage, but that an investigator told them, "There isn't anything we can do about it."

A Reiner spokesman said it is not known if there was any record of such a call.

Apparently Nora had been carrying false identification as early as her freshman year at Redondo Union, the sources said. On one occasion, they said, she used a false state ID to buy a cocktail in a Redondo Beach restaurant.

When asked about it, they said, she commented, "It's just something I have."

In recent weeks, investigators executed search warrants at the actresses' Redondo Beach residence; the Sun Valley offices of Vantage International Productions, a major producer of adult films, and the Sherman Oaks offices of modeling agent Jim South, who is credited with discovering the actress in 1984.

The investigators recovered video tapes of Lords' movies, including "Traci Takes Tokyo," "It's My Body" and "Beverly Hills Copulator."

They also found a birth certificate, a state identification card and U.S. passport in her apartment, all in Nussman's name.

Carrying a false passport is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison, a $2,000 fine or both. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office here declined to comment on whether the case was under investigation.

Reacting to comments by sex film makers that they were victimized by Lords using false identification, Reiner called such a defense "preposterous."

"We're all familiar with their high standards," he said.

Reiner spokesman Schuyler Sprowles said the office's continuing investigation has included interviews with several individuals "associated in the production of the early performances of Traci Lords ."

"At this point, it is not clear if ultimately there'll be any prosecution," Sprowles said. "It's not an all-out assault on the porn industry that we're engaged in. The investigation is focused very narrowly."

Reiner said it is unclear how many pornographic film producers might be questioned. He added that he had no plans to bring before the county grand jury pornography industry personnel who refuse to answer investigators' questions.

On Thursday, John Weston, attorney for the Adult Film and Video Assn. of America, said video rental shops should pull any film featuring Nora made before last May, when she turned 18.

A check of a dozen video rental shops around Los Angeles on Friday turned up only one store with a large selection of Traci Lords tapes still in stock.

03/06/87

The Orange County Register

Three film producers were charged Thursday with sexually exploiting a minor because they featured porn star Traci Lords in a movie when she was 16 years old.

The producers claim that Lords presented identification showing she was an adult. The government argues that not knowing Lords' true age is not a defense for the federal act under which the men were charged.

The 1984 Child Protection Act was the basis for the one-count federal grand jury indictment returned Thursday. The indictment, the first of commercial film producers under the act, does not charge that any of the three men knew Lords was underage. And, according to the act, the government is not required to show it at trial.

"The law does not require us to prove that they had knowledge she was underage," U.S. Attorney Robert Bonner said. "This crime is akin to statutory rape. It's no defense to say you didn't know she was a minor."

Lords made more than 70 other sexually-explicit films before she turned 18. The films were taken off the shelves last July when it was disclosed she was underage.

John Weston, lawyer for the Adult Film Association and who represents two of the three men, said Lords not only had a California identification card showing she was 20 but also was a Penthouse centerfold before the film was produced.

But Bonner questions that argument. "Nobody can look at that kid and say she's an adult."

Lords was the centerfold in the July 1984 Penthouse, the same issue that featured revealing photographs that resulting in the dethroning of then-Miss America, Vanessa Williams.

"The entire country saw that issue," Weston said. "How could the government jump on these people (the defendants) for being just as fooled as everyone else was?"

The case was brought under the federal law, Weston said, because California laws allow someone to argue he was fooled by false identification. Under the government's theory, Weston said, a retailer who sold a Lords' video also could be charged.

Until now prosecutors have used the Child Protection Act to go after distributors and recipients of child pornography.

"It's our intention to vigorously enforce the law regarding the use of minors in films or artwork that depict minors in sexual activity," Bonner said.

"Those Young Girls" is the title of the 1984 film. "It graphically shows Ms. Lords in a variety of heterosexual and homosexual activities," Bonner said. "Nothing is left to the imagination."

The indictment alleges that Ronald Rene Kantor, 40, and Rupert Sebastian Macnee, 39, both of Los Angeles, produced the film. James Marvin Souter Jr., 47, of Thousand Oaks, is charged with helping them by serving, in essence, as Lords' agent.

Lords, a native of Steubenville, Ohio, began making sexually explicit films in 1984 shortly after arriving in Los Angeles and after answering Souter's newspaper ad seeking models.

The three are scheduled to appear in court March 23 to enter their pleas. If convicted they face a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.

Souter, owner of World Modeling in Van Nuys, was arrested Wednesday in an unrelated state case. He was charged with conspiracy to commit pandering in connection with his role in having six men and women get paid to perform sexual acts in a film.

Three in Traci Lords Sex Film Case Indicted

KIM MURPHY

03/06/87

Los Angeles Times

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(Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 1987 All Rights Reserved)

Sex film star Traci Lords ' agent and two producers who allegedly propelled her to blue movie fame at the age of 16 were indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on Thursday in the first prosecution against commercial film producers under federal child pornography laws.

James Marvin Souter Jr., 47, the man who allegedly hired Lords through his World Modeling Agency in 1984 for the film, "Those Young Girls," is charged with producers Ronald Rene Kantor, 40, and Rupert Sebastian Macnee, 39, with violating the federal law prohibiting the use of minors in sexually explicit films.

The indictment is likely to be the first of several against producers of the more than 70 hard-core films in which Nora Kuzma, a teen-ager who migrated to Los Angeles from a small town in Ohio, won national attention as Traci Lords , U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner told a news conference.

While the current multiagency investigation is directed primarily at producers and distributors of films in which Lords appeared, federal authorities also confirmed that they are looking into Penthouse magazine's use of Lords' photograph as its centerfold in September, 1984.

"This indictment reflects our determination to vigorously enforce the law that prohibits the use of minors in hard-core pornographic films; films that show minors engaged in sexual acts," Bonner said. "We hope that the message will go out loud and clear to the pornographic film industry that if they do use minors in their productions, they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law."

The three men face a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine if convicted.

Lords, now 18, who "in the broadest sense . . . was unquestionably a victim," will not be charged, Bonner said.

The investigation against Souter, a Thousand Oaks resident, and Macnee and Kantor, both of Los Angeles, was first launched by the Los Angeles County district attorney's office.

But while state child pornography laws require some proof that film producers and distributors knew they were using a minor, there is no such requirement under federal law, presumably easing such prosecutions.

John Weston, an attorney for the Adult Film and Video Assn. of America who is representing Macnee and Kantor, said the federal law's strict liability requirement is probably unconstitutional because it is too broad.

Past U.S. Supreme Court rulings seem to require that the film producers must have had actual knowledge that Lords was underage or recklessly disregarded knowledge that she was a minor, Weston said.

" Traci Lords made scores and scores of films and videotapes in a short period of time. And if one looks at her films, her photographs or talks to the people who knew her, nobody would have had any doubt that she was not what she purported to be," he said.

Lords produced identification from the state Department of Motor Vehicles indicating that she was 20 at the time of the filming, the lawyer said.

Weston also questioned the federal government's decision to prosecute his clients when no indictment has been returned against the publishers of Penthouse.

"Surely, the government had people either formally or informally looking at Traci Lords ' centerfold," he said. " . . . If the government was not stimulated to go investigate (Penthouse) because of the age of this person, it seems very highly unfair to at this juncture smugly indict people for allegedly being just as fooled as the government was."

Assistant U.S. Atty. Charles Stevens, who is prosecuting the present case, said, "Anybody that's used Traci Lords is a target in this investigation. . . . If Penthouse used her, Penthouse would be a target."

But the federal child pornography law is aimed at explicit sexual material, and the films in which Lords appeared are "much more graphic than anything depicted in magazines, including Penthouse," Stevens said.

Weston said the adult film and video industry for the most part voluntarily removed Lords' films from sales shelves when questions about her age first surfaced last year.

"The announcement of the indictment today suggests that the responsible actions of the industry were apparently deemed to not be enough," he said.

Souter acted as Lords' agent for many of her films after she responded to a newspaper advertisement for his modeling agency, Bonner said.

Souter was arrested by Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies Wednesday on pandering charges in connection with performers he allegedly supplied for another pornographic film.

The three men are scheduled for arraignment on March 23.

07/13/87

Newsday

The X-rated film industry is out for revenge. After being knocked flat on its back last year when porn queen Traci Lords was exposed as an underage participant in many porn films, the porn biz is ready to profit from the video release of "Traci, I Love You." It's believed to be the only flesh-fest that Lords starred in when she was legal at age 18. Apparently, the 19-year-old Lords has taken acting lessons to try to break into clothed acting work and didn't want the film released. But X-rated vid outlets are salivating over the tape, and about 100,000 copies will be released this summer. Last summer, porn purveyors stripped skin flicks from their shelves after the bombshell revelation about Lords, who lied about her age and was as young as 15 when she acted in about 102 films with titles like "New Wave Hookers" and "Lust in the Fast Lane." Although porn purveyors are peeved about the estimated $1 million to $2 million loss caused by Lords, they can't wait for the tape. "The advance sales have been enormous," said an insider. "They want to make back some of the money she cost them."

08/22/87

The New York Times

One year after Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d announced the findings of his Commission on Pornography, a new Justice Department team is leading a nationwide effort to stem the distribution of obscene materials.

Its efforts have ranged from using a child protection law to prosecute two producers of a sexually explicit film to using Federal racketeering statutes for indictments against the distributors of allegedly obscene materials.

''We really are seeing a new thrust in terms of prosecution,'' said Paul J. Maurer, a spokesman for the National Coalition Against Pornography Inc., a Cincinnati-based clearing house focusing on the child pornography and other sexually explicit material. But critics respond that the wave of prosecution carries with it the threat of censorship.

The 10-member Justice Department team, the National Obscenity Enforcement Unit, was formed by Mr. Meese last March in response to the pornography commission's call for increased law-enforcement efforts against the distributors of pornographic videotapes, operators of ''dial-a-porn'' telephone services and producers of X-rated films involving minors or extreme violence.

'An Alarming Step-Up'

At the same time, local prosecutors, particularly those in California, have stepped up attacks on makers and distributors of allegedly obscene materials, sometimes aided by national anti-pornography organizations.

''There's an alarming step-up in activity around the country through the encouragement of the Justice Department,'' said Leanne Katz, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, based in New York City. ''The call for censorship of sexually explict materials we're seeing all over the country results from that.''

The new Federal enforcement unit is currently aiding Federal prosecutors in a case involving an X-rated actress who calls herself Traci Lords .

In July 1986 law-enforcement authorities in Los Angeles discovered that Ms. Lords was not the 22-year-old adult she claimed to be, but rather had been only 16 years old when she appeared in nearly 80 X-rated videos and posed for Penthouse magazine and other publications.

Using a Federal statute aimed at protecting children from exploitation, Federal attorneys are now prosecuting two film makers for using Ms. Lords in a sexually explicit movie in 1984.

Last Friday, the enforcement unit announced that a Federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., had indicted three people and a Maryland-based company in the first obscenity case brought under Federal racketeering laws.

The Federal unit has also been instrumental in assisting prosecutors in obtaining a guilty plea in a Utah case against two Los Angeles-based companies that operated telephone services in 12 cities nationwide in which callers could hear prerecorded dramatizations of sex acts.

Responding to complaints in the Salt Lake City area that children were making calls to the dial-a-porn services, prosecutors brought a Federal indictment that resulted in a $100,000 fine against the companies, Adult Entertainment Network Inc. I and II, and an order enjoining the employees from any practice involving the communication of sexual material.

In the forefront of the effort are officials in California, where more than 80 percent of the nation's X-rated movies and video cassettes are produced.

A change in the state's obscenity law, which became effective in January, was aimed at making it easier for jurors to reach a conclusion about a work in question. Part of the definition of obscenity in the law was changed from ''utterly without redeeming social importance'' to ''without significant literary, artistic, political, educational or scientific value.''

Among the cases in California is the trial in Los Angeles of Eric Boucher, a San Francisco punk rock singer who performed under the name Jello Biafra with his now-defunct band, the Dead Kennedys. Mr. Boucher is charged under a state law that prohibits the distribution of matterial deemed harmful to a minor.

At issue is not his music, but rather a poster that was included in one of the band's record albums. The poster was a reproduction of a painting by Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger depicting 10 sets of human genitalia.

Michael Guarino, the deputy city attorney prosecuting Mr. Boucher, said the issue was not whether the poster was obscene by adult standards but whether it was suitable for minors. The case arose when a 14-year-old girl bought the album as a gift for her 11-year-old brother.

''I believe strongly this poster is the very sort of thing the law was designed to prevent from falling into the hands of a child,'' Mr. Guarino said.

Mr. Guarino will also prosecute a case filed last month against Jerry Lee Deming, the owner Spartacus Corporation, a mail-order distribution company in Anaheim. According to a spokesman for James Hahn, the Los Angeles City Attorney, the case represents the nation's first criminal case against a video distributor for simulated sexual torture.

John Weston, a Beverly Hills lawyer whose firm is representing Mr. Deming, said, ''The Federal government and local prosecutors have declared war on violent material with a sexual component.''

Mr. Weston is also representing Ronald Kantor and Rupert McNee, the film makers in the Traci Lords case. Although the case began with the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, it was taken over and prosecuted by Federal authorities because conviction under the Federal laws appears more likely.

Under state law, prosecutors would have had to prove that the defendants knowingly used a minor in the film. Mr. Weston said his clients absolutely believed Ms. Lords was at least 18 years old when they made the movie. Federal law, however, does not offer such a defense.

Ronni B. MacLaren, an Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles who is prosecuting the case, said the issue under Federal law will not be whether the film was obscene, but whether a minor was used in a sexually explicit movie.

Ms. MacLaren said the case was ''part of an effort to clean up the industry because there are real victims here.''

11/07/87

The San Diego Union-Tribune

LOS ANGELES(Copley News Service) -- In what may be the first decision of its kind, a federal judge ruled yesterday that two pornography producers charged with casting Traci Lords while she was underage can argue they believed she was an adult.

U.S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts refused to declare unconstitutional a statute under which the two filmmakers are charged, but said attorneys can attempt to show there was a "reasonable belief" that the porno star was 18.

Lords allegedly used a false birth certificate and California identification cards to win parts in more than 70 hard-core films believed made since she was as young as 15.

Producers Ronald Kantor, 40, and Rupert Macnee, 39, both of Los Angeles, are charged with casting Lords in "Those Young Girls," shot in August 1984 when she was 16.

The indictment is believed to be the first in the nation brought against commercial producers under the U.S. Child Protection Act of 1984. Assistant U.S. attorney Ronni MacLaren had argued that the statute calls for strict prosecution of those who use minors in pornography, regardless of whether they thought Lords was of age.

Letts ruled that the defendants, scheduled to begin trial Jan. 5, can try to show their mistaken belief of Lords' adulthood was "reasonable, and not due to carelessness or negligence." The defendants, however, can not escape conviction by simply saying that Lords told them she was 18, Letts said.

In a 37-page opinion, Letts noted that an actor's age "cannot be determined by simple examination of the performer's appearance" and that a performer, who is often relied upon for birth data, "is in position to falsify the information and deliberately mislead the inquirer." With laws against child pornography, Letts said the actor "has every incentive to falsify the information convincingly."

"To allow an employer to be imprisoned and severely fined based upon factual error, which might have been the product of trickery and deception, puts a considerable twist on basic notions of fairness," Letts wrote.

The judge also said that allowing the "mistake-of-fact" defense could encourage others in the pornography industry to carefully investigate their would-be stars to avoid prosecution.

Defense attorney John Weston said the judge's decision appears to be the first allowing defendants to argue they had credible reasons to assume a minor was an adult. Three other federal judges across the country have determined that the statute should be strictly applied because the minors in question were so young there was no doubt about their age, he said. "This case is the first case where the court was presented with a credible and serious articulation and reasonable belief of `mistake of fact,' " Weston said.

James M. Souter Jr. of Thousand Oaks, Lords' ex-agent, pleaded guilty in April to sexually exploiting a minor when he recruited her for "Those Young Girls." Souter denied knowing that Lords was a minor.

Souter, 48, is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 3. However, his attorney said Souter may try to withdraw his guilty plea because of Letts' ruling.

Date: Friday, June 10, 1988 Source: By Thomas D. Elias, Scripps Howard News Service.

Section: FRIDAY Copyright CHICAGO TRIBUNE

WITH NEW FILM, TRACI LORDS LOOKS FORWARD

Her new movie is called ``Not of This Earth.`` As a work of art, it`s not exactly out of this world. But it`s worlds apart from what Traci Lords was doing less than three years ago.

Back then, Lords was one of the unquestioned queens of this town`s booming pornography industry. At one time, almost 60 films, videos and loops were available featuring her in various sex acts and poses.

But Lords, now 20, quit all that when she was 17, just before California law enforcement officials discovered she was underage when the films were made. The blue movies and videos were pulled from stores everywhere in America.

Her new film, which features her contending with an alien race of bloodsucking supermen, is Lords` first venture back into filmdom since she abruptly stopped making sex movies.

She has no illusions about suddenly becoming an Academy Award winner. ``If you`re expecting an amusing B-movie, you`ll love it,`` she says.

Even though she did a couple of near-nude scenes in the new picture, Lords today is revolted by the hard-core pornography she was doing at age 15, 16 and 17.

``I`m constantly reminded of it,`` she said in an interview near her Santa Monica, Calif., town house. ``It`s like somebody continually telling you you`ve been a bad girl. The films are very embarrassing now. I`m told they bring high prices on the black market.``

But Lords doesn`t come across as a wanton ``bad girl,`` even though she knows her past will always dog her. Wearing a loose black top and skintight jeans, her long blond hair hanging straight down, she talks intensely about her mistakes and what she learned from them.

A runaway at 15, she says, ``I was running away to hell. But I thought I was running to heaven-no one telling me to go to school or when to come home at night. I was a little girl. If kids say, `I`m going to rebel and run away and hurt my parents and teachers and their friends,` who are they really hurting?``

``The ad led to nude pictures in Penthouse magazine. Then I got X-rated movie offers,`` said Lords, who officially changed her name two years ago.

``I got anywhere from $500 to $3,000 a day. A 60-minute film would take no more than three days to make. Over three years it didn`t add up to more than $60,000. I actually made maybe 20 movies, but they take three camera angles and then they slice it up and put it together in different ways with different titles.``

At the time, the money she made seemed good. Now it looks awful to her.

``One of the worst things in porn is there`s no pay for the actors. The producers make huge amounts of money and they exploit young girls who think it`s easy money,`` Lords said.

She stopped making X-rated movies suddenly, when ``I grew up.``

``I was 15 one day, 17 the next and I suddenly realized what I was doing. It was a shock when I really realized I was having sex on camera and people would see it. I`d always sort of thought no one would ever see it, and then I suddenly realized they would.``

Now that she`s clear of the blue movie industry-``It`s amazing what will happen when you change your phone number``-Lords studies acting, voice and dance non-stop. And she reads voraciously. ``People think I`m an incredible bookworm,`` she said. ``I study all the time.``

But her past follows. It affects her relationships with almost everyone she meets.

``I intimidate the hell out of many men,`` she said. ``They say, `My God, this is Traci Lords. She must be a sex monster.` It sometimes makes me laugh how I intimidate successful full-grown men when I`m barely not a teenager anymore and I still feel like a teenager. I`m talking about producers, teachers, actors.``

Women are affected, too. ``A lot of women see me and instantly hate me,`` Lords said. ``You wouldn`t believe how many hissing cats there are when I walk down my block. Most of my girlfriends are models or actresses. They know they`re beautiful and so they`re not insecure around me.``

Her sex life is very different since she ended her porno career.

``For a long time I did nothing at all sexually,`` she said. ``Now I have a monogamous relationship with a boyfriend I met on a modeling job. I`m not at all promiscuous. And it`s much better now. You have a problem when you have to start thinking about camera angles while you`re doing it.``

As enthusiastic as Lords is about her new, non-porn acting career, her real love is the autobiography she`s writing. ``I don`t want other little girls to make the mistakes I did,`` she said. ``There won`t be anything sexy about this book.``

Now, however, it looks as if her story has taken a turn for the better. She said she`s again on good terms with her family, is totally free of drugs and is ``very happy.``

``I`m growing,`` she said. ``I can be whatever I want to be and do whatever I want to do. I feel sort of like I`m in a closet trying on all kinds of new clothes, each one with a different label.``

04/27/89

Los Angeles Times

Traci Lords , fearing for her life, pleaded with her mother not to reveal that she was underage when she made many of her films, the porn star's mother testified Wednesday.

"She told me the people she was involved with would kill her," Patricia Briceland said.

"She told me to keep my mouth shut or I would get her in terrible trouble," Briceland added.

Briceland testified in the third week of the trial of Rubin Gottesman, a Woodland Hills resident charged with distributing child pornography. Prosecutors allege he sent Lords' videotapes through the mail and also distributed obscene material through his Van Nuys business, X-Citement Video.

Gottesman, 56, is also charged with violating federal Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization statutes for allegedly conducting a racketeering enterprise by means of interstate sales of obscene videotapes.

According to earlier testimony, Gottesman sent the videotapes to officers and agents conducting an undercover investigation dubbed "Picture Perfect."

Briceland was called on to testify about her daughter's age when the latter made "Sex Shoot" and "Lust in the Fast Lane."

"That's my daughter, Nora," Briceland said. "She's definitely 16, no more."

Lords' appearance changed dramatically while she was making the film, the mother said.

"I can see differences in the way she presented herself, the way she spoke, her confidence, the totality of the person," Briceland said.

The mother said her daughter got a "look in her eye. She started getting very hard, very tough after she started making the movies."

But under cross-examination, Briceland admitted that there could be as much as a six-month margin of error in her calculations about her daughter's age.

"When she was 16, she still was pudgy in the face. Her hair was brown-colored, kind of brown with a little red in it," the mother said.

The bespectacled Briceland, whose own red hair is worn short with bangs, said her daughter left home a few weeks before she was 16.

Within six months, the mother of three other daughters said her eldest told her that "Traci" was doing nude modeling.

During one of Lords' visits home, Briceland said she confronted her daughter about the rumors.

"She said it wasn't true. I think it started right after she left. She got involved with these people before she left and started doing it after she left," Briceland said.

"Eventually, I did see some pictures in Penthouse (magazine). I confronted her with that. She was 17," Briceland said.

Asked if she told her daughter to stop that kind of work, Briceland said: "Of course."

But she said her daughter refused.

"I told Nora if she didn't stop, I would go to the police, I would go to Penthouse," Briceland said.

But after Nora expressed her fears, Briceland said she decided to "keep the lines of communication open" with her daughter.

"I did nothing in the legal sense," she said.

05/04/89

Los Angeles Times

In a setback for the federal government's campaign against major distributors of pornography, a judge Wednesday dismissed racketeering charges against a Woodland Hills video distributor, saying he could not find that the graphic, occasionally violent films he sold violated community standards.

U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon, granting an acquittal in the only Los Angeles case brought in the Justice Department's highly publicized crackdown on obscenity, said he could not conclude that films like "Kneel Before Me" and "Beyond DeSade" were "patently offensive" in an area as diverse as Los Angeles.

"The great majority of people in this town would be incensed by this," the judge said. "I just do not believe that unless you have positive evidence of what the entire community believes in this area, that any judge could say what goes on in the so-called edge of this area, whether it's obscene, or (merely) pornographic."

"I cannot say beyond a reasonable doubt that community standards were violated," Kenyon said in his oral decision.

The ruling represented the government's first loss in a series of racketeering prosecutions launched throughout the country in 1987, and both prosecutors and defense lawyers predicted it could affect the way the government presents evidence in obscenity cases in large metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, where community standards are difficult to define.

"In a way, what the court did, which is of nationwide significance, is call into question the Supreme Court's assumption that you can tell if material is patently offensive just by looking at it," said defense attorney Stanley Fleishman. "The historic fact as I see it is that in America today, the American people tolerate virtually any sexual material."

The case against Rubin Gottesman, owner of X-Citement Video Inc. and R. G. Sales Co. in Van Nuys, was filed under federal racketeering laws, which allow prosecutors to seize the assets of pornography distributors and effectively put them out of business. Under the statute, prosecutors had sought to seize Gottesman's Woodland Hills home, his stock and ownership interests in both companies, his personal and corporate bank accounts, all office furniture and equipment.

The indictment was one of a series returned in a campaign prompted in part by the 1986 report of a Justice Department commission that found a link between some sexually explicit material and violence.

The four films alleged to be obscene in the present case included graphic depictions of group sex, oral sex, beatings and bondage. One included a gang rape scene in a mental hospital. One showed a woman committing suicide after she had been sexually attacked.

The Supreme Court, in its historic 1973 ruling on obscenity, held that only materials that are "patently offensive" when measured against contemporary local community standards and that appeal primarily to "prurient interests" can be adjudged obscene. But defense lawyers in this case argued that in metropolitan areas, it is virtually impossible to determine what may be offensive to the entire community.

"The scant evidence concerning contemporary community standards in the Los Angeles area suggests that there is found on the newsstands in the community a wide range of scenes of explicit sex, singly and in groups, including detailed portrayals of genitalia, sexual intercourse, fellatio, masturbation, bondage and sadism," the defense argued in its motion to dismiss the charges.

Defense lawyers said the government's failure to present expert testimony about community standards-electing instead to let the judge decide for himself, as a representative of the community-warranted dismissal, unless the judge could say beyond a reasonable doubt what such standards are.

Prosecutors did present one expert witness who testified that materials such as those cited in the indictment are not readily available on video shelves in Los Angeles, an indication, perhaps, that even purveyors of pornography consider them outside the scope of most films. But Kenyon said that may indicate only that the distributors "would say it's not worth the risk" of potential prosecution.

Indeed, the Adult Video Assn. has filed suit against the Justice Department in Los Angeles federal court seeking to enjoin racketeering prosecutions against pornographic film distributors. The lawsuit alleges that the prosecutorial campaign violates the First Amendment because it discourages distributors from carrying even soft-core porn for fear of tough racketeering penalties.

Adult film rentals have topped 104 million a year-nearly double the number of rentals two years ago-indicating the growing popularity of such films by mainstream Americans, the association contends.

Kenyon earlier in the trial expressed doubts about his ability to judge community standards without the testimony of experts.

"I think there are things the court could say without doubt that would be beyond what the community would stand for-way beyond," Kenyon said. "So-called `snuff movies,' where somebody was being killed right before your very eyes in a sexual way-could we all agree with that?"

But Kenyon, a Republican, former Marine captain and longtime jurist, said that the line, after that, becomes more complicated. "You come into a rather mixed bag that L.A. is, what it adds up to is that the line of demarcation may not be as precise, and therefore the judge may have to look further out on the horizon, if you will."

Drew S. Pitt, a special Justice Department prosecutor, argued that the judge is as qualified as any juror to determine community standards. But after the judge's ruling on Wednesday, Pitt said the department may re-evaluate its usual practice of allowing the films to speak for themselves. "This may indicate that we may have to present expert witnesses," he said.

The fact that the majority of the nation's pornography distributors are headquartered in Los Angeles also makes obscenity prosecutions more difficult here, Pitt added. "Because of that, I think the people in Los Angeles are more aware of it and may tolerate some of it more than they would if the industry wasn't here."

Gottesman and his sales manager, Steven Orenstein, 26, of Los Angeles, still face charges of interstate transportation of child pornography because of a series of films they distributed featuring porn queen Traci Lords. Lords was under the age of 18 when most of the films were made, though Gottesman testified Wednesday he had no idea she was a minor.

He testified that she was the biggest star in the business. "My educated guess, and I'm pretty well educated in that area, I know for a fact there are at least 120 films that she made," Gottesman said. "She was No. 1, and there was no No. 2, she was so far ahead of everyone else. Her movies outsold everyone else 10 to 1."

Last month, a federal judge in Santa Ana granted prosecutors' motion to dismiss child pornography charges against three other men who hired Traci Lords to star in an adult film. The dismissal was granted after a federal appeals court ruled that the men could present a defense that they did not know Lords' true age.

In the present case, Pitt said prosecutors may still be able to forfeit some assets under the child pornography statute, though the amount will depend on what assets they are able to trace to Lords' films.

If convicted on the two child pornography counts, Gottesman could face up to 20 years in prison. Orenstein pleaded guilty in October and has not yet been sentenced.

06/17/89

The San Diego Union-Tribune

LOS ANGELES -- An adult film distributor has been convicted of distributing child pornography by selling videotapes showing teen porn star Traci Lords performing sexual acts while she was a minor.

Rubin Gottesman, 56, of suburban Woodland Hills, was found guilty along with his firm, X-Citement Video, after a non-jury trial before U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon.

"The court finds beyond a reasonable doubt that Gottesman knew or had reason to believe that Traci Lords was a minor at the time," Kenyon said. "The evidence was fairly clear, quite clear."

"The court believes the statute was not simply designed to protect very young minors but minors up to and including the age Traci Lords was at the time," the judge said.

Lords' mother, Patricia Briceland of Redondo Beach, testified in April that Lords, whose real name is Nora Kuzma, was 16 or 17 when she made most of the sexually explicit videotapes.

Gottesman's attorney, Stanley Fleishman, said he will appeal the verdict. He argued during the trial that child pornography laws are a violation of the First Amendment not intended to apply to teen-agers like Lords, who he said looked like she was of age.

"She (Lords) was a grown woman -- this law should not apply to a woman of that age. Justice will be done on appeal," Fleishman said.

Lords was the top X-rated film star in 1985 and 1986, when she made at least 105 adult films.

In the summer of 1986, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office received an anonymous tip that Lords was a minor, and the adult-film industry pulled Lords' films and videotapes out of distribution as a result.

Fleishman had also argued during the trial that Gottesman did not know Lords was under-age in 1987, when he became the target of an undercover Los Angeles police investigation.

An undercover officer posing as an adult-film distributor paid Gottesman to ship several Lords tapes to Hawaii.

The tapes included films such as "Sex Shoot," "Harlequin Affair" and "Screaming Desire."

A federal grand jury indictment returned against Gottesman in April 1988 charged that he distributed obscene material and violated the child pornography laws.

He also was charged with racketeering under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, act.

Last month, however, Kenyon dismissed the obscenity and RICO charges against Gottesman, ruling that in a community as diverse as Southern California he could not determine if the videotapes violated community standards.

The ruling was a major setback for federal prosecutors, who had hoped to use RICO statutes in a number of obscenity cases as well as in the Lords case.

Gottesman faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison when he is sentenced on Aug. 7.

10/24/89

Los Angeles Daily News

An adult-film distributor from Woodland Hills was sentenced in federal court Monday to a year in jail for selling videotapes featuring Traci Lords engaging in sex acts when she was a minor.

Rubin Gottesman was convicted in June along with his Van Nuys company, X-Citement Video Inc. The company was fined $100,000 Monday.

Gottesman could have received up to 30 years in prison on three counts of distributing child pornography.

In imposing sentence, U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon said that he did not want to give in to the strong emotions evoked by the issue of child pornography.

"It is quite true that this particular area raises great emotions," he said. "I think the court therefore is really placed in a position of making sure that a sentence is not designed just simply to react to public furor or incitement."

Prosecutor Drew Pitt, an attorney with the Justice Department's organized crime and racketeering section, asked for the one-year sentence, which he later called appropriate. "It's everything we asked for," he said.

Gottesman, 56, declined comment. His attorney, Stanley Fleishman, vowed to appeal.

Fleishman argued that Gottesman deserved to be given probation and a community service sentence, saying his client was sorry for his "mistake."

But Kenyon said not only was it clear Gottesman knew Lords was underage when the films were made, but that he also "is terribly enamored of the so-called almighty buck. Money runs all through this."

Fleishman contended that the child pornography law is unconstitutional, and was meant to protect children younger than age 16. Lords was 16 or 17 when she made the movies, testimony in the non-jury trial indicated.

" Traci Lords is not a child," and was experienced in the adult film business when she made the movies in the case, Fleishman said.

Date: Sunday, April 1, 1990 Source: By Cheryl Lavin.

Section: SUNDAY MAGAZINE Memo: Fast Track. Vital Statistics.

Copyright CHICAGO TRIBUNE

TRACI LORDS

Occupation: Actress/singer.

Birthday: May 7, 1968.

Birthplace: Steubenville, Ohio.

Real name: Nora Kuzma.

Current home: Hollywood.

Marital status: I`m getting married in September to Brook Weaton, a movie prop master.

Working on: A new movie, ``Cry Baby,`` with Johnny Depp, which will be out this month.

I stay home to watch: Talk shows. I like to see how celebrities handle themselves.

Favorite performer: Brigitte Bardot.

Prized possession: My diamond engagement ring. It`s a gold band with a 1 1/2-carat and 20 other diamonds.

Personal hero: Jack Lord of ``Hawaii Five-O.`` When I was a little girl, I had a crush on him. He drove nice cars, was a little racy and had a bad mouth.

When nobody`s looking, I: Dance around my house naked.

The worst part of my job is: Learning lines. Sometimes your memory goes on the blink when you have a big monologue. It can be very embarrassing when they say, ``Take 40, Traci.``

The one thing I can`t stand is: Women who think they can get whatever they want because of their looks, and men who comb their hair more than I do. I knew I was a grownup when I: Only answered to myself.

My most irrational act: The first time I ever did drugs.

If I`ve learned one thing about life, it`s: Never trust anyone who says, ``Trust me.`` They say it because they`re not willing to prove they`re trustworthy.

The worst time of my life: When I was 18, my whole life came crashing down on my head. I was strung out on cocaine, trying to go through rehab and generally messed up.

My most humbling experience: My mother telling me that I was not as hot as I thought I was, that I looked like garbage and that nobody liked me.

The best time of my life: This past year. I`ve gotten a lot of things I`ve wanted, I`ve come to terms with myself about a lot of things I felt bad about, I`ve done some housecleaning in terms of men and I`m more together than I`ve ever been.

Three words that best describe me: Ambitious, impatient and grateful.

FROM PORN TO THE MAINSTREAM TRACI LORDS CLOTHED FOR `CRY-BABY'

Ryan Murphy Knight-Ridder Newspapers

04/08/90

The Sacramento Bee

There is one advantage to being a former porn queen, says Traci Lords , streetwise and cynical at 21 and about to appear in her first major motion picture that America won't have to be sheepish about asking for at the video store.

That advantage is, she says, that once you go public with your past, you never have to worry about your face cozying up to Cher's or Madonna's on the cover of a supermarket tabloid.

"I mean, what could they write about me that was any more scandalous than what I've already done?" asks Lords, only three years removed from a hard-core porn career that she began at 15 and walked away from at 18. "I don't have to worry about the headline, ` Traci Lords Is a Former Porn Queen!' because that's already been said. And I've said it.

"Look," she says, "The National Enquirer won't touch me. I'm too common now."

The commoner's first big general-release movie opened Friday: "Cry-Baby," directed by John ("Hairspray") Waters, spoofs 1950s-style juvenile delinquents, and has Lords cast as, not surprisingly, a baaaaad girl.

The movie, she says, has done more than give her a new career. Recently engaged to the prop master from "Cry-Baby," Lords' prior life came to a halt when the feds busted the distributors of her films for marketing pornography with (unbeknown to them, they said) a minor. Now, she lives in the Hollywood Hills with her fiance.

She is, she claims today, "disgustingly normal."

"My idea of a wild Friday night is to drink wine and cook spaghetti in my underwear."

Three or so years ago, her poison of choice was much stronger than vino.

"Cocaine," she says tersely. "I was smoking it, yeah, freebasing it." The drugs, she says, were an antidote to pain. After running away from home and making pornographic films, she felt, again not surprisingly, "used up."

"I was a victim of my own youth and stupidity," she says.

At 17 1/2, she almost overdosed, and her brush with death, she figures, saved her life. She woke up in a hospital room, first terrified, then strangely focused. No longer would she be the toy of sleazy porn pushers. She would become what she had always wanted to be anyway, before she says the smooth talkers side-tracked her: a star.

She never lacked for star power. During the height of her porn popularity, Lords' personal appearances in Las Vegas and Japan, touting her movies with titles like "New Wave Hookers," drew legions of fans.

She still knows how to make an entrance. Men stare as she swings into a Hollywood eatery in an elegant black outfit, her platinum hair a-bobbing, her lips Revlon red, her 5-foot-small body effortlessly voluptuous.

Prior to "Cry-Baby," she had made two minor, B-movie general release pictures -- the Roger Corman-produced drive-in staples "Not of This Earth" and "Fast Food" -- and, of course, the slew of XXX-rated ones prior to those.

"Sure, I was familiar with her past," says "Cry-Baby" director Waters.

She plays Wanda Woodward, a girl not unlike Jessica Rabbit: She's not bad, she's just drawn that way.

"She's got a bod that says sex," says Lords of Wanda. "But the catch is, she's an innocent. She walks and men fall over and she can't help it. With this role, I made fun of what people think of me -- the whole sex thing. I wiggle a lot and wear a big bullet bra. My theory is, if I laugh at my past, people will laugh with me."

"She's terrific," says Waters. "Traci's beautiful. . . . She has talent." Not that the talent level is necessarily comparable -- but that's what they said about Joan Crawford, for example, who also dabbled in blue movies before she became a household name. But Crawford was able to make her mark without the hindrance of stigma; rumors of her checkered past only came out long after her image and reputation were assured.

Because of the VCR, Lords' attempted climb to grace faces an additional obstacle. Her prior life will always be out there, rentable on VHS. Her past is competing with her present, and she knows it.

In any case, no acknowledged porn figure has yet made the leap to mainstream stardom. Lords believes she will be the first.

..."People still ask me about it, and in 15 years, they'll still say `Do you remember when, . . . ' " she says. "For the rest of my life, they will ask me."

Only one of Lord's pornographic videos -- "Traci, I Love You," which was made two days after her 18th birthday -- is available legally. The rest, made when she was 15, 16, and 17, were withdrawn from the market when the feds busted their distributors.

She stupidly sold the rights to "Traci, I Love You," she says, and when its contract expires two years from now, her intention is to take the master copy to the beach, burn it, and throw the cinders of her past into the surf.

The actress moved to suburban Los Angeles from Ohio with her mother and three sisters after her parents divorced. But life in the burbs wasn't exciting enough for her, not even her name: Norma Kuzma. She wanted glamour, she wanted excitement. And not being readily available, she decided she would create it.

Mad about Jack Lord, the dashing star of "Hawaii Five-0," she took his last name, borrowed a new first name from her best friend and ran away at 14.

Built like a bombshell even then, there was money -- and drugs -- to be had for one willing to exploit her attributes. At first it was photo spreads in nudie magazines. But eventually, it was hard-core movies. Soon, she was the porno industry's most in-demand actress.

"It's true you can always just walk away from it," she says. "If you can't, there are reasons why. My reasons were drugs and people who surrounded me who just didn't care." Then came the near overdose, and then the bust of three years ago when it was revealed that Lords was under age when she made her films.

"I feel like I'm 30," she says. "I've lived so much."

Ironically, it was the Justice Department's suit against the child pornographers that helped reunite mother and daughter. Patricia Briceland Kuzma was called to the stand in Los Angeles to testify that her daughter was indeed under age when she made films like "Lust in the Fast Lane" and "Sweet Little Things."

Today, says Traci, she and her mother are on the best of terms. "She's a Buddhist, very earthy and supportive. If I called her tomorrow and told her I was going to be a waitress, she'd say great, do it."

Lords says she has cleaned up her own act. She's religious now too, she says, but "I'm not into established religion at all. I'm more into the universe -- karma and fate and destiny, crystals. That's more my thing, what makes me tick. I don't talk about it much, because people think it's weird, but I think it's intelligent, really." NBC, Lords says, is doing her life story. Called "Out of the Blue," she says it will air in December.

"Finally, after three years of haggling, it got the green light. Some people have said that Christina Applegate (the blond vixen from `Married . . . With Children') would be good as me, but I think she's too limited of an actress. I want them to offer it to Drew Barrymore. Now she'd be perfect. . . . She's got that woman/child thing. Just like me."

10/29/89

The San Francisco Chronicle

""GUYS ARE petrified of me," says former sin strip slave Traci Lords on the set of John Waters' ""Cry-Baby." ""Men are so afraid of me it's ridiculous. I have that bombshell thing without even trying." She pouts, then says, ""Listen, I'll answer your questions, but let's go to my dressing room first. These mosquitoes are killing me." Lords stands up. She pulls down a halter strap, slathers on some bug juice. I follow her into the trailer. The door slams.

In ""Cry-Baby," John Waters' musical about the birth of rock and roll, Lords plays Wanda Woodward, trailer trash queen, a hell-raising '50s she-cat in short skirts. Or so it would seem. Although she loves to make the squares squirm by flirting, you find out that - big joke, this - Wanda's a virgin.

When Lords reached the tender age of 21, the cast - which includes Iggy Pop, Patty Hearst, Mink Stole and Joey Heatherton - and crew of ""Cry-Baby" celebrated. They gave her a chocolate cake, and in a way, they gave her high school years back, too. The film has given her a taste of the kind of innocent high school experience she never had.

Five years ago, when she was 16, Traci Lords wasn't waving pompons in gym. She wasn't cramming for a test. Lords was making films with obscure, elusive titles like ""Talk Dirty to Me III" and ""New Wave Hooker." It's hard to say how many films were made, or how many ""scenes" were shot, but she estimates she's circulating in about 70 films. ""There's one film, three cameras, and you end up in five movies. That's just how it is."

Until one day in 1986, when the FBI knocked on her door. It was 6 a.m. ""I was half-naked. They came barging into the house, put me up against the wall and left me standing there for at least 20 minutes. They trashed my apartment, then drove me around in a car for about two hours. They were trying to scare me, to find out who I was . . . how old I was. I was petrified."

It's rumored that Lords' mom owned the rights to all her pictures. Perhaps Lords, by calling the FBI herself, was able to take the films off the market, jack sky-high the underground price and make her mom extremely rich. And there's another version: Lords and a boyfriend were given thousands of dollars and a car, with instructions to go to France and make a film. Months later, Traci and the stud returned - with no money, no car and no film. Big trouble in a business reputed to break arms like breadsticks. It's possible, then, that Lords called the feds for protection, even becoming a secret witness against those who wouldn't understand that she spent the money on French bread.

When Lords coolly describes her plans for the next five years, it's like listening to somebody twice her age. And when she talks about her past, which she does easily, nothing slips that isn't supposed to. The FBI didn't come at her request, her mom doesn't run her business. To this day, Lords claims she doesn't know who tipped off the FBI. ""I have no idea to this day who, when, why. I have no idea what happened," she says.

But the ensuing publicity ended a successful career - established wholly when she was underage. And the bust landed her in headlines across the country.

...First there was ""Warm Up With Traci Lords ," a tame workout tape. Then there was last year's remake of a Roger Corman vehicle, ""Not of This Earth" (it wasn't), her first nonporn vehicle. And with ""Out of the Blue: The Traci Lords Story" being developed by NBC and with negotiations under way with a major label for a recording contract, Lords isn't going to disappear.

John Waters had not seen any of her movies when he sent Lords his script, nor was he concerned about her legend. ""Believe me, in my world, nobody's background is a problem," says Waters, the man who cast Sonny Bono in ""Hairspray" and Patty Hearst as Wanda's mom in ""Cry-Baby."

""I THINK she looks like a movie star," he says, a little wild-eyed on the ""Cry-Baby" set. Yes, but can she act? ""I think she's funny. She fits the part. She wouldn't have gotten the part if she hadn't done well with the screen test."

If Lords successfully crosses over, it might be because she really was a child porn star. She always looked Catholic schoolgirl innocent. Lords isn't dirty. She's camp.

Waters disagrees. ""The people I cast are not camp at all. They are my dream all-star cast. I got everybody I wanted to get for this movie, except Mother Teresa. I think of them as stars. And I'm impressed by every one of them. I'm star-struck by them. I'm not star-struck by Al Pacino. Nothing against him, but I like what they politely refer to as "creative casting.' "

When she was 12, Lords came to Southern California from Steubenville, Ohio, with her mother on a Greyhound bus. Dad was a steelworker who stayed behind. Lords was shy, the quiet kid who rarely shows up in class. And then one day, she got wiiiild.

""L.A. was so different from anything I'd ever been near. I was from this dirty little town. I knew everyone in the whole school. Then, all of a sudden, I was out there. People were smoking cigarettes, grass - people were saying "f - -.'

""I was so rebellious. I was so angry, I didn't have a dad or any male in my life, so I went looking for a father figure. I found it in the wrong guy. And from there it's just the classic "Star 80' syndrome."

Lords took her fake ID to a bar and met a 23-year-old ""jerk boyfriend." She ran away. Mom called the police, but Lords didn't want to be found. ""When I was in high school, I started doing uppers, downers and speed. And then when I was 15, I got into freebasing cocaine. That was my worst enemy and my best friend all at once." Lords says she made movies for just a little more than a year, though she was ""in the business," doing centerfolds for men's magazines, before that.

Typically, Lords' movie contracts were signed under the influence. And she didn't make as much money as people think. ""I maybe made about $80,000 the whole time I was doing everything. Which is nothing. But people don't understand that doing X-rated films is nothing like doing real films. You don't get royalties and there is no union. There's none of these things to protect you. They get these stupid little girls off the street that are 15 years old and have run away from home. They say, "We'll give you 300 bucks to do this.' And the girls do it. That's all there is to it. The girls never see another dime. It's sick, actually.

""I woke up one morning and people that I didn't even know were sitting around in my living room doing drugs, burning holes in my brand-new couch. I just had to get out of there. I started walking."

Not everybody walks away. John Holmes, who died of AIDS in 1988, didn't. ""He died. I didn't die. AIDS has always been a fear of mine. I've been tested a million times. I don't have it, thank God. But I hit my rock bottom when I was 17."

05/09/93

The Washington Post

"Where do you want to do it?" asks Nora Louise Kuzma without a hint of irony. "On the couch? I love the couch."

Why should there be anything ironic about this question? She is, after all, only talking about an interview. But Nora Louise Kuzma is, after all, more widely known as Traci Lords .

Lords, 25, began her show business career in the adult film world, starring in titles such as "New Wave Hookers" and "Beverly Hills Copulator." She appeared in more than 100 videos and got hooked on drugs, all before she turned 18. This did not sit well with the FBI; though Lords herself was never charged with any crime, her films were declared child pornography and pulled from the shelves.

She left the business in 1986, began taking acting lessons and cleaned up her lifestyle. Says she got happily married, thanks. The actress has carved out a hard-earned legitimate career, appearing tonight, for example, in the ABC mini-series "Stephen King's The Tommyknockers," one of the network's May Sweeps Events.

The last time Lords did nudity on-screen was in the lead role in a 1988 remake of the Roger Corman sci-fi cult film "Not of This Earth." "They asked me to take my top off - I thought that was a step up," she laughs.

She's also had guest shots on "MacGyver," "Married ... With Children" and other TV shows, and a feature role in John Waters's 1990 musical comedy "Cry-Baby." She's recently completed a cameo take in the Baltimore director's upcoming film "Serial Mom."

But back to the couch.

Is this pretty, demure young woman with the deep green eyes and the Veronica Lake swath of blond hair, reclining in the lobby of the swank Omni Shoreham Hotel, the same person who did all those naughty things so many years ago? Not really, Lords contends. "My X-rated mess happened when I was 15, 16, 17 years old; I was a teenager," she says. "Now I'm pretty much a grown woman, and I've really started to figure out who I am and what I want. You change a lot."

Lords talks with considerable ease and candor about her past, but there is never the quavering-voice confession of the rich, wounded star, never the obnoxious manner of the self-helped celebrity who has seen the light of righteousness and demands that you see it too.

As John Waters says, "Her past is always gonna be there, people are always going to bring it up, but so what? It's a good story."

That story begins in Steubenville, Ohio - the town that gave the world Dean Martin - where Nora Louise was born in 1968. Dad was a steelworker, Mom a housewife and Nora Louise was the second of four daughters. Asked if she gets back there much, she finds the notion so hilarious she can barely get out a "no" between laughs.

Then her mood suddenly darkens: "My father's there." Does she have any relationship with him? "No," she says softly. "Steubenville to me is like a black and white picture - that's what it represents to me. I just have really bad memories of it."

Her middle-American childhood was unhappy. "My father was an alcoholic, and my parents split up when I was very young, and my mother moved us to California when I was 12 years old. It was a tremendous shock for me. I remember thinking, `Oh, it's my fault my parents split up, and my father's an alcoholic because of me.' "

(Her mother could not be reached for comment, and the only Kuzma in the Steubenville phone listings said he was not Nora's father.)

One other important thing happened to Lords before the move west: puberty. "I was the first girl in my fourth grade class to have breasts," she says. "And we're talking breasts. Overnight." And with such attributes comes male attention, like it or not.

"The boys all thought I was a whore because I was very well endowed" - she's talking faster now, chopping the ends of her words, with a touch of anger - "I didn't understand what I had done wrong. I was 10 years old walking around with a ponytail being checked out by 17-year-olds." Her response became a "bad girl" stance: "I'd walk around and snap my gum and stick my butt out," she says. "When I started doing that boys became terrified."

In California things got worse; where "the boys in Ohio were running around pulling bra straps, the boys in California were into Jack Daniels and cocaine."

With a rarely seen mother - "she was working and going to school to get her college degree" - no child support from Dad, insecurities about her looks and a need for peer acceptance, Lords, then 14, turned to drugs. "It started with me walking down the corridors of Redondo Union High {in Redondo Beach}, me and my girlfriends. Pot, coke, whatever, you could get it all," she says. "It was a cool thing and I very much wanted to be in."

What she got into was pornography. Lords bought a fake ID, answered a "models wanted" ad in the Los Angeles Times, ran away from home. And Nora Louise Kuzma was history. Modeling meant money and money meant drugs; at 15 she bared all in Penthouse magazine, then plunged into the X-rated film world.

But it was "never about sex," she claims. "Or an obsession with sex or a need for sex or anything. It was about drug addiction. For me, all porn ever was was drugs. I had no inhibitions or morality or sense of anything. All I cared about was getting high. It was always about drug addiction."

With a surname taken from "Hawaii Five-0's" Jack Lord - "I thought he was the hottest thing I'd ever seen. I loved his hair" - and a cocaine monkey on her back, Lords freebased her way through three years of sexual abandon. Yet she insists that her teenage years were not that unusual.

Come on, Traci. "I think the only thing that's different from me and just about any other kid growing up is that mine was filmed," says Lords. "Most of the people I know have tried this and that, smoked some pot, certainly had sex. It's the way it happened to me that interests people."

After the FBI swooped in and ended her illicit career (Lords did make one legal-age film, "Traci, I Love You," shot in France just after she turned 18), she decide to opt for the straight life and joined Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. Which didn't really work. "Meetings just made me that much more needy," she says. Though she readily admits that those organizations "can work for others, they had nothing to do with recovery for me. It was such a clique {in Hollywood}. They smoked too many cigarettes, they drank too much coffee and all the guys hit on me."

It's a story she's told a thousand times, and this certainly won't be the last. And you better believe there's a moral: "You have to watch what you do and take responsibility for your life," she says.

As corny as that sounds, if she doesn't really mean it, then she's one hell of an actress. "They tell you when you're young you're supposed to get your ya-yas out, but they don't tell you the hasty mistakes you make can come back and haunt you."

So Traci Lords has quit porn and drugs, says she doesn't even drink or eat meat, and weakens only for one cigarette a week. She's been married for three years to Brook Yeaton, 25, a prop master she met on the "Cry-Baby" set - "we do normal things, go to flea markets a lot" - and says she has a strong relationship with her mother and three sisters. She's even been baptized by John Waters. ("I have the power through the Universal Church," reveals Reverend Waters. "Traci's the only baptism I've ever done, but I'm available. It's $6.")

But can she act?

"I would have never cast her in `Cry-Baby' if she didn't have talent," offers Waters. "Nobody looks like her, she can make fun of herself, and I've never minded a woman with a past. Especially a past she's overcome."

"She's not intimidated by things that ordinarily inhibit people," says Frank Konigsberg, executive producer of "The Tommyknockers," who cast Lords as a vampish, small-town postmistress. "She's kind of fearless."

Lords may have overcome her past drug abuse, but her image as an "ex-porn queen" (words she refuses to utter) continues to follow her like a mangy dog. "I think she has lost roles in other films {because of her image}," says Konigsberg. And the actress readily concurs: "I've lost so many roles that had nothing to do with talent, it had to do with a producer. Or a producer's wife. I'm seen as a threat."

Waters has seen the fear. "I've been on planes with her and people are scared of her," he chortles. "I find that amusing."

The boys were afraid of her in high school. Not much has changed in 11 years.

Though many of her roles have been scaled-down versions of the steamier scenes from her past, Lords knows you don't go from porn princess to playing Helen Keller overnight. "I don't think there's anything wrong with sexpots, and it's not all I do," she says. "God knows Farrah Fawcett had to get into a burning bed and get beaten by a man before anyone said she could act."

In the first two hours of "Tommyknockers," she says, "I'm the sexpot, and in the second half I'm the hideous monster." But her "burning bed" may be the upcoming film "Skinner." She portrays the beautiful victim of a serial killer's carving knife who becomes, well, un-beautiful. "It was the most challenging role I've ever played," says Lords, who wore considerable makeup to look properly grotesque. "I got to play something completely not me."

What doesn't destroy you will make you stronger; this seems to be the case with Lords. She leans back on the couch, sips from a glass of soda water. The woman is content with life, serious about her career; she's tamed her wild streak: "It controlled me, now I control it." For five years she has worked with Children of the Night, a Los Angeles-based organization that helps runaways.

Lords wants kids, "before I'm 30," though she's "very afraid of being a bad mother." Perhaps that is understandable. She also says, "This world can be a terrible place to bring children into." As well she knows.

06/17/93

Newsday

TRACI LORDS still has a bit of an image problem. Although it has been nearly a decade since she exposed herself in "The Sex Goddess," "New Age Hookers" and all those other films that earned her star billing at stag parties across America; although she has since cleaned up her act, taken acting classes, and tried, really tried, to be taken seriously as an actress, as a human being - it still hasn't been enough for people, especially men, to not think of sex when they hear the name Traci Lords .

Even reporters, who are supposed to know better, like to turn their one hour of time with Lords into a Penthouse Variations letter. "One writer at a national magazine spent the first three paragraphs talking about the way my lips were wrapped around the straw in my Coke," she says during a recent interview, sipping her second cappuccino and laughing at the recent memory. "I mean, it was so slimy. I read it and I thought, `What does his wife think when she sees this?' "

But Lords, who is dressed hiply conservative in a black ankle-length skirt and crop top, low heels and almost no makeup, is not offended. "I think it's very funny that people give me that kind of power. If they want to, then by God, hand it over."

Now a wiser 25, Lords is going where no skin-flick performer has gone before. While maintaining her bad-girl reputation by portraying campy, PG-and-R-rated versions of her former X-rated self in films and television, she is breaking into the mainstream. Gradually.

Others have tried and failed. Harry Reams, the star of "Deep Throat" and "The Devil in Miss Jones," made one legitimate film, a bomb called "National Lampoon Goes to the Movies" (1981), before throwing in the towel. His "Deep Throat" co-star, Linda Lovelace Marchiano, wrote a book about her "Ordeal," as it was titled, but never landed real commercial work. Marilyn Chambers, of "Behind the Green Door" fame, starred as a bloodsucker in David Cronenberg's 1977 horror film, "Rabid," but found other Hollywood doors closed.

Lords is lucky. She got out of it when she was still young - having gotten into it when she was 15. Now, both time and the times are on her side.

Madonna's X-rated picture book, "Sex," couldn't have hurt any, managing to blur the line between pornography and popular culture. And filmmakers seem less skittish about recruiting from the skin trade these days. For instance, porn actress Andrea Naschak will be starring in director Joel Hershman's feature debut, "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me," an offbeat comedy due out this summer.

Lords is a step ahead, however, with several films in the can and in the works. She recently appeared in "The Tommyknockers," a two-part ABC movie based on a Stephen King novel in which she played a postmistress-turned-alien, who cavorted with married men and shot a laser beam from her lipstick tube.

Her next film is called "Skinner," a thriller scheduled for fall release, in which she plays a half-flayed victim of a serial killer who seeks revenge on her assailant. Lords speaks only "baby-talk" in John Waters' "Serial Mom" (currently in production), which stars Kathleen Turner as "a Betty Crocker who kills," Lords says.

So she's playing bimbos now: Lords couldn't be happier. Specifically citing the King project, she says, "It's prime-time TV and it's the most mainstream thing I've ever done. The bottom line is that it's a long way from porn. I'm at a place where I can look back and go, Yeah, that was me. It doesn't hurt me."

She hasn't always been so comfortable with her past. "Black-and-white and one-dimensional" is how she recalls her hometown of Steubenville, Ohio. Her father was an alcoholic. "It was the classic case of mind abuse and mind games," says Lords, whose real name is Nora Louise Kuzma.

When she was 12, her parents separated and she moved to Redondo Beach, Calif., with her mother and sisters. Quiet and insecure, she began taking drugs, mostly speed, to fit in. To support her growing habit, she answered a "models-wanted" ad. Dropping out of high school, she spent the next three years allegedly making as many as 70 films.

The string of movies ended in 1988 when FBI agents broke into her Los Angeles apartment and arrested her as a suspect in a pornography ring. Although she was never charged with a crime, it was enough of a shock to jolt her into straightening up, Lords says. She joined Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and enrolled in acting classes at the Strasberg Institute. Her first "legitimate" film role was in a remake of the Roger Corman sci-fi picture, "Not of This Earth."

"When I did it, I was eighteen and out to prove to the world that they were wrong about me," she recalls. But it wasn't the launching pad she had in mind; she still had to undress for two nude scenes.

Lords also began lecturing on college campuses about her descent and rise, and working with the Children of the Night organization, which provides help to street kids. "I don't preach," she says. "That's not my style. I'm totally against any kind of censorship. I think people should be able to watch anything they want to." She claims that she has never seen a porn film, not even one of her own. "Just the thought of seeing one of my own is absolutely horrible."

She is more at ease talking about her drug addiction. "I tell kids that there were times in my life when I really liked drugs. I had a really good time when I did them, but after a point it wasn't fun anymore, it nearly killed me. I mainly tell them the pros and cons of a kinda weird story, which is my life.

"As horrifying as much of it is, it's actually kind of amusing. If you can't laugh at yourself, you're truly doomed."

A few years ago, she met her savior in director John Waters, who, like Lords, was also seeking respectability in mainstream cinema. He cast her as a tough-talking sex-kitten in his 1990 film, "Cry-Baby," opposite Johnny Depp. Lords received favorable reviews spoofing her pouty image.

It was on the "Cry-Baby" set that she met Brook Yeaton, a prop master who she married that year. Yeaton is Waters' nephew, which makes the director Lords' beloved (if eccentric) uncle-in-law.

Didn't her past pose a problem?

"You must understand," Lords explains, "that Brook is not a normal person. Divine {the late actor who appeared as a female in most of his films} was his godfather!" She pauses. "Or . . . god-mother. Up until the age of ten, my husband thought that men and men were supposed to be together, and women and women. He thought that his parents were the exception."

Traci Lords' passion turns to techno music

Chuck Campbell

03/31/95

The Knoxville News-Sentinel

The music industry is full of all types, so it isn't surprising that former porn star Traci Lords would seek fortune there. And though it might seem unexpected for her to submerge herself in the cyber world of techno music, the genre's trendy, style-obsessed way is a natural for Lords.

Plus, she doesn't have to be a particularly good singer, nor do her lyrics have to be especially profound for her to succeed in techno. She just needs sufficient support in the studio.

That she has on "1,000 Fires." Electonics wizard Ben Watkins, a pair from the Thompson Twins (who are now in the group Babble) and Mike Edwards of Jesus Jones are all on board, giving the actress a sturdy foundation.

Lords shares a songwriting credit on seven of the 10 songs - including all the better ones - and her voice works fine: It isn't too thin, and it's always in a comfortable range for the processed music. It's hard to imagine she'd do well with a Mariah Carey ballad, but that's not what techno is all about.

After The Fall

By SUSAN CHENERY

07/15/95

Sydney Morning Herald

YOU HAVE to hand it to the Americans - they do love a bad girl. In spite of themselves. Particularly, evidence would suggest, a bad blonde girl. The Mae, the Lana, the Marilyn, the Madonna, the Sharon, the Courtney, the Drew, in a straight line of succession as icon. The painted, peroxide, pneumatic parody of female sexuality. The blonder, it seems, the better.

While a male public figure can crash his career overnight with a kamikaze car trip down Sunset Boulevard, these goddesses flaunt their genitalia, their drug addictions, their pain, their dangerous carnality, their attitude; they strut in fishnet stockings and red satin pumps. They provoke, they tease, they stridently stream expletives; they inhale. They have Pasts.

And, honey, they never apologise.

Who can tell what lurks in the seams of the American psyche? In the hearts of the silent majority? But bad blondes are adored - and they are forgiven. Traci Lords 's prurient past, however, leaves the rest of those flagrant faux-blondes for dead. Now, hers is a reputation with a capital R. "I've done it all," she is the first to admit. "And I am not ashamed of who I am, not for one minute."

Today, she slides sideways to a showy stop in her souped-up sports car in the gravel driveway of her Los Angeles record company, spraying stones across summer lawn. Long, lean and lissome in jeans and leather jacket, she strides through the carved wooden doors of the old Hollywood Hills mansion, clicking confidently across the parquet floor, folding with grace into a chair. A 26-year-old woman whose flawless porcelain beauty is so untrammelled, so fine, that it disguises at first the steel in the wide, flinty, speckled eyes. Eyes that flash without warning.

She is funny in the tough, edgy way that bitter experience can confer. But the manifestation of her past is there in the voice; the deep come-with-me-to-the-boudoir voice; a voice that promises to blow your mind. And it is there in the extraordinarily lascivious mouth: glistening, full, fat, carnivorous lips that are almost obscene against the dazzlingly white teeth.

It was this devastating mixture of tensile strength, pure sexuality and angelic innocence that got her into trouble in the first place. Down below us the city of Los Angeles simmers in a toxic haze as she drinks Coke, chain-smokes and tells her story. There is, you see, the old Traci and the new Traci. Two separate lives. "I'm not really bad," she smiles. "I'm just strong." On August 8 the new Traci will be seen on the hip TV soap Melrose Place. The old Traci, well, her acting career was pretty much from the waist down.

Warning: this is not a pretty story.

Traci Lords became a fallen woman while she was still a child. Already in free-fall as a 13-year-old Hollywood runaway, a plump brunette called Nora Kuzma, by 14 she was more than averagely acquainted with hard drugs. "I lost three years of my life free-basing cocaine."

By a blonde and nubile 15, with a sleek, perfect body, she had become Traci Lords . Legend. Mobbed in Paris and Tokyo when she made appearances; in the States drooling men would line up for hours to get her autograph. While other little girls were dreaming of becoming Homecoming Queen, Traci Lords was a porn queen - committing indecent acts in tawdry films such as Beverly Hills Copulator. The biggest star in a $3 billion business. "She was a nasty little girl who enjoyed being bad," a fellow, er, actor once told a journalist. "She was as cute as can be." Her badly lit, shoddily-shot videos - heavy emphasis on the zoom lens - outsold those of other porn actresses 10 to one. Even dope-sick, as she was, and demeaned, her eyes glassy and glazed, she had on film a seductive savvy innocence. Coltish, tough, platinum Lolita who was defiant and combative with the men with whom she was having sex. "Call it temporary insanity," she says now, with a hollow laugh. "When I was younger, I was very, very destructive. I was passionately angry. I was very rebellious. I was exorcising my demons."

But by 18 it was over. She was busted by the FBI for being under age. In truly bad-girl style she did a deal and walked away, but not before sending several of the men who had exploited her to jail for violating Federal child-pornography laws. The mob reportedly was so enraged at losing millions of dollars when hundreds of thousands of her videos were pulled from the shelves, they put a contract out on her. But the traitorous golden goose was ahead of them. She was checking out anyway. One night she emptied a near-lethal syringe of cocaine into a vein. "I was f---ed up," she says, shrugging her shoulders and blowing cigarette smoke hard. "I was a mess. I did not want to live." When she woke up in hospital she was skeletal, washed up, ruined and not even 20.

But she might as well live. So, like everybody else in America, she went into recovery. "It has taken me years to feel OK about myself."

Ambitious starlets on the B-movie circuit are a dime a dozen in Hollywood. But when Lords set out to claw her way to the top she was coming from the wrong end of the alphabet. The X-movie circuit. Beyond the pale. Perhaps it is a strangely contradictory country with a big heart that can forgive and embrace its children who fall by the wayside; perhaps it's that Traci's story of family dysfunction, self-abuse, drug-abuse, attempted suicide, institutionalisation and the rehabilitation is so utterly commonplace; perhaps she is the embodiment, as it were, of American Success, and the extremes from which it springs: tragedy and survival. Or maybe she is merely a novelty, a curiosity, an exquisitely beautiful freak show.

But today she is a mainstream, albeit tarnished, icon. Details magazine recently went so far as to refer to her as "America's Sweetheart" on its cover. And she is starring on family television. "It is how far I have come that fascinates people. The thing that people miss, though, is that what is happening now is as bizarre as anything that happened then. I am on my way. But I am very impatient. I want things to happen now." She brings her hand down on the table and laughs.

Her self-referential techo-dance album is in the charts. "I wanted to do, like, a really edgy dance record," she explains. "I found a lot of record companies that said, 'OK, we can exploit that you are an actress, you know, whatever, we will package you and put you in the studio with 10, like, cool songs'. But I wanted progressive techno. It was really hard to get anybody to take me seriously. So I just waited. I figured if I never make a record, I never make a record. I held out."

Now there are guest roles in Roseanne ("Like anyone else I am sure she can be a monster, but I don't know her to be that kind of person who wakes up in the morning and goes 'OK, I am rich and powerful and I am going to f--- with everyone today' "), Married With Children, miniseries such as Stephen King's Tommyknockers and the role in Melrose Place that will not easily be forgotten. When her Melrose Place appearance screened in the US, ratings soared. "I am the sweetest girl at first but then I turn into a monster," she says. "I am involved in a cult. I am a cool card, I could snap at the drop of a hat. I cause a lot of hell."

11/8/98

Real2Reel@webtv.net watched Traci Lords interview on Roseanne's TV show: "Very sad in parts, and it brought tears to Roseanne's eyes. She talked about being fully developed at age 10, and being called a whore before she even knew what it meant. She was sexually abused by a family friend at age 10, and she said that every single girl she met in the sex industry has been abused. The reason why she came on Roseanne is because she is a good friend, and Traci did not like the unauthorized biographies done about her lately. She said that she is not a statistic and says she was high on coke most of the time she was in the industry."

Brad Williams writes on rec.arts.movies.erotica: "Traci is quite good at self-promotion, though it sort of suprises me that Roseanne, another master of that craft, would fall for such BS.
If her porn experience was soo horrifying and all that, she wouldn't be running around using the name "Traci Lords." Here is one example of where I have zero sympathy for the perfomer and support the industry itself. She's the one who obtained the bogus birth certificate that lead to the bogus driver's license. This "coked-up" bit is a lot of bulls--- and trying to convince the public of how "she didn't know what she was doing due to drugs." Hey, if she was hooked on coke, who was the f---ing dumbass that got hooked? She didn't claim that she being force-fed coke did she? There were porn producers looking at long jail terms over this when they did nothing wrong except trust that one Nora Kuzma's driver's license was accurate. Where's her sympathy for the people who got hounded by the Feds due to her duplicity?

"I met "Traci Lords" once here in Atlanta was she was touring the radiowaves and making public appearances about the time she was on Melrose Place. She was in a very crowded bar where she was hardly recognized, except by me. She'll talk porn when it's not "on the record" so to speak, and I didn't get an impression she was so loathful of her past as she publicly proclaims. She wears some pretty garish and harsh makeup these days, so a lot of porn fans who saw her movies and might not have seen her since wouldn't probably recognize her. She's fairly nice in person once you sort of let her know that you aren't some mark for bulls---.

"She's just out to make a buck, which in and of itself is fine by me. To try and capitalize on being a porn star and yet dismiss at the same time as some drug-induced haze she barely remembers is a lot of s--- though. Porn made her....she can't act her way out of a bag, doesn't look so good any more, and can't sing any better than Lassie barking. Without her porn past, she's just another face in the crowd and unmarketable. Obviously she needs some bucks and exposure now since she's touring the talk-circuit for exposure. That part is kind of amusing."

12/07/99

Traci Lords Wins Lawsuit

LOS ANGELES –– (AP) Former porn star Traci Lords has won a nearly $130,000 judgment against Caballero, a distributor of adult videos who sold her only legal pornographic movie without permission.

Lords made dozens of X-rated movies as a teenager between age 15 and 17.

The movie in question, "Traci, I Love You," was her only legal film, made in Cannes, France, days after she turned 18. Her other films are illegal in the United States due to her age.

The verdict came against Caballero Control Corp., which two years ago was selling the movie and a video culling of clips from the movie to which she believed she owned the rights. A federal jury found that Caballero violated Lords' rights and awarded her $128,753 in damages for the movies. The jury further found that the use of Lords' name and likeness on the video box were worth $750.

Now let's see if Traci is ever able to collect this money.

Traci Lords in Denial

5/00

From: http://www.dailyradar.com/features/showbiz_feature_page_63_1.html

In a private conference room, two floors below E3's gigantic neon excitement, sat the icon of taboo: Traci Lords. While Lords has parlayed her name recognition into a pseudo-legitimate showbiz career, she will always be known as the teenager who was illegally burning up the silver screen in such classics as Beverly Hills Copulator, Sex Fifth Avenue, and one of the finest adult films of all time: the original New Wave Hookers.

Eagerly signing copies of Blade and Virtuosity, Lords had a crowd of game industry folk drooling over her blue snakeskin dress. Trying desperately not to stare at the extreme cleavage Lords was sporting, I sat down hoping to learn about porno's most notorious refugee. Who knew that Traci is in a deep state of denial about her fame?

12/14/00

Traci Lords Moans On First Wave TV Show

AJB writes: Just watching some of the boob tube, seeing a science fiction show called "First Wave". In this episode, Traci (playing the recurring role of Jordan Radcliffe) is strapped naked to the surgical table of some hideous alien creatures. They start experimenting on her and --- THERE IT WAS --- the classic wailing banshee erotic moaning of Traci Lords, the wailing the launch 100,000 loads in the 1980s. She was somewhat more subdued than her marvellous 1980s acting style but it was a pleasant little trip down mammary lane for me. Of course I know most RAMErs were never into her screeching but it was my fond introduction to one of the greatest clichés of porn.

Director James DiGiorgio writes: Lukey--Tell AJB I had an even better Traci Lords auditory experience. A number of years ago, a friend of mind asked me if I'd supervise an ADR session for the "Highlander" TV show. This means going to a sound stage and re-recording some dialogue for the show. Anyway, I get down there and guess who the 'talent' is? Yep, Traci Lords. And get this, most of the audio that needed replacing was of Traci moaning for a scene where she goes into some kind of trance of something. I stood there, remembering fondly her videos, with a huge hardon (well, huge for me at least). I admit I had Traci perform many more takes than was actually necessary, but hey, it was like music to my ears.