For those who don’t recall, Traci Lords was an adult movie actress back in the eighties. There was a big scandal when it was revealed that virtually all of her movies had made when she was underage (she used fake ID). But all of the accounts I’ve read say things like “authorities learned she was underage”. Has anyone ever been identified as the person who gave this information to the authorities?
One speculation I’ve read was that it was Lords herself. Has she ever made a statement on the issue?
Fun but useless fact - she also appeared nude while underaged as the centerfold in the edition of Penthouse that had nude pictures of then-Miss America Vanessa Williams.
And she was 16 at the time and nobody ever demands that all copies of that issue be pulled because of child pornography, which ought to say something about the legality of nude photography without sex.
Of course, it doesn’t answer the question. It does quote several people in the industry who think that Traci turned herself in so she could get out of the business.
The theory, if you can dignify something with as little coherence as what’s presented as a theory, goes something like this.
Traci had an actual U.S. passport with her fake age on it. That meant she was probably working with the feds all along. It’s known that the feds had been surveilling her and everybody involved with her movies for almost the entire time she was working underage. It wasn’t a week or so after she formed her own production company and made a legitimate movie on her eighteenth birthday that the feds stepped in with the bust. This literally destroyed all the competition, because all the underage films had to be taken off the market and destroyed. She had a monopoly on the hottest film in porn. And she marketed herself as a victim, instead of a coked-up raging narcissist nymphomaniac, so she could be the only porn actor to be accepted in mainstream films. That was a successful ploy. She also made the move right when AIDS started becoming a known thread in the business.
That actually makes a better case than what the book presents. (The book has many important interviews, but it’s just awful as a book or as a history.)
At this point I doubt that the real answer is available publicly. Maybe someday.
How could they pull all the copies? It was revealed 2 years after the magazine came out - it wasn’t on store shelves anymore. Or do you mean they haven’t prosecuted anyone for having a copy of that magazine, but they have prosecuted for having copies of her porn?
I mean that you can’t legally buy a copy of her underage porn videos in the U.S. and they would be pulled if someone offered them on eBay or even an adult film site. The magazine is freely available even on mainstream sites like Amazon.