, if you want to make it in time.
At the age of 15, Lords became pregnant by her high school boyfriend. Afraid of her mother's reaction, she went to Hayes for help. He arranged for her to have an abortion without her mother's knowledge.[3] Searching for a job in order to get money for the abortion, she got introduced to Hayes' friend Lynn for whom she started working as a babysitter. Lynn offered her help to solve her job problems by getting her a false driver’s license. Her new ID with the name Kristie Elizabeth Nussman stated she was 22 rather than 15. In February 1984, she answered a newspaper advertisement for Jim South's World Modeling Talent Agency. Posing as her stepfather, Hayes drove her to the agency.[5] After signing a contract, she began working as a nude model and appeared in magazines such as Velvet, Juggs or Club. In August, when she was hired to model for Penthouse magazine, Lords was asked to choose a stage name. She chose Traci, one of the popular names she had longed for growing up and Lords, after the actor Jack Lord since she was a fan of the television series Hawaii Five-O, in which he portrayed the character of Steve McGarrett. The September 1984 issue, for which centerfold she was paid $5,000, became the best-selling issue in the history of Penthouse. After some of her schoolmates recognized her in the Velvet magazine pictorial, she left high school and never came back.[2]
Lords made her first film in October 1984, when she appeared in What Gets Me Hot! alongside Tom Byron, who later became her boyfriend off-screen.[6] She first appeared only in a non-sex role, but was later replaced with a hardcore scene. In her next film, Those Young Girls, she appeared alongside another female pornstar Ginger Lynn. After appearing in the porn parody of the film Splash, Talk Dirty to Me Part III, which won the AVN Award for the best film, Lords was hailed as the "Princess of Porn". She became one of the highest-paid pornstars of that time, earning over $1,000 a day. Besides her work in porn, she also appeared in the music video for "Gimme Gimme Good Lovin'" by the heavy metal band Helix. Lords continued making more films until the fall of 1985 when she decided to "retire" from the industry. Afterwards, she met Stuart Dell who became her boyfriend, manager and business partner. In January 1986, she announced her return to porn with the formation of TLC (The Traci Lords Company). Dell and Lords made a distribution deal with Sy Adler, an industry veteran who ran Vantage International, that they would produce three films for the company. In March, the first TLC feature, Traci Takes Tokyo, was released. The second, Beverly Hills Copulator, was released afterwards and the third film, Screamer, was shelved.[6][7]
In late May 1986, around three weeks after Lords' 18th birthday, authorities discovered she had been underage when she appeared in about 75 pornographic films. The owners of her movie agency and X-Citement Video, Inc. were arrested (See United States v. X-Citement Video.) She was taken into a protective custody and hired a high-profile lawyer, Leslie Abramson. On July 10, district attorney's investigators searched Lords' Redondo Beach home, the Sun Valley offices of Vantage International Productions, a major producer of adult films, and the Sherman Oaks offices of modeling agent Jim South. South and other industry officials said that Lords, on seeking employment, provided a California driver's license, a U.S. passport and a birth certificate, which stated that her name was Kristie Nussman and gave a birth date of November 17, 1962. Leslie Jay, spokeswoman for Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, also said Lords showed identification indicating that she was over 18 before the photos for the September 1984 issue were taken.[8] 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. Two adults who knew Lords but who requested anonymity said they saw her picture in the adult magazine Velvet in July 1984, and 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."[9][10]
On July 17, video rental shops and adult movie theaters were ordered to pull all material featuring Lords from their shelves. John Weston, attorney of the Adult Film Association of America, said distributors should pull any film made before May 1986, featuring Lords "in sexual conduct, no matter how briefly." The withdrawal of Lords' films from the market cost the industry millions of dollars.[8][11][12] Government prosecutors declared Lords was a victim of a manipulative industry, maintaining she was drugged and made to do non-consensual acts.[13] But industry insiders, like Ron Jeremy, Tom Byron, Peter North and Ginger Lynn, say they never saw her use drugs, and insist that she was always fully aware of her actions. While most of her films were removed permanently from distribution in the United States, several were re-edited to remove Lords' scenes entirely (such as Kinky Business and New Wave Hookers), or in a few cases, had new footage shot with a different actress playing her part (as in Talk Dirty to Me Part III). The only film legally available in the United States was Traci, I Love You, shot in Paris only two days after her 18th birthday.[7] She sold her rights to Traci, I Love You in early 1987 for $100,000. This action led to claims that she herself had tipped off the authorities to gain immunity from prosecution, while being the only one to profit from the movie. Lords denies this notion in her autobiography and claims she was reluctant to sell the rights, since at that time she was trying to become a mainstream actress, and wanted no older movies still available.[2]
