Her boyfriend knew he had HIV. For three years he slept next to her and never said a word. Her mom had HIV. Her sister died of AIDS. The state took her only son. She's 50 now, homeless, and the last time she smoked crack was two hours before this camera turned on.
She's been on crack, off and on, for about 30 years. She's homeless on the streets of Atlanta. She left Ohio because she owed a dealer sixty dollars. Not six thousand. Sixty.
She was born in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in foster care. She met her real mom once she was older. Her mom had a drug problem too. She never met her dad.
Her foster mother took care of her, she says, but she was the one who got beaten the most. With anything and everything. Because she was the foster child. "It was about the money."
She never made it to high school. She dropped out of middle school and nobody told her not to. She finally got her GED at 43.
Her sister died from complications of AIDS. That's when she broke. She moved to Orlando to live with her brother, who had custody of her son. When the state found out she was staying in the same house, they took her son away. She says that's when she started smoking crack.
In 1996 she found out she was HIV positive. She got it from a boyfriend she'd been with for three years. He knew. He never told her. Her mom had HIV. Her sister had it. She knew exactly what the risks were, and she says he gave her no choice.
In 2010 she got married. She was in recovery. She told him she had HIV before anything happened between them. She says he loved her for her.
Now they're separated. He's clean. He gave her a year to get herself together. Five months of it are already gone.
Her son is 31. She didn't raise him. When she's asked how that feels, she says it still hurts.
Her mom is gone. Her grandma is gone. Her brother and her sister are both dead. She's the only sibling left. Her foster family might take her in, but she says she won't go. "It's that pity. I don't need nobody to pity me."
If she could go back and talk to herself at 18, she'd say three things: stay in school, get a career, not a job, and raise your son.
She smoked crack two hours before the camera turned on. On Monday, she has an interview for rehab.
Was her life destroyed by crack, or by every person who was supposed to protect her and didn't?
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Tisha stayed clean for four years. Then her dad had a stroke. The first words out of his mouth: "You've been sober too long." And he tossed her a bag of dope. She's 29 now, homeless, and she says over 200 people she knew died of overdoses in the last year alone.
She wasn't always this. At 21 she was a city bylaw officer in animal control. Then the city handed the contract to someone else and everybody got laid off. She had rent to pay, $2,000 a month, and nobody would hire her.
So she started selling cocaine. Her dealer told her she couldn't sell it if she didn't know it was good. She said she didn't even do drugs. He said: "Well, you do now." Her first line. Then he asked if she'd ever tried crack. She hadn't. "Oh, well, here."
She says it was the first time her brain went quiet. Before that, she was just a regular girl, she says. Chicken nuggets and McDoubles from McDonald's. Like everybody else.
Four years ago her mom fell four stories down an elevator shaft. Tisha moved to take care of her, and she got clean. Four years sober. Then she went back home when her dad had his stroke, and he put the drugs back in her hand. She's been using ever since.
She has 11 brothers and 4 sisters. She doesn't talk to them. Her mom calls her "just a junkie." Her little sister is 17. Tisha says she became her example of what not to do, when she wishes she'd been her inspiration.
She's been homeless for six months. On the first day, she says, she felt like a speck of dirt on the planet. Now some days she feels like gum stuck to the bottom of someone's shoe.
Men assume she's a prostitute. They offer her a warm place to stay. Then, she says, they pull their pants down, and when she tries to leave, they tell her she's not going anywhere. Once in Montreal a man held her for two days, no phone, not allowed outside, because he said someone else owed him $10,000 and she was the payment.
Her best friend died of an overdose. Back home there's a field of 380 plain white crosses, one for every person the opioid crisis killed there. His mom started it.
She knows the drugs are getting cut with tranq. She knows the odds. In her own words: it's a dangerous game, but sometimes we play it anyway.
She got clean once and stayed clean for four years. It took one sentence from her dad to undo it.
Did Tisha choose this life, or was it handed to her by the people who were supposed to protect her?
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Charlie Sheen was making $1.8 million an episode. Then came headaches so bad he was sure he was dying. It wasn't cancer. It was HIV. He never found out who gave it to him. But the people who found out about it started blackmailing him, and he says it cost him around $10 million to keep it quiet. Then he blew up his own secret, live on national TV.
Asked how he thinks he got it, he doesn't dodge. Probably during one specific window, he says. A period of "experimentation." He didn't have it before that. He found out right after.
He never even tried to find out who it was. He says there was so much partying by then that pinning it on one person was impossible.
It started with the headaches. He was convinced it was a brain tumor, something in his spine, liver cancer. Something terminal for sure. That's why he refused to go to the hospital. He held out for a day and a half before his ex-wife Denise Richards finally got him there.
Then the doctors came back with the answer. He says his first reaction was almost relief. It wasn't the death sentence he'd been expecting. The treatment was already working.
But the diagnosis wasn't the worst part. Hiding it was.
People found out, and they came for him. Extortion. Bribes. Payments. Shakedowns.
So he did the only thing he thought would make it stop. He went on the Today Show and told the whole world, live on television.
Then came the headlines claiming he'd hidden it from women he'd been with. He brushes it off. His answer now: lead with the truth, and if anyone thinks they have a case, let them show their evidence.
Looking back, he says the lesson was simple. Keeping it under wraps was a lot worse than just having it.
The biggest star on TV spent millions hiding one secret. In the end, the only way out was saying it out loud.
Was Charlie Sheen a victim of the people who blackmailed him, or of the years he spent partying like nothing could ever touch him?
Charlie Sheen was making $1.8 million an episode. Then came headaches so bad he was sure he was dying. It wasn't cancer. It was HIV. He never found out who gave it to him. But the people who found out about it started blackmailing him, and he says it cost him around $10 million to keep it quiet. Then he blew up his own secret, live on national TV.
Asked how he thinks he got it, he doesn't dodge. Probably during one specific window, he says. A period of "experimentation." He didn't have it before that. He found out right after.
He never even tried to find out who it was. He says there was so much partying by then that pinning it on one person was impossible.
It started with the headaches. He was convinced it was a brain tumor, something in his spine, liver cancer. Something terminal for sure. That's why he refused to go to the hospital. He held out for a day and a half before his ex-wife Denise Richards finally got him there.
Then the doctors came back with the answer. He says his first reaction was almost relief. It wasn't the death sentence he'd been expecting. The treatment was already working.
But the diagnosis wasn't the worst part. Hiding it was.
People found out, and they came for him. Extortion. Bribes. Payments. Shakedowns.
So he did the only thing he thought would make it stop. He went on the Today Show and told the whole world, live on television.
Then came the headlines claiming he'd hidden it from women he'd been with. He brushes it off. His answer now: lead with the truth, and if anyone thinks they have a case, let them show their evidence.
Looking back, he says the lesson was simple. Keeping it under wraps was a lot worse than just having it.
The biggest star on TV spent millions hiding one secret. In the end, the only way out was saying it out loud.
Was Charlie Sheen a victim of the people who blackmailed him, or of the years he spent partying like nothing could ever touch him?
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Charmain has had a gun pointed at her face more times than she can count. She's been raped on the same street she sleeps on. Girls she knew have disappeared from it. Both her parents died of overdoses. She's 33, and she says none of that is what scares her most.
Her mom died last year, alone, at 47, from fentanyl and Xanax. Her dad died at 51, the same way. Charmain lives on the streets of Kensington, Philadelphia, and uses the same drugs that killed them both.
She's been on drugs since she was 13. She's been to rehab, by her own count, around 50 times. Five years ago she landed in Kensington. She got out once, stayed clean for a year, and was doing well. Then her legal problems pulled her back. She says the place just holds you in and you can't get out.
She pays for it the way most of the girls there do. She calls them "dates." She escorted and danced in Florida before this, and she says she's been programmed since she was young to be numb to it.
She doesn't really sleep. She catches a nod here and there, because when you finally go under out there, it's dangerous. She says she can be lonely in a crowd of people.
She has a son and a daughter. They're back home, with her brother and with her daughter's dad. She doesn't talk to them. When she's asked why, she asks back what she would even tell them.
Then she talks about what Kensington does to women. She says almost every girl out there has been raped at least once or twice, some more. Girls disappear. A few she knew and cared about were killed recently. She's had a gun pointed at her face more times than she can count.
Her biggest fear isn't dying. It's time. She says it keeps disappearing on her. She lost everyone she loved and always thought there would be time to see them again.
Her biggest regret: not being a mom to her kids. Asked what she'd say to them if they ever saw the interview, she says she prays to God they don't, but she loves them.
She doesn't blame her parents. She doesn't blame anyone. She says it was her decision to be there.
Her parents died young from the same drugs. Now she's on the same street, with the same habit, and her own kids are growing up without her.
Is Charmain a daughter who never had a chance, or a woman who, like she says herself, chose every step of the way?
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She flew to San Diego for a yoga clothing shoot. By 9pm they had her phone, her signature, and a camera rolling. By 4am, she was on one of the most-watched channels on Pornhub. With her full name.
She was 22. A religious girl from Washington who taught yoga and paid her own way through college. She had never sent a nude photo in her life. She answered a Craigslist ad for fitness models.
She did everything right. She FaceTimed two "reference models" who swore the guys were the best to work with. When they mentioned they also shot porn, she said no. Then she said no again. They said: no problem, it's just an option. Her mom had her flight number and her hotel.
A black Escalade picked her up at the airport. The moment it started moving, the doors locked.
At an apartment, they took her purse with her phone "for safekeeping." Men stood by the door. They stripped her for what they called a "verification photo." Then they drove her to a hotel, unplugged the room phone, and put a stack of papers in front of her. Sign here. Initial here. No, you can't read it, we're in a hurry.
They made her smoke, poured four shots of vodka into her, and turned the camera on.
From 9pm until 4am. Every time she didn't look like she was enjoying it, they filmed the scene again. She tried to run out of the room. She was shoved back before she reached the door. When she said she was done, they told her they'd send everything to her parents with her full name.
When it was over, she locked herself in the bathroom. When she came out, the two men were eating room service burgers in front of the TV. One of them offered her a French fry.
Two weeks later the video was online. The first person to send it to her was a boy from her high school. That same night her parents got it from family friends. For years, her family believed their daughter had chosen to become a porn star. She let them, because she thought the truth would hurt them more.
She changed her number six times. Someone left a dead cat on her doorstep. Her marriage fell apart.
GirlsDoPorn did this to hundreds of women for over a decade, while selling itself as "ethical" amateur porn. Over a billion views. Around $17 million. One of the men in that hotel room got 20 years. The co-founder ran and ended up on the FBI's Most Wanted list.
Half the internet watched those videos and thought the girls wanted to be there. Almost nobody asked why so many of them looked dead in the eyes.
She went for a yoga shoot. She came home as a porn star to everyone she knew.
How many of the videos people watch tonight were filmed in a room just like that one?
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"I couldn't scream loud enough to make them stop."
That's Mia Khalifa. Not about a scene. About what the company did to her years after she quit, when she started saying the producers' real names out loud. They dug up old footage of her and released it like it was new. She stopped eating, stopped showering, stopped getting out of bed. She was in porn for a few months. Her contract says they own it forever.
She grew up in Lebanon, moved to America and got bullied for being Middle Eastern right around 9/11. She says she hated her reflection for most of her teens. At 16 she got into a relationship with a man about ten years older. Four days after her 18th birthday, she eloped with him to Las Vegas. Today she calls it grooming.
He was in the Army. One day a man walked up to her at lunch and handed her a business card. She went home and laughed it off. The answer at home was: you should do it.
She signed a three-to-five page contract. Two words in it would follow her for the rest of her life: "in perpetuity."
Within weeks she went from nobody to the most searched name in the industry. She says it felt like the lights coming on in a club at 4am. The floors are sticky and nothing looks the same. The whole time, she kept asking herself one question: what is wrong with me?
She quit. She moved into a Miami efficiency where the bathroom sink was also the kitchen sink and the only window was broken and taped over. She took a job as a paralegal. Everyone in the office recognized her. Then bookkeeping at a construction company. The owner wouldn't let her go to job sites.
She moved to Austin, started therapy, rebuilt her life. By 2019 she was married, living in LA, landing her first real TV role. Then she started naming the people behind the company. That's when the old videos came back.
Two therapy sessions a week. A psychiatrist. Antidepressants, beta blockers. She says she felt like a prisoner in her own body.
They still own the website with her name on it. Fighting it means suing a billion-dollar company. And now she says what keeps her up at night is AI and deepfakes, the feeling of being violated all over again with no way to stop it.
Half the internet still thinks she got rich off porn. Almost nobody knows about the husband who pushed her into it, or the few pages she signed that took her name forever.
She was in porn for a few months. They own it for life.
Was Mia Khalifa a woman who made a choice, or a girl who signed away her name before she knew who she was?
"I couldn't scream loud enough to make them stop."
That's Mia Khalifa. Not about a scene. About what the company did to her years after she quit, when she started saying the producers' real names out loud. They dug up old footage of her and released it like it was new. She stopped eating, stopped showering, stopped getting out of bed. She was in porn for a few months. Her contract says they own it forever.
She grew up in Lebanon, moved to America and got bullied for being Middle Eastern right around 9/11. She says she hated her reflection for most of her teens. At 16 she got into a relationship with a man about ten years older. Four days after her 18th birthday, she eloped with him to Las Vegas. Today she calls it grooming.
He was in the Army. One day a man walked up to her at lunch and handed her a business card. She went home and laughed it off. The answer at home was: you should do it.
She signed a three-to-five page contract. Two words in it would follow her for the rest of her life: "in perpetuity."
Within weeks she went from nobody to the most searched name in the industry. She says it felt like the lights coming on in a club at 4am. The floors are sticky and nothing looks the same. The whole time, she kept asking herself one question: what is wrong with me?
She quit. She moved into a Miami efficiency where the bathroom sink was also the kitchen sink and the only window was broken and taped over. She took a job as a paralegal. Everyone in the office recognized her. Then bookkeeping at a construction company. The owner wouldn't let her go to job sites.
She moved to Austin, started therapy, rebuilt her life. By 2019 she was married, living in LA, landing her first real TV role. Then she started naming the people behind the company. That's when the old videos came back.
Two therapy sessions a week. A psychiatrist. Antidepressants, beta blockers. She says she felt like a prisoner in her own body.
They still own the website with her name on it. Fighting it means suing a billion-dollar company. And now she says what keeps her up at night is AI and deepfakes, the feeling of being violated all over again with no way to stop it.
Half the internet still thinks she got rich off porn. Almost nobody knows about the husband who pushed her into it, or the few pages she signed that took her name forever.
She was in porn for a few months. They own it for life.
Was Mia Khalifa a woman who made a choice, or a girl who signed away her name before she knew who she was?
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Ilona Staller was 35 when she was elected to the Italian parliament. Nine years earlier, she had become the first woman to bare her breasts on Italian television. In 1987, around 20,000 people in Rome wrote her name on their ballots. Only her party's leader got more.
She was born in Budapest in 1951. Her mother was a midwife. Her stepfather worked for the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior. She moved to Italy, took the stage name Cicciolina, and became the most famous adult film star in the country.
In 1979 she ran for parliament with Italy's first Green list and lost. In 1986 she went to Marco Pannella, the chain-smoking, hunger-striking leader of the Radical Party, and asked if she could run as his candidate. He said yes.
Her campaign was a circus. She gave speeches with one or both breasts out. But the platform was serious: against nuclear power, against NATO membership, for divorce rights, abortion rights and sex education in schools.
She beat 47 other names on the Radical Party list. Umberto Eco shrugged: "Immorality for immorality; we've seen worse."
Inside parliament she called the male deputies "cicciolini", little chubby boys. The Prime Minister was a cicciolino. The head of the Socialist Party was a cicciolino. During her term she offered to sleep with Saddam Hussein if it would bring peace to the Middle East. On a visit to Lisbon she posed topless in the Portuguese parliament and the session was suspended.
In 1991 she married the American artist Jeff Koons. In 1992 she lost her seat. That same year the Mani Pulite bribery investigation began tearing apart the parties whose men she had mocked.
In 2011 Italy learned she would receive a state pension of about €39,000 a year for her five years in office. The country was outraged.
Half the internet remembers the porn star in parliament as a punchline. Almost nobody remembers what she actually campaigned on, or that the men laughing at her were about to be investigated for bribery.
They called her the joke. She called them cicciolini.
Was Cicciolina the scandal that embarrassed Italian politics, or the only honest thing in a parliament that was already rotten?
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Jenna Jameson sold her porn empire to Playboy on her wedding anniversary. Exactly three years to the day after marrying the man she built it with. The price was never officially disclosed, though it was reported at around $25 million. Six months later, she filed for divorce.
June 22, 2006. The front page above ran the day Playboy Enterprises announced it had bought ClubJenna, the company Jameson founded in 2000 with Jay Grdina. By then she was already one of the most famous names in the adult industry. Her 2004 memoir "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" had become a New York Times bestseller, and Playboy's CEO Christie Hefner described her as one of the most searched names on the internet.
ClubJenna started as a personal website. Grdina later said it turned a profit within its third week, and that its first film sold around 100,000 copies when an ordinary adult release topped out near 5,000. By 2006 it had grown into a business with its own film production and a library of video content.
The two had married on June 22, 2003, in a Catholic-style ceremony, and lived in a mansion in Scottsdale, Arizona. As part of the deal, both of them signed personal service agreements with Playboy. Jameson called it exciting and said they were happy to be part of the Playboy family. In December 2006 she filed for divorce.
Her life since has played out in public: a relationship with UFC fighter Tito Ortiz, who was arrested in 2010 on suspicion of domestic violence at their home, a 2023 marriage to Jessi Lawless that ended with an annulment filing less than a year later. The company that carried her name was already someone else's.
She sold the company on her wedding anniversary. By December she had filed for divorce.
Was Jenna Jameson the smartest businesswoman the industry ever produced, or just the one who got out with the most money?
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Tiffany has been on crystal meth for nine years. For the last four months she's been selling it too. Her whole family showed up to save her on camera. Before the day was over, the police had been called. Three days later she was arrested with meth on her.
She sits in front of the camera with a red bandana in her hair. Then the family takes turns: her mother, her grandmother, two brothers, her stepfather. In between, the old photos: Tiffany as a smiling baby, Tiffany at family birthdays, years before any of this.
Her parents divorced when she was 11. Two years before the cameras showed up, her boyfriend broke up with her. By then meth had been part of her life for years, and by the time A&E filmed her she wasn't just using it. She was dealing it.
The intervention was set up near the courthouse. Her family waited for her down the street and sat her down with all of them in one room. It didn't stay in that room. It ended outside, on the street, with her relatives around her and the police on their way.
The episode ends with one line on a black screen. Three days after the intervention, Tiffany was arrested for possession of crystal meth and moved back in with her grandparents.
Her family got one day with her. The police got her three days later.
Can a family's love actually pull someone out of nine years of meth, or does it only work once the person hits bottom on their own?
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He slapped her so hard her ears rang. Then he beat her head against the floor until her face was covered in blood, choked her unconscious twice and held her head in a toilet so she couldn’t breathe
He wasn’t a stranger. He was a porn star she called a friend
Jessie Rogers was a young porn star on the rise. She had been to his place before. Several times. Never on camera, just hanging out
That night started like the others
She walked in. He looked angry
“You’re late.”
Then the first slap. She hit the floor
Everything after that happened fast. She remembers being in a daze while he slammed her head down again and again. Her face started bleeding. He kept going
She asked him to slow down. She asked him to stop
“You’re fine, babe.”
He choked her until she blacked out. When she came to, he did it again
Then he pushed her head into his toilet. Every time she tried to come up for air, he pushed her back down
“I thought I was going to die, honestly.”
The warning signs had been there for a while. Before that night, a syphilis outbreak hit the industry. The man who spread it was no beginner. He had been working for more than eight years, and he kept shooting with other performers
She and her roommate had talked about quitting. More than once. They stayed
Until 4 a.m. that night, when she was driving home alone and asking herself one question:
“Why am I hanging out with these type of people?”
She quit. Her roommate quit too
Years later she tells the story on camera, fit and done with that world. Halfway through she has to stop. “It’s hard for me to talk about it in detail.”
Then she says the strangest part
She’s thankful for that night. Because it woke her up
A man nearly killed her, and that’s what it took to get her out
So was he one monster, or just the one who finally showed her what that industry really is?
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Traci Lords was one of the most famous names in the adult industry by 1986. Then investigators found out she had been a minor for almost all of it. She was 15 when she started, with a fake ID. Overnight nearly every film she made became illegal. Stores pulled them nationwide.
Her real name was Nora Kuzma. She was born in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1968. After her parents split up, her mother moved the kids to Los Angeles. As a young teen she got hold of a fake birth certificate and a California driver's license that said she was 20.
With that ID she walked into an agency in the San Fernando Valley. Nobody checked further. Within two years she was on magazine covers and in dozens of films. Her name sold videotapes all over America, and the money went to the producers and distributors.
In May 1986, just after her 18th birthday, the truth came out. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office found that she had been under 18 when almost all of her work was made. Overnight, every one of those tapes was legally child exploitation material. The industry's own trade association told members to pull everything made before May 1986.
Video stores and rental chains across the country emptied their shelves. District Attorney Ira Reiner said Traci herself would not be charged, because the law saw her as the victim. The investigation went after the agents, producers and distributors who had hired her. In the end, almost none of them went to prison. Courts ruled they could argue they had been fooled by her ID.
She walked away from the industry and spent years trying to be taken seriously. John Waters cast her in Cry-Baby in 1990. She got roles on Melrose Place and other shows and released music. In her 2003 memoir she wrote about the abuse in her childhood and said she had been a lost kid nobody protected.
Half the internet says she lied about her age and fooled an entire industry. The other half says a 15-year-old should never have been able to. Almost nobody talks about the fact that the age-verification records every studio in America still has to keep exist because of her.
She broke the law to get in. The law said she was the only one who couldn't be guilty.
Was Traci Lords a teenage con artist who fooled everyone, or a 15-year-old girl that a whole industry chose not to look at too closely?
Kristin used to help people buy homes in one of the richest counties in America. Then a judge took her child away. Now she's 44, sleeping on the streets of Irvine, smoking the second she wakes up and taking a cut from shoplifters just to survive.
Her old life was in Orange County, one of the richest parts of California. She says the old days were boring, a good kind of boring, the kind you only miss once it's gone. She worked in mortgages and made good money doing it. Drugs weren't part of the picture. She calls her addiction a newer thing.
What broke it was court. She lost custody of her child, and she says she didn't know how to deal with the pain, so she found something to numb it. She can't even remember exactly who first put the drugs in front of her. Now she lives outside in the same county where she used to arrange home loans.
The money now comes from the street economy. She works between boosters, the people who steal from stores, and fences, the people who buy what they take, and she keeps a percentage. Her day starts at around 5:45 in the morning, and the first thing she does, she says, is smoke.
She talks about what she has seen out there without much emotion. The man she was with was shot in the leg. People around her overdose constantly. She says people on the street won't go to the police for help, and most are too afraid to even ask. She still says she wants out, and that one day she wants to help the people living the way she does now.
At the end she tries to tell anyone listening to appreciate their family and the smallest things they have. She doesn't manage to finish the sentence.
She lost her child in a courtroom. She lost everything else on the street.
Is Kristin's story about drugs, or about how close anyone is to losing everything after one bad day in court?
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Traci Lords was raped at 11 and ran away from home. At 15, with a fake ID, she became one of the most famous porn stars in America. When the truth about her age came out, almost every film she had made turned illegal overnight. She was never charged. She was the minor
She was born Nora Kuzma in Steubenville, Ohio. Her father drank, her parents split, and her mother took the girls to Los Angeles. In the interview she says the rape at 11 was the single most traumatic thing that ever happened to her, and that she carried the shame for years without telling anyone, not even her mother. She stopped speaking to her mother, ran away and, in her words, went through the whole thing
At 15 she got a driver’s license in another woman’s name and walked into an adult modeling agency in the Valley. Nobody looked twice. Within months she was in Penthouse, and studios started building films around her
She says she was very, very high for about three years, most of the time. Plenty of kids have sex and try drugs in high school, she says. The scandal was that a camera was rolling and she was 15 years old
In 1986, shortly after her 18th birthday, it all came out. Video stores across the country pulled her tapes off the shelves. Prosecutors went after the agent and the producers who had hired her. The only legal film left was the one she made after she turned 18
She got sober, took acting lessons and landed a lead in John Waters’ Cry-Baby next to Johnny Depp. In this interview she is promoting her first album, the one where she sang about the rape for the first time. She says her past cost her roles, and whatever she has built, she built in spite of it
At the end the interviewer asks if women in porn are victims or have only themselves to blame. She says no normal, healthy woman wakes up one morning and decides to become a porn star. Out of all the women she met in that industry, she says, every single one of them had baggage
She was 15 on camera, and 40 years later most people still know her as a porn star first
Was Traci Lords a rebellious teenager who lied her way in, or a 15-year-old rape survivor that a whole industry chose not to ask questions about?
Joseph Paul Franklin honked at a Black man driving too slowly in a mall parking lot. When the man got out of his car, Franklin shot him with a .357 Magnum. Then he shot the man's white girlfriend. Driving away, he says, every single traffic light turned green for him.
That was August 7, 1977, at East Towne Mall in Madison, Wisconsin. Alphonce Manning and Toni Schwenn were both 23. In the video he tells it like a road story: he'd given two girls a ride to the mall, got stuck behind a slow car, leaned on the horn, and the driver walked toward him with a scowl. He describes the exact moment the scowl turned into surprise. He shot Schwenn, he says, because they were an interracial couple and he figured he was going to get caught anyway.
He wasn't caught. He had money from a bank he'd robbed in Columbus a few days earlier in his trunk, and he drove out of the lot. The murders went unsolved for seven years, until he confessed to them himself from prison.
Born James Clayton Vaughn Jr. in Mobile, Alabama, he had already passed through the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. In the interview he says he left both because the members just sat around talking. He wanted "action." Two months after Madison he lay in wait outside a St. Louis synagogue and killed Gerald Gordon as guests left a bar mitzvah. A psychologist on the program says he could describe every detail of a killing but couldn't explain what he felt doing it.
Between 1977 and 1980 he crossed the country with a rifle hunting Black men, the white women with them and Jewish people. He was convicted of eight murders and linked to around 20, plus bank robberies and bombings. He also confessed to shooting Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, who spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Missouri executed Franklin by lethal injection on November 20, 2013, for the murder of Gerald Gordon.
He couldn't say what he felt pulling the trigger. He remembered the traffic lights.
Was Joseph Paul Franklin a racist with a gun, or a psychopath who just picked the ideology that let him do it?
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Ziggy's father abused her, her sister and her brother. Her mother was hooked on prescription pills. By the time she got out of that house she had an addiction of her own and spent nine months in rehab. Then she moved from Arizona to California and walked straight into porn.
She tells it herself, sitting in front of a backdrop for Soft White Underbelly, the channel that interviews people most of the internet would rather scroll past. She starts with her father and what life in that house was like for all three kids. Her mother was there, but she was on pills.
Then the story turns to Ziggy herself. The pills that were in the house became part of her life too. It got bad enough that she went into a treatment program and stayed for nine months. When she gets to her grandmother, she stops talking and cries.
She says it took courage for them to get out, and they did. She left Arizona for California, and that is where she started working in adult film.
She escaped one house and walked into another one with better lighting.
Was porn the thing that saved Ziggy, or just the next thing that got to her?
Ziggy's father abused her, her sister and her brother. Her mother was hooked on prescription pills. By the time she got out of that house she had an addiction of her own and spent nine months in rehab. Then she moved from Arizona to California and walked straight into porn.
She tells it herself, sitting in front of a backdrop for Soft White Underbelly, the channel that interviews people most of the internet would rather scroll past. She starts with her father and what life in that house was like for all three kids. Her mother was there, but she was on pills.
Then the story turns to Ziggy herself. The pills that were in the house became part of her life too. It got bad enough that she went into a treatment program and stayed for nine months. When she gets to her grandmother, she stops talking and cries.
She says it took courage for them to get out, and they did. She left Arizona for California, and that is where she started working in adult film.
She escaped one house and walked into another one with better lighting.
Was porn the thing that saved Ziggy, or just the next thing that got to her?
oly retweeted
Months after she was raped, a preacher's daughter signed her first porn contract. For the next 10 years she smiled on red carpets in Las Vegas. Behind the camera she was on drugs and trying to kill herself. This is Jessica, and this is what the industry did with her.
She was raised in church, in a family where everyone knew who the preacher's kid was and what was expected of her. She says she had a clear picture of how her life would go, and none of it involved cameras. The rape broke that picture apart, and within a few months of it she had signed with the adult industry.
It worked fast. She got bookings, then fans, then a name people recognized. For ten years she was a successful porn star, the kind who gets invited to the awards in Las Vegas and photographed on the red carpet in a gown.
The same career pulled her into drugs. The money kept coming in and so did the attention, but none of it touched what had happened to her before she ever signed a contract. More than once, she tried to end her life.
Today she lives a quiet life away from the industry, with a dog and a backyard, and she tells the story herself on camera, from the preacher's house to the red carpet to the drugs and the suicide attempts.
She spent ten years as one of porn's success stories. She almost didn't survive it.
Was Jessica a grown woman who chose that career, or a rape survivor the industry picked up at the exact moment she couldn't say no?
Months after she was raped, a preacher's daughter signed her first porn contract. For the next 10 years she smiled on red carpets in Las Vegas. Behind the camera she was on drugs and trying to kill herself. This is Jessica, and this is what the industry did with her.
She was raised in church, in a family where everyone knew who the preacher's kid was and what was expected of her. She says she had a clear picture of how her life would go, and none of it involved cameras. The rape broke that picture apart, and within a few months of it she had signed with the adult industry.
It worked fast. She got bookings, then fans, then a name people recognized. For ten years she was a successful porn star, the kind who gets invited to the awards in Las Vegas and photographed on the red carpet in a gown.
The same career pulled her into drugs. The money kept coming in and so did the attention, but none of it touched what had happened to her before she ever signed a contract. More than once, she tried to end her life.
Today she lives a quiet life away from the industry, with a dog and a backyard, and she tells the story herself on camera, from the preacher's house to the red carpet to the drugs and the suicide attempts.
She spent ten years as one of porn's success stories. She almost didn't survive it.
Was Jessica a grown woman who chose that career, or a rape survivor the industry picked up at the exact moment she couldn't say no?