Free Out of Bondage by Linda Lovelace

Long Island’s Great South Bay against the polluters.
    On occasion Victor tends to be flamboyant. Rather, I should say he loves to be flamboyant. And he definitely has a way with words. I was once thumbing through papers in his office and I saw a transcript of one of his typical cases (he was representing Colorado’s Florissant Fossil Beds against a group of home developers) and I read his summation to the jury: “Your honor, Florissant Fossil Beds are to geology, paleontology and evolution what the Rosetta Stone was to Egyptology. To sacrifice a 30-million-year-old record, written in the hand of Almighty God, to 30-year mortgages and basements in the A-frame ghettoes of the ’70s is like wrapping fish in the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
    At the end of that case, the courts decided to make the Florissant Fossil Beds a national monument, and it was all Victor’s doing.
    I first met Victor by accident; I was just tagging along with Larry on a visit to his office. Since Victor had always been a friend of Larry’s family, we were introduced. No problem. Victor had never seen an X-rated movie in his life and had no way of knowing who I was. However, since he spends his days looking at accident victims, Victor knew there was something wrong with me.
    “Pardon me for being personal, young lady,” he said at one point. “But do you have any pains or problems with your breasts?”
    I looked over at Larry quickly and he nodded his head.
    “Tell him,” he said.
    “I’ve been having terrible pains,” I said, “How could you tell?”
    “Unfortunately, I make my living looking at sick and injured people every day. The . . . ah . . . outlines aren’t right. It looks like you’ve got more than a few lumps there. Did you ever have silicone injections?” “Yes,” I said.
    “She was forced to,” Larry said.
    “Well, I’m always reading the medical literature,” Victor said. “More and more I’ve been reading about silicone injections and their cancer potential. That’s especially true when they were injections, not implantations. Were these injections?”
    “Yes.”
    Then Victor started asking other questions. As it turned out, the silicone injections were just the beginning of my medical problems. He asked to see my legs, those poor legs that had been treated so badly by Chuck Traynor. They’ll never be right again. During that first pregnancy, one leg became swollen until it was nearly twice the size of the other. Two different times I had to be rushed 80 miles to New York Hospital in Manhattan. And today, even though I love the beach, I hate to expose my legs.
    “You’ve got all the signs of thrombal phlebitis in this leg,” Victor said. “That requires treatment right away.”
    During that first day, Victor picked up the phone and began calling doctors. Because of his legal interests, he knew a wide range of specialists. This meant more trips to Manhattan, more treatments, debts. I’ll never forget the look on the face of the first doctor who examined my legs.
    “My God!” he said. “What happened to you ?”
    What happened to me, of course, was the awful story I would later tell in Ordeal. It was a story I outlined for the doctor. And later for Victor Yannacone.
    I told them that a 21-year-old girl named Linda Boreman had made the movie Deep Throat under unimaginable duress. The personal prisoner of a sadist, I had been beaten and raped repeatedly over a period of years. I told them I had lived those years in absolute terror, the prisoner of a man who made me perform freakish stunts, who managed my career, who forced me to marry him, who handed me out to celebrities and who turned me into a fear-filled mindless slave.
    Victor had never heard anything like it.
    “It was so sick,” I told Victor. “He loved playing with sex games, seeing how much pain he could inflict.”
    I hadn’t talked about it in a long time. No one else had really believed me and I don’t know why I was bothering to go through it