September 1984 was an interesting year. We had Prince’s “Purple Rain” in the theatres, I underwent an appendectomy right before it burst (my mother had thought that it was just “monthly pains” until I convinced her otherwise, LOL), and Vanessa Williams lost her Miss America crown. Vanessa Williams hadn’t won the title yet when she had posed for Penthouse, but the images of her in several interracial lesbian scenes (gasp!) cost her the title when the magazine came out with the pictures in its September 1984 issue.

The Penthouse Pet of the Month that month was a new girl who had apparently been discovered by a talent scout while sunbathing in Malibu. Her driver’s license identified her as Kristie Elizabeth Nussman, a 22-yr old living in Los Angeles.  She had told the scout that she also went by the name Christie Lee Nussman.

Her pouty lips, blond hair, and amazing physique made her extremely popular with men’s magazines, and so in 1984 and 1985 she appeared either as the centerfold or as a featured pictorial model including Penthouse, Oui, High Society, Swank, and Club, and even appeared in several of them more than once in that time.

She was also paid $10,000 for a four-day shoot with Tom Byron, amongst others, in her first hardcore XXX video,”What Gets Me Hot”. She was deemed an overnight sensation and subsequently went on to become the reigning porn starlet in the US, appearing in over 107 hardcore adult videos before 1987.

In 1987, authorities found out that her name wasn’t legally Kristie Elizabeth Nussman (or Christie Lee, for that matter). She wasn’t 22 either – she was only 15 in 1984 when she was discovered on that beach in Malibu.

Her name was Traci Lords. Born Nora Louise Kuzma. From Ohio.

At the time, there was no real legislation about minors in adult films – just that adult films were, well, for adults. Child pornography was not the rampant national issue that it is today. All the feds could do at the time was just take the production companies that had shot Lords either on video or on still camera to court.  Hundreds of thousands of adult videos and magazines were pulled from shelves and destroyed to avoid child pornography charges. Agents would notoriously troll adult video stores and bookstores to look for Traci Lords videos for years after the initial judgment. There is only one adult film, “Traci, I Love You”, which is allowed to be legally seen in the United States, because it’s the only adult film in which she is actually 18 years old.

One of the appeals for the Lords case went before the United States Supreme Court.  Congress had no choice, due to public outcry, but to pass legislation “imposing certain obligations on the producers of graphical representations of actual, explicit sexual conduct”.  Title 18 United States Code Section 2257 was enacted on November 18, 1988, with subsequent series of regulations named 28 CFR Part 75 for the enforcement of the 2257. In June of 2004, there were newly amended Regulations which made a few changes and addressed adult content on the internet for the first time.

The funny thing about the Traci Lords story is that regardless of whether the 2257 laws were in effect before or after her emergence into adult entertainment, there still would have been a massive fallout. Lords’ driver’s license was “legally” obtained by the California DMV in Torrance, when Lords had submitted her friend’s older sister’s birth certificate. Her driver’s license was “legal” but obtained illegally. She never pretended to be an ingenue or a pedophilic fantasy – she marketed herself as an adult and marketed herself to adults. Her story is an odd lesson in legal record-keeping laws, but it is because of her that we have such legislation.

Lords sought a mainstream acting career after she turned 18, and despite her critics in the beginning, has proven to be a multifaceted entertainer in her own right – from nightclub DJ to singer to mainstream actress. Sure, some of her fame is due to her notoriety, but she’s doing a great job of proving her critics wrong – which reminds us that just because someone has “done porn” in their life, it neither makes them a bad person nor an idiot. Sometimes it just means that they like to live life to their fullest, with as many life experiences as possible before they get out *wink*.

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