Porn Valley- In her interview for the Carly Milne book, Naked Ambition: Women Who Are Changing Pornography, Tera Patrick states that she comes from a dysfunctional and abusive family and that her life was the equivalent of pain most of the time.
"There was no lovemaking in my home as a kid. There was fist fighting." Patrick was an army brat and by the age of 14 was living in Japan and Europe modeling in fashion shows.
"But I didn't want to be Kate Moss or Heidi Klum," she says. "I loved Betty Page and Jayne Mansfield. I idolized sexy, voluptuous women who weren't going to apologize for their sexuality by looking emaciated and androgynous." Her father was an army doctor, and, eventually Patrick took a job in nursing figuring she could find a remedy for her own ills. But after a patient threw a bedpan full of shit in her face, she began thinking long and hard about her own life's decision.
Patrick, in her interview, states that a twist of fate took her to a Playboy casting call with some of her girlfriends.
"In the blink of an eye I was whisked from my casting call to studios and was shot by Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and practically every men's magazine there was...everybody loved me."
Patrick goes on to say that she lived at Suze Randall's home for awhile.
"And when she wasn't busy hitting on me, she was getting me published in every magazine imaginable." Patrick suspects that Randall probably paid for the house off the pictures she shot of Patrick.
No stranger to hard work, Patrick says, she wasn't in the business to get famous.
"We are all hos on this bus- everyone is giving up something for something else...so when I entered the business I decided that I'm no better and no worse than anyone. I called my own shots. I decided who I slept with and how. And if I didn't like the situation I walked."
Which probably explains her relationship with Digital Playground, although Patrick doesn't mention the company by name.
"Most girls who gained a certain amount of popularity angled to become a contract girl for a major company like Vivid or Wicked," she says. "At this point in my life I was drinking heavily, and- under the influence of about five gin and tonics and a few joints- I signed possibly one of the worst white slavery contracts in the history of the earth. I had no attorney and basically signed my life away to some people who were out to rob me blind."
Patrick says she was successful and finding herself on covers of mainstream and adult magazines. She had back-to-back-to-back- best selling movies.
"There was only one problem," she says. "I wasn't getting paid."
"Financially, I had been duped," she adds. Patrick mentions that one time she was dating a guy who was all freaked out on meth and broke her wrist.
