Shortly after news broke of the alleged rape of a teenage girl in Steubenville, Ohio, actress and former adult film star Traci Lords spoke out about her own rape in the steel town.
At age 10, Lords was walking through a field on her way home from school when she says she was sexually assaulted by a 14-year-old boy. Lords told Daily Beast that the boy threatened to kill her if she told anyone. She said she never spoke about the attack until she was in her 20s and explained the incident to her therapist.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that that experience really set the stage for me to go into porn and do all those things,” Lords told the Daily Beast. “These are not things you start doing because everything is OK.”
Lords went on to say that the area has a history of treating women as "second class citizens." The Daily Beast included the following excerpt from Lords's autobiography:
I grew up in a dirty little steel town called Steubenville, Ohio. Women had not yet been liberated, husbands ruled the house. Women cleaned it, and any strong opinion was rewarded with a fat lip.
Recent news regarding the alleged rape of the underage girl who was reportedly ferried to different parties by a group of high school football players on Aug. 22 has polarized the town where Lords grew up.
A blogger by the name of Alex Goddard initially drew attention to the alleged incident when she wrote about how she'd witnessed disturbing Tweets and photographs suggesting that a highly intoxicated girl had been carried around and sexually assaulted by a group of athletes from Steubenville High School.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer went on to cover the story with an in-depth article in September, and the case drew national attention when The New York Times covered it in December.
The hacktivist group "Knight Sec" later demanded that the Steubenville High School's football team apologize and threatened the release of sensitive information if the team did not comply.
The group made good on its threats last week when it leaked a 12-minute video of an Ohio State University student named Michael Nodianos joking about a "dead girl" who was "so raped." Nodianos is no longer a student at Ohio State, citing threats.
In response to the controversy, protests have been held in the town, and the attorneys for two students who've been charged in the case have asked for a change in venue, ABC reports.
As ABC notes, authorities have since put up their own website, called Steubenville Facts, to show their transparency in handling the case:
The goal of this site is to disseminate the most accurate information about a recent case involving sexual assault charges pending against two juveniles in Steubenville...City leaders know that many people outside Eastern Ohio are interested in this matter and people from other states and countries may not be familiar with some basic facts about the background of the case. This site is not designed to be a forum for how the Juvenile Court ought to rule in this matter.