Tera Patrick - Sinner Takes All

I was really proud of the work I was doing with Vivid and Teravision. It felt like the drama with Digital Playground was light years behind me. I felt relieved, but I also felt a sense of vindication. I won. I was able to not just be successful on my own, but to find even greater heights of success and satisfaction by doing it my way. I could do porn, be in love, and have it all. Sinner takes all!

Chopper’s been kidnapped!" I cried into the phone to Evan as I stood shaking outside our Cadillac Escalade with the door wide open. My six-pound black-and-white fox terrier dog, Chopper, and his carrying bag were missing.

“Get here now!” I wailed.

I couldn’t believe what just happened. I was running into the Westfield Fashion Square Mall in Sherman Oaks for just a few minutes, and I left Chopper in the car alone. Big mistake. I don’t know if I forgot to lock the door of if I hit the Lock button but it didn’t work, but when I walked out of the mall and approached my car, my heart sunk as I saw the door wide open and my little baby nowhere to be found.

Evan was used to getting 911 calls from me for a variety of reasons, but usually it was because I went shopping by myself without a bodyguard or assistant and ended up being trapped by fans or autograph-seekers and couldn’t deal with it. But this 911 call was a real emergency, and Evan dropped what he was doing and rushed over to the mall. It was useless looking around the parking lot because I knew Chopper was kidnapped. Someone took him. I immediately thought maybe it was an enemy of mine or maybe it was even a fan because I put Chopper in some of my movies and we did photo shoots with him. So, maybe someone knew it was my dog and took him for a ransom. Evan immediately sprang into action. As I cried and hyperventilated, he went through the security tapes with the mall guards.

I bonded with Chopper like you bond with your firstborn. As someone who didn’t have or want children at the time, my dogs were my babies; and Chopper was my first. (Mr. Big Time, a teacup Chihuahua; and Bandit, a Dutch shepherd, came next.) I took Chopper everywhere with me—to the set, to shoots, to dinner, on vacation, when I travel. He was my constant companion. I was devastated when I saw the car and him not sitting there waiting for me.

Everything stopped and Evan put everyone at Teravision—especially Robert Mora, my assistant, and Maxx Padilla, our VP—on the job of finding Chopper. Teravision production stopped, I canceled all of my work, and for three long weeks we had teams of people looking for Chopper. And for three whole weeks I didn’t sleep a wink.

We even called our publicist at the time, Lizzie Grubman, and did a full-court press on it. She got me on every radio show on Sirius radio, on KTLA TV in L.A., on The Howard Stern Show, in New York Post’s Page Six, and other media outlets so I could let people know we were offering a $5,000 reward for my baby. We also put ads in every newspaper we could think of, including the Los Angeles Times, The Daily News, the LA Weekly, Star magazine, and Spanish publications like La Opinion.

I asked Evan to call his biker buddies, street gang members, and even guys with ties to the Mexican mafia—who, according to Evan, know everything that goes down on every street in L.A.—to comb the streets looking for Chopper. We even hired street teams of people to pound the pavement for us. We signed up for every dog-search service we could find, such as Sherlock Bones, FidoFinder .com, and Home Again.

Within the first hour of Chopper going missing, we had four-color flyers made up and started posting them from the Valley into Hollywood and all the way to Downtown L.A. and other surrounding areas. We spent thousands of dollars looking for Chopper, and lost tens of thousands in the work we missed for those three weeks.

I was beside myself. I was sleeping with Chopper’s leash around my neck, crying myself to sleep, and even walking the neighborhood at night in my bathrobe with a flashlight looking for Chopper under parked cars. Evan and everyone really thought I was heading for another breakdown and would end up in the psych ward again. It was awful.

Fans were sending flowers, cards, and gifts of condolences to the offices. Evan had already begun looking for a new dog to get for me. He was convinced Chopper was dead or off with another family and never coming back. But I kept saying, “He’s coming home. I just know it.” They thought it was crazy.

I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t shower. I couldn’t put makeup on. I certainly couldn’t work. But around the third week of the big Chopper search, after everyone else had given up hope, I finally pulled myself together enough to make a personal appearance at a party during the Pro Bowl in Hawaii that I was booked for. The night before I left for the trip, I went on The Howard Stern Show to make one last plea for the return of Chopper and to remind people that we would give a $5,000 reward with no questions asked.

I’ll never forget our last day in Hawaii. I was on my phone with my sister Debby, crying about Chopper. I was calling Debby every day during this time and sometimes at two or three in the morning. And my sister got serious with me and said, “Linda, you just have to let him go. It’s been three weeks. Just think of him as this little angel who came down to live with you for a short while, and let him go.” I hung up the phone with her, and Evan got a call from Robert.

“We got him,” Robert told Evan.

“You have Chopper?” Evan couldn’t believe it.

“We don’t have him yet, but we got a call and I believe it’s him.”

Evan was skeptical because we received many other calls from people saying they had Chopper but it never ended up being Chopper. We hopped on the next flight back to L.A., and Robert was right. It was Chopper. Two Armenian lesbians from the Valley had the dog. It was a “no questions asked” deal, so we never did get the full details of how or why Chopper was abducted. But Robert gave them the check for $5,000 and got Chopper back. The Armenians told him that they renamed the dog Prince because he pranced around like he was royalty and because he looked like a pygmy, kind of like the artist Prince.

We got Chopper back on Valentine’s Day 2005, two years from when Evan gave him to me, and it was the best Valentine’s Day ever. It just proved that if you don’t give up, the unthinkable might come true. I knew Chopper would come back to me, and he did. I squeezed him so hard and never left him alone again.

Oh, and, when we got home from getting Chopper back, Evan tried to cancel the $5,000 check, but it was too late.

Working with Evan as my manager, my costar, and the CEO of my company was starting to really pay off. On a personal level, it brought us even closer together. On a business level, all of the moves that he made—from lining up my feature dancing gigs to the deal with Vivid to encouraging me to expand my sexual horizons on film—led to my big crossover year in 2006. This was the year Evan vowed to take me from top of the porn world to the mainstream world.

When I entered the adult industry, it was not my goal to become a mainstream actress or star. If that’s what I wanted to do, I would’ve gone the typical route of taking acting lessons, going in for auditions, and trying to get bit parts like every Hollywood hopeful does. But that wasn’t my quest. I’ll be honest, I just wanted to be famous and I liked to model and to be nude. Porn was satisfying. But once the idea of mainstream popularity started becoming more of a possibility, I was pretty excited at the non-adult-industry opportunities that started coming my way.