Tera Patrick - Sinner Takes All

I was living the life. Nothing turned me on more than turning it on for the camera, and sometimes photographers were there to benefit from that. I lost my virginity to a thirtysomething photographer on one of my earliest shoots in Tokyo in my first year there. I can’t remember his name, but I’ll never forget this shoot. He was really, really hot. He had gorgeous, thick, short brown hair. His frame was small, his waist thin, and his body was all lithe muscle like David Beckham. He could have been a model himself when he was younger, but his face was a bit menacing-looking. I think I was attracted to him because he looked like a bad boy, and I loved a bad boy—musicians, motorcycle men, model photographers.

He took charge and he told me I was beautiful. I loved posing for him, and seeing how he wanted me. I wanted him, too. We were flirting a bit before we started shooting, and when he’d touch me to move my hair out of the way or fix the strap of my top, my skin felt hot. I was so excited to be working with him.

He was feeding me champagne and Valium and I was getting wasted. I’d had plenty of drinks before, both in the clubs in Japan and at the winery my dad worked at in California, but I was a different kind of drunk on this occasion. It was the kind of drunk where your head falls back but your eyes stay staring out in front of you, the kind of drunk where you’re not really sure what’s happening, the kind of drunk where you lose your virginity to a man twice your age. Yeah, the kind of drunk where statutory rape happens.

“You look so beautiful,” he’d say. “Move your hair to the side. Perfect.” His direction turned me on. I wanted to feel like a sexy woman, not a fourteen-year-old kid straight off the plane from California, and the way he told me how to look like a grown woman turned me on wildly.

The shoot was going great and we were flirting with each other, and then he kissed me. I felt warm, fuzzy, and very soft. And most of all, I felt wanted. I felt desired. He made me feel like my dream of becoming Paulina Porizkova was coming true. Right then. Right there in his photo studio. He made me feel how I felt looking at Paulina’s photo that first time in my dad’s Playboy .

I was posing on a chaise lounge in this little dress and he found every excuse to get closer to me, to remove the space between his camera and my body. He’d say, “Let me pull your strap up.” Or, “Here, it would look better if you unbuttoned one more button.” The next thing I knew, he slid his hand up my thigh and I shivered.

I’ll never forget the feeling I got in the pit of my stomach. I still get that feeling sometimes even today. It’s a feeling that something is just not right and I can’t quite put my finger on it. It almost takes my breath away. I had that feeling when he started feeling up my leg and putting his fingers inside me, and touching my nipples. I was very turned on and hot for him, but something didn’t feel right.

Finally, he lay on top of me, lifted up my dress, pulled my panties off, and spread apart my drunken legs. I was having an out-of-body experience. He finally inserted himself, and I was wet for him. We had sex for about fifteen minutes, and I remember being wasted during most of it. But I also remember feeling some pain. I was a virgin, after all. I just kept thinking, “Is this what it’s supposed to feel like?!” It felt feverish. He was like a jackhammer, and I was not enjoying it.

I never said “no” or “stop.” I felt like it was my fault because I enticed him. I brought it on. I flirted with him and kissed him. I had this way of flirting too far, where you push and push and push and tease and tease and tease until something finally happens. That’s what this was. Later on, I didn’t talk to the other models or my manager about it because I didn’t want to get a reputation or lose jobs, so I just kept quiet. To me, at the time, it wasn’t rape because I consented. But it wasn’t right, either. I always thought I’d lose my virginity to someone like Joe Elliott, the lead singer of Def Leppard, in a field of flowers. This was not that.

After we were done, I told him I was a virgin, and he asked, “Are you kidding?”

“Nope. I am.”

“Wow, maybe I should have been gentler.”

“Why?”

“Well, you don’t treat a virgin the same way you treat any old regular girl.”

After that, we continued the photo shoot as if nothing happened. This is where “The Switch” kicked in. This is when I changed forever and it sent me on the path to porn. He was done. I was done. OK, I can move on and finish the shoot now. I was completely professional and acted like nothing had happened. I had a job to do and I was going to do it well. This switch kicked in where I could turn it on and turn it off at will. I could go through a painful, weird, drunken sexual experience and in the next second be back in front of the camera all smiles and ready to give it my all again. Have sex, move on. This MO would serve me quite well when I starting doing porn.

I actually liked turning this sex queen on and off. It really did work well for me for a while, and not just in porn, but also in my real-life relationships. If that first sexual experience went differently, would I still be a porn star? I don’t know. I think my emotional life would’ve been different, that’s for sure. But I don’t have any regrets, because if I wasn’t a famous porn star, I wouldn’t have been able to call up the man of my dreams from three thousand miles away and make him my husband. I wouldn’t have millions of dollars and be recognized all over the world. As fucked-up as it may sound, if it weren’t for porn, I probably would still be this shy little introverted girl nicknamed Spider. As violating as it may seem, that sexual experience made me who I am today, and I love who I am today.

Two days after losing my virginity, I wanted to have sex again. I went out with a group of models—Alberto and Nancy from Holland, Cole from Florida, Kay from L.A. (who was dating Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan), and Orly and Galit from Israel. We headed out to the Lexington Queen and I finally came face to face with one of my idols: Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses. The band was in town to play the Tokyo Dome, and I couldn’t go to the show because I had a job, but we were all going to meet up after.

I was sitting there on one of the couches, glass of champagne in hand, strobe lights pulsating away to the club music playing loudly. Over the music, I said to one of the other girls, “Oh, my God. This is so cool! We’re going to meet Guns N’ Roses.” And just as the words left my mouth, Axl Rose came walking through the club in a long fur coat. I was so starstruck that I didn’t speak to him. I didn’t say anything. I just stared at everything around me. I was so intimidated being around this crowd of people, but I was also keenly aware of how cool it was to be so young and in a foreign country and among all these beautiful, famous people. I knew that I was now closer than ever to fucking a rock star.

I was pretty sexed-up this particular night. I spent much of the evening chatting up some Guns N’ Roses groupies who were much older and more experienced than I was. With a few drinks in me I felt loosened up enough to ask a question that was on my mind: How do you give a blowjob? I was already plotting the end of my night and I knew I wanted to fool around with someone, so I thought I should learn a few tricks, and who better to learn from than these gorgeous rocker-chick groupies. A really hot petite blond groupie gave me the best advice of my sexual life up to this point:

“Here’s what you do—practice on a popsicle. Get your mouth nice and wet and start by opening up wide and putting your lips out over the popsicle, then slowly slide the popsicle as far down your throat as you can go while making a sucking motion with your mouth. Alternate between sucking hard and fast and teasing it slowly with the tip of your tongue. Whatever you do, don’t do the same motion the entire time. You have to change it up!”