When a rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, became national news, it affected Traci Lords, especially. The actress known for her underage stint in the porn business was “inundated” with tweets and Facebook messages after the Steubenville case broke. People wanted to know what she thought, she said, because she was born and raised in Steubenville.

She was raped in Steubenville, too. She was 10 years old. “It takes me right back there,” she said. “It’s not a fun thing to talk about.” Lords was on her way home from school that day, she said, when she cut through a piece of property with a “big grassy green field in it.” The sun felt good, she said, and she decided to lie there. What happened next is best described in a song Lords later wrote about her experience that she titled “Father’s Field.”

I was laying on the grass making big angels
I was feeling kinda itchy in the grass
Laying in the sun, kinda liking the way it felt
Guess I must have fallen asleep

I still don’t know what woke me up
All I can remember seeing were these huge eyes
Staring over me, right on top of me
This older boy, out of my league
’Cause I was no cheerleader, I was the lipstick queen

I could feel his eyelashes on my face and they were tickling me Maybe that’s what woke me up, I was shocked
That sun was so hot and he was so warm
And I didn’t know what it was but it felt kinda good

Just the way his fingers ran through my hair, just raking it up
I’d never had anyone touch me like that before except for my mother
I knew there was something wrong but I don’t know I kinda liked it
It was sort of like, wow, like amazing
And he just kept whispering, “You’re so beautiful God, you’re beautiful”, just this sweet voice tickling me
Then I got kinda nervous and I got really embarrassed I felt myself getting really hot, sort of blushing,
I tried to get up but he started to laugh
And he was sort of pulling me down, pinning me in to the ground
He’s not playing a game, I hear this screaming and it’s me
And I started to hear my clothes rip
And I got scared, really scared and in a way I hoped to God no one would find us ‘cause I was so embarrassed I became silent, this is really wrong
It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault, it’s all my fault
His hand over my mouth, that’s why I’m not screaming
I didn’t say anything, I didn’t feel anything,
I just drifted away I just floated, just that sharp pain And then he’s through with me
I didn’t tell anyone Didn’t tell anyone

Lords didn’t tell anyone because the 14-year-old boy threatened to kill her. “I thought if I didn’t say anything, maybe it was just a bad dream, and it didn’t happen,” she said. The rape “shattered my self-esteem,” she said, and she is today certain it played a huge part in her foray into the porn business—at 15 years old. “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,” she said.