The release of Lovelace this weekend means that the subject of the film, Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat, is back in the public conversation. It sounds as though the film wants to satisfy both Lovelace's claims of abuse and others' opposite claims. This article gives a decent, if biased, sense of the chronology.

While I have no doubt that Chuck Traynor, the manager/boyfriend behind Lovelace and, later, Marilyn Chambers (post-fame), was less than a good guy. It's entirely reasonable to assume he used physical force to get his way from time to time. But Lovelace's whole story paints a picture of a manipulator.

Of course, I don't know what really happened but I do know that, after Deep Throat, she parlayed her celebrity into more films and many cash-in appearances. When her fame faded, she revealed she had been abused in a best-selling book. When the other seminal participants in the porn boom contested her allegations, she claimed to have been exploited by the anti-porn movement. She did a late-in-life portfolio for the skin mag Leg Show. She was an addict and died when her car "inexplicably" ran off the road.

I'm naturally skeptical at many of Lovelace's claims not because I'm unsympathetic or because I'm defender of pornography. The reason is because her behavior is too consistent with a certain breed of woman usually found among the poorer classes. The future is always bright, the present transformative and the past hellish.