Reporter Matt Stevens from the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia called with an update on the Big Daddy Redd developments. Redd was popped in Philadelphia for, allegedly, using an underage girl in one of his tapes. Stevens called AVN for information. We wound up getting some interesting information out of Stevens about Traci Lords.
Stevens: "I read one of your reviews. It was great about a guy named Big Daddy Redd in the January AVN, panning his work. I wondered if you had been informed that he's in jail. They re-arrested him yesterday because they found another 14 year-old girl in one of his videos. That's what he had been arrested for, sexual assault involving underage girls. There was a girl here in North Philadelphia. She was a 14 year-old runaway. There was another underage girl from Connecticut who appeared in one of the movies. I guess someone tipped off the police and they ended up raiding his apartment. He's in jail with about a million sex counts, and they've now arrested two of the actors in the films charging them with various sex crimes. We're working on the story and I read your review. We can't find any of the tapes. They've been taken off the shelves. Did anybody know this guy [In California] ? Or was he a mail order local guy here? He's not the kind of guy that the big boys out there in the Valley know about? I don't even know why I'm pushing it this hard except they want to keep on this story.
"I used to work out there for ten years at KNBC. Then I moved to Philadelphia. I remember going in search of Traci Lords, when was it, '87? I always tell the guys back here the story that I was working at Channel 4. One night I was working the night side. It came out that she had been 15 0r 16 when she was making these movies. She was overrage at the time, but they still thought it was a story. My assignment was to go find her. We found out that she was living with her manager in Marina Del Rey. We drive down there and we don't know whether it's a house or what it is. We get there and it's a huge apartment complex. It's like a 1,000 apartments and a big courtyard. So we get there, and me and my camera guy are standing there and I'm go, 'How am I going to find her in all this?' So, all of a sudden it gets real quiet. It's about 8 o'clock at night. Then I hear, 'Aaaagh!! Aaaaagh!' Like that. I'm looking around, it's echoing and I can't figure out where it's coming from. Finally I do. I go and look on the mail boxes, and sure enough, there's her name. It says the second floor and that's where the noises are coming from. We ring the phone. This guy answers. We tell him we're trying to find Traci Lords. He tells us she's busy right now and he hangs up. It was her. They were doing it right there. It was just as loud as could be. It was incredible, right on cue.
"I was told by a couple of the video stores that Daddy Redd would come in with 20 tapes. He was doing dubs in his apartment. The police confiscated something like 49 VCR's in his apartment. He would come with 20 tapes and sell them for 5-6 bucks apiece to the stores and they'd try to turn them around for $13. One of the shop owners told me this really hurts all the independents because now, when guys come, people are going to be really wary that they might have underage people on their tapes. He [Daddy Redd] might have done a lot of people a disservice by making everyone paranoid."
