(4 September 1971 - 1974) (divorced)
While recovering at the home of her parents, Boreman became involved with Chuck Traynor. According to Boreman, Traynor was charming and attentive at first, then became violent and controlling. She said he forced her to move to New York, where he became her manager, pimp, and husband.
Coerced by Traynor, Boreman was soon performing as Linda Lovelace in hardcore "loops," short 8-mm silent films made for peep shows. Boreman starred in a 1971 bestiality film titled Dog Fucker and alternately Dogarama. She later denied having appeared in the film until several of the original loops proved otherwise. In 2013, Larry Revene, the cameraman who actually shot the film itself, spoke about it for the first time, and in so speaking about it, he asserted that Boreman was a willing participant and that no coercion took place. Porn star Eric Edwards, who was present for the shoot, has similarly claimed there was no obvious coercion going on and that Boreman appeared to be a cooperative performer.
In 1972, Boreman starred in Deep Throat, in which she famously performed deep-throating. The film achieved surprising and unprecedented popularity among mainstream audiences and even a review in The New York Times. It played several times daily for over ten years at theaters in the Pussycat Theater chain, where Boreman did promotions, including leaving her hand and footprints in the concrete sidewalk outside the Hollywood Pussycat. The movie later became one of the first, and highest-grossing, X-rated videotape releases.
In 1975 Boreman left Traynor for David Winters, the producer of her 1976 film Linda Lovelace for President co-starring Micky Dolenz, which showed her on the campaign trail following a cross-country bus route mapped out in the shape of a penis. However, her career as an actress failed to flourish, and her film appearances add up to only five hours of screen time. In her 1980 autobiography, Ordeal, Lovelace maintained that those films used leftover footage from Deep Throat; however, she frequently contradicted this statement. She also posed for Playboy, Bachelor, and Esquire Magazines between 1973 and 1974.
In her suit to divorce Traynor, she said that he forced her into pornography at gunpoint, and that in Deep Throat bruises from his beatings can be seen on her legs. She said that her husband "would force her to do these things by pointing an M16 rifle at her head." Boreman said in her autobiography that her marriage had been plagued by violence, rape, forced prostitution, and private pornography. She wrote in Ordeal: When in response to his suggestions I let him know I would not become involved in prostitution in any way and told him I intended to leave, [Traynor] beat me up physically and the constant mental abuse began. I literally became a prisoner, I was not allowed out of his sight, not even to use the bathroom, where he watched me through a hole in the door. He slept on top of me at night, he listened to my telephone calls with a .45 automatic eight shot pointed at me. I was beaten physically and suffered mental abuse each and every day thereafter. He undermined my ties with other people and forced me to marry him on advice from his lawyer. My initiation into prostitution was a gang rape by five men, arranged by Mr. Traynor. It was the turning point in my life. He threatened to shoot me with the pistol if I didn't go through with it. I had never experienced anal sex before and it ripped me apart. They treated me like an inflatable plastic doll, picking me up and moving me here and there. They spread my legs this way and that, shoving their things at me and into me, they were playing musical chairs with parts of my body. I have never been so frightened and disgraced and humiliated in my life. I felt like garbage. I engaged in sex acts for pornography against my will to avoid being killed... The lives of my family were threatened.
Lovelace's accusations provoked mixed responses. Skeptics included Traynor, who admitted to striking Lovelace but said it was part of a voluntary sex game. In Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne's 2005 book The Other Hollywood, several witnesses, including Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano, state that Traynor beat Boreman behind closed doors, but they also question her credibility. Eric Edwards, Boreman's co-star in the dog sex films and other loops that featured Linda urinating on her sex partners, similarly discounts her credibility. According to Edwards, Boreman was a sexual "super freak" who had no boundaries and was a pathological liar. Adult-film actress Gloria Leonard was quoted as saying, "This was a woman who never took responsibility for her own [...] choices made; but instead blamed everything that happened to her in her life on porn." Corroboration for Lovelace's claim came from Andrea True, Lovelace's co-star in Deep Throat 2, who, on a commentary DVD track of the documentary Inside Deep Throat, stated that Traynor was a sadist and was disliked by the Deep Throat 2 cast. Andrea Dworkin stated that the results of polygraph tests administered to Boreman support her assertions. Moreover, psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman notes that many details in Lovelace's memoir Ordeal are consistent with a diagnosis of Complex PTSD, such as Lovelace's description of a fragmented personality in the aftermath of alleged abuse. Because of the circumstances of her upbringing, however, it had ceased to be clear whether the abuse came from Traynor or from Boreman's parents.
Eric Danville, a journalist who covered the porn industry for nearly 20 years and wrote The Complete Linda Lovelace in 2001, said Boreman never changed her version of events that had occurred 30 years earlier with Traynor. When Danville told Boreman of his book proposal, he said she was overcome with emotion and saddened he had uncovered the bestiality film, which she had initially denied making and later maintained she had been forced to star in at gunpoint.
Boreman maintained that she received no money for Deep Throat and that the $1,250 payment for her appearance was taken by Traynor.