Page Reveals Childhood Trauma

Iconic American beauty Bettie Page has spoken out about the abuse and neglect she suffered as a child in a new newspaper interview. The 82-year-old former pin-up and early porn star, dubbed the Queen of Curves, tells the Los Angeles Times she was molested by her father and despised by her bitter mother, and hates recalling her youth in rural Tennessee.

Page says, “(My father) molested all three of his daughters.” But life at home with her mother, Edna, wasn’t much fun after she divorced her husband when he impregnated a teenager. Page adds, “All I ever wanted was a mother who paid attention to me. She didn’t want girls. She thought we were trouble. She didn’t help with homework or teach me to sew or cook. She didn’t go to school plays I was in or go to my high school graduation.”

And things got even worse when Edna kicked the stunning brunette out of her house when her lover spurned her for her daughter. She was forced to live with her father. She recalls, “I couldn’t review my exam notes, which were at home (with her mother). Because of that I got beat out of graduating valedictorian by a quarter of a grade point and lost my dream of getting a scholarship to attend Vanderbilt University. It was the worst disappointment of my life.”

In the Times article, Page reveals she’s now a born-again Christian, who spent years in a mental institute after attacking a former landlady with a knife. As she awaits a rebirth in the US, thanks to new TV movie The Notorious Bettie Page, she reveals she’ll never agree to be photographed again because, “I want to be remembered as I was when I was young and in my golden times.”