I didn’t know if I was going to die that night,” says Nadia North, fighting back tears.
Eleven days prior, the adult actress and filmmaker had threatened to leave her husband, porn legend Peter North, only to have him attack her, she says. But on this day, Dec. 18, 2018, she was determined to follow through with it. The abuse had been escalating, and she feared for her safety. So, she threw some clothes, personal belongings, and a burner phone into a bag, and waited for North to leave their Newport Beach home. As soon as he left to go to the gym, she sprang into action and was all ready to leave when North returned to the house. “He caught me,” she tells me.
The next several moments were a bit of a blur. “I ran upstairs, he threw me down on the ground and kicked me in the back of my head,” she explains. “And I’ve had brain surgery in the past—I have a soft spot on the back of my head, so I can’t get kicked there—and he hit me so hard I was throwing up and got a concussion.” As she was writhing about on the floor, semi-conscious, she decided to hit record on her phone and pushed it under the bed. She was convinced he was going to kill her and didn’t want him to get away with it.
“He shoved a bunch of pills in my mouth, sat [in a chair] and blocked the door, and waited for me to fall asleep,” she remembers. The saga of Nadia and Peter North (real name: Alden Joseph Brown) began as a love story. The couple met in 2015, after North reached out to Nadia to help him raise capital for his nutrition company.
“We talked on the phone a lot and he seemed charming,” the 43-year-old shares.
She was aware of North’s background. By then, he was an adult-industry staple, having acted in porn since 1983 and starred in over 2,000 XXX films. North, who is now 64, was primarily known for “barely legal” content featuring the aging performer having sex with young women who were barely over the age of 18. In the 1980s, the feds grilled him for shooting a number of porn scenes with an underage Traci Lords, but the government never followed through with the investigation.
“He used to brag about how Traci Lords was underage when he worked with her. He said a lot of things that… I don’t want to get into,” Nadia says.