Linda Lovelace was obviously a liar
This movie is based on Linda Lovelace's "autobiography" that was written in the early 1980's when she was embracing a idealogy I call "victim feminism". This almost completely discredited idealogy, which most self-respecting women and even most feminists, would probably consider insulting today, basically supposes women have no free will, so if they end up working as strippers, porn stars, prostitutes, etc., it MUST BE because they were forced into it by men. Worse, Lovelace wasn't even sincere about this. She only became a "feminist" some years AFTER she failed to parlay her infamy from "Deep Throat" into main street celebrity.
Of course, some women ARE forced into prostition, but she was the only mainstream porn star to claim this, and strangely she never did so in the early 70's when she was at the height of her minor fame and had lots of mainstream exposure. Instead she started a revue in Las Vegas and made "Linda Lovelace for President". Her stories are also contradicted by everyone she ever "worked" with back then--Harry Reems, Gerardo Damiano, Thora Birch's mom--many of whom are not otherwise still friendly with the porn industry. She's also contradicted herself numerous times. She allegedly took a polygraph at her publisher's request after this book came out, but if THAT story is even true, the machine probably exploded or she passed it only because she was a sociopath.
It's not hard to believe she was in an abusive relationship with her then-husband Chuck Traynor, but then she turned around and made outrageous claims about mild-mannered director Gerardo Damiano holding a gun to her head. This is typical "victim feminism"--instead of blaming ONE man and assigning ANY responsibility to a woman for her poor romantic choices, they blame some kind of "patriarchal" male conspiracy, even though the larger "patriarchy" back then was definitely against women being in porn. Moreover, that was a strange time when porn was largely still illegal, but porn stars were quasi-celebrities; porn producers were outlaws flying under the radar, yet there were probably thousands of liberated young hippie girls willing to go all the way on screen (it was the height of the Sexual Revolution). And in the midst of all this, a large conspiracy of people chose to risk kidnapping rape and felony menacing charges (a gun to the head) to force one, only marginally attractive woman to make a porno movie? Pardon the pun, but this whole story is VERY hard to swallow.