How FBI sought to block Deep Throat the movie

One was a top FBI investigator, a legend of the Watergate affair. The other was a porn movie that came to be seen as a defining moment in America’s cultural and sexual revolution. Now it has emerged that Deep Throat the Fed may have come across Deep Throat the movie during his time with the FBI. According to FBI files released following a freedom of information request by the Associated Press, the bureau worked furiously to try to thwart the 1972 movie.

Agents seized copies of the film, arranged for negatives to be analysed in laboratories and interviewed actors, producers and even messengers who ferried reels to cinemas. Mark Felt, the agent who came to be known as Deep Throat by Washington Post investigators Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for his whistleblowing role in the Watergate scandal – culminating in the disgrace and resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 – was second in command at the bureau at the time.

The huge success of Deep Throat, which disputed sources say may have made up to $600m (£364m) for its mob backers, is seen by many as a key moment in the cultural and sexual revolution, though others label it a cheap and nasty exercise in exploitation. “Today we can’t imagine authorities at any level of government – local, state or federal – being involved in obscenity prosecutions of this kind,” Mark Weiner, constitutional law professor and legal historian at Rutgers-Newark School of Law, New Jersey, told AP.

The information has been gleaned from 498 pages taken from the FBI file on Gerard Damiano, the movie’s director, who died last October aged 80. The full file is 4,800 pages long. Within still concealed areas of the case file is an interview with the film’s star, Linda Susan Boreman, credited as Linda Lovelace. Boreman, who died after a car accident in 2002, defended the movie until 1980, when she made a rapid about-turn and denounced her career.

Ben Child