The Complete Disappearance of Cheri Champagne, Part 2: Podcast 168

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In the previous episode of The Complete Disappearance of Cheri Champagne:

After years of hearing mysterious stories about the 1980s adult film actor, Cheri Champagne, I was keen to see if she was still around and interested in talking about her life. The trouble was that no one seemed to have heard from her for almost forty years.

There were many reasons why she intrigued me: from the strange beginnings dancing in a cage in a Maine sex club, the bizarre adult films she’d appeared in, the aggressive persona she adopted in magazine interviews, and her dominatrix-themed stage show that toured the sex clubs of New York in the early 1980s.

Hers was a typically wild life journey from another era – but there also seemed be something different about Cheri, something that nagged at me, suggesting I wasn’t seeing the whole picture. No one had managed to get close to her back in the day, perhaps not surprising given that she claimed she kept a torture chamber in her house and that her main pleasure was inflicting pain on her partners – hardly the sexy, feminine image that so many other stars of the time cultivated.

But there was perhaps more to her than that: there were rumors from those who’d known that her hinted at a secret, something hidden in her background, something that might explain her distant attitude and seemingly hostile behavior.

And then, after years of looking, I found Cheri. I called her, excited to learn the truth from her perspective. Her reaction was hostile and angry. She obliquely referred to trauma in her past as being the reason for not wanting to talk – and, after a short conversation, she hung up. This is what happened next.

This is the concluding part of Cheri Champagne’s story.

You can listen to the first part here.

This podcast is 30 minutes long.

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Cheri Champagne

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