Martin Hodas, popularly known as New York's King of Porn, owned every 25-cent sleazy peep show across Time Square in the 1970s and raked in millions. 'Marty,' who ran his porno empire out of an office located at 113W. 42nd St, was considered astute and courageous by business owners outside, however, he was a different person when he came home.

Hodas terrorized his children and often projected his own insecurities about his weight on his eldest daughter Romola Hodas. He routinely fat-shamed her, physically abusing her and sending her off to fat camps, branding her a "fat pig". 

"He once put me in the hospital," Romola told MEA Worldwide (MEAWW). "My dad used to beat me up when I gained weight. He used to pick me up when he came home from work and put me on a scale, and if I gained any weight he used to beat me up. I would later sit at the dinner table and not eat anything and then clean and wash the dishes and go to my room without food. He was rough," she added.

"'You are so fat!' he shouted. "How can you walk out of the house looking the way you do? ... You must be the fattest girl in school! You’re a fat pig. Don’t tell me you’re not fat. Your ass is HUGE!'," Romola said, writing about her father's outbursts over her weight, in her book 'Princess of 42nd Street'.

She was eight when Hodas began his verbal and physical onslaught on his daughter and made her terribly conscious about her weight. This initiated her journey to yearly trips to fat camps during summers. Weight, for Romola, became an issue and which she still sometimes struggles with at the age of 61.

"Sometimes I have issues with my food and weight because of what my dad did but I worked really hard to overcome all the criticism and feelings of inadequacy. I still feel inadequate sometimes," she told us while adding how years of abuse had made her a problem drinker.

Growing up with drugs, physical violence, and sex orgies at her house was a norm for Ramola when she was a child. Her father owned most of the adult entertainment establishments from Sixth to Eighth Avenue. He expanded his business from peep show machines to other ventures including massage parlors, topless bars, live model photography, and eventually started his own movie studio to produce “loops” for his peepshows.

"Some kids’ dads are doctors or lawyers or teachers or bankers; they visit their dads in skyscraper offices, or bright shiny hospitals, or gleaming banks that smell of money, but no, it’s my lot in life to be the daughter of Martin J. Hodas, the Lord of the Loops, Prince of the Peep Show, Times Square’s," Romola wrote in her book.

Romola and her siblings — two younger sisters and younger brother — struggled to overcome years of childhood abuse. On being asked whether writing the book about her life as the daughter of the porn king was cathartic, she said: "No, it wasn't, it was one of the hardest things I ever did."

"I worked out a lot of my stuff. I actually do public speaking and talk about the habits that I incorporated to help me overcome a lot of the physical and emotional abuse and part of it was starting to forgive my parents. So writing this book and going over each chapter seven-eight times, and putting myself back in all of that hell was very, very hard," she said.