"There were lots of drugs, crazy parties and things children should not be seeing," New York porn king Marty Hodas' eldest child Romola Hodas said while recalling how it was to grow up in the house of a man who transformed Times Square by building a pornography empire. 

Romola, while talking to MEA World Wide (MEAWW), said that not only did her father leave a legacy in his porno empire, he also left his children with enduring issues as they still struggle to cope with them decades later. 

"Two of my siblings had a very rough time with drugs and alcohol. I struggled too but I am moderate now, I still drink but I am healthy about it 95 percent of the time," the author of 'The Princess of 42nd Street: Surviving My Childhood as the Daughter of Times Square's King of Porn' said. 

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Talking about her parents' weekly swinger pool parties at their house in New York, Romola said that growing up in Marty's house was very rough for her and her siblings — her two younger sisters and younger brother. She said that from childhood, she struggled to be a surrogate parent for her siblings as she felt protective of them considering her disturbed parents. Romola's father was abusive and her mother had bipolar disorder and was mostly emotionally distant.

"Topless waitresses breastfeeding kittens, people doing drugs, strangers having sex all over the house, it was just — rough," she said. "When I was growing up, the parents of my school friends would not let me in their houses, and they were not allowed to go to mine. I was very embarrassed."

"It’s really pretty remarkable that I have any normal, healthy ideas about sex whatsoever, considering the depravity I witnessed in my own Long Island living room during those crazy days in the early ’70s, when I was still only in my mid-teens," Romola wrote in her book.

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Me and dad. About 20 years ago. My book "The Princess of 42nd Street, surviving my childhood as the Daughter of Time's Squares King of Porn"... Can make a great Holiday gift. Get it on Amazon

A post shared by Romola Hodas (@romolahodas) on Dec 5, 2018 at 3:08pm PST

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"Apparently, Dad didn’t get enough sexual stimulation running a porn empire at work, so he started hosting swinger parties at home — basically, parties where people arrived as a couple and then switched partners to have sex, and then switched again until everyone had enjoyed multiple partners in one night," she wrote.

 

Marty virtually owned every 25-cent sleazy peep show in the city in the 1970s and raked in millions. He terrorized his children, particularly his eldest daughter, routinely fat-shaming her, physically abusing her and sending her off to fat camps, branding her a "fat pig".

He even once wrote a letter to her when she was a child, reading: "Dear Romola, You will always be my daughter. This is a biological fact that cannot be changed. As your father, I have fulfilled all of my obligations in accordance with the law. All the other obligations that a father has toward his children are from his desire to do so. In most cases, the desire remains lasting, but in many cases, this is not so... At this moment I do not care for you as a person. I am not obligated to do anything I don’t want to do for anyone. I hope someday you will change." The letter which Romola received as a child left a lasting impact on her emotionally. 

Romola, in her book, wrote that although she and her siblings were asked to stay in their rooms during these parties, they could not help see some of it. She tried to prevent her siblings from seeing this world but did not fully succeed.

"I did the best I could, but still, they were exposed to far too much. For example, Jarrett [her brother] told me just recently that he remembers being a kid and seeing Dad outside floating naked on an inner tube in the swimming pool and sporting a full erection. It still breaks my heart to think about all the things those kids had to try to make sense of at such a young age," she wrote.