BDSM MEDIA NEWS!!!!
07 july 2012
“Canada’s most famous dominatrix” trades her whip for camera
Source: Metronews.ca. - Metronews.ca - Canada
CANADA - “I hope to have a new dungeon.”
As soon as the words tumble from her mouth, Terri-Jean Bedford emits a giddy squeal. After walking down a long and dusty path, as she likes to say, Bedford has emerged in a clearing.
A thin layer of dust from her journey - a childhood filled with abuse, living on the streets as a teen, challenging prostitution laws as “Canada’s most famous dominatrix” - still coats her memories.
It is still hard to forgive her abusers. It is still painful to relive her past.
But at the age of 52, Bedford has decided it’s finally time to take her message to the masses. It’s time to trade her whip for a TV camera or, at the very least, start snapping that whip on camera.
Bedford has signed a deal with Hiltz Squared Media to develop a number of properties based on her life and memoir, Dominatrix on Trial. There will be a documentary and a reality series - working title The Bondage Bungalow - that follows Bedford and her 32-year-old daughter as “they prepare to open a house of bondage in Toronto.”
If this sounds a bit risqué, Bedford says, that’s only because we are squeamish about S&M and, by extension, the role of women in society.
“We’ve been formulated to believe that women are submissive little dolls to be kept at home, pregnant and barefoot,” she says.
In 1994, Bedford, known as Madame De Sade, was arrested for running a common bawdy house. She later decided to fight the prostitution laws, which were partially struck down in March by Ontario’s Court of Appeal.
But with the case possibly headed to the Supreme Court, Bedford believes the battle is far from over. In the interim, she wants to help young women trapped on the same dusty path.
“There are a lot of girls that are on the stroll, doing crack, sticking needles in their arms and they don’t have a hope in hell,” she says. “I was there. I can show them how to get through it.”
She recalls her own time on the streets.
“Having no place to go, no place to wash up, no one to love you or care about you,” she says. “People spitting at you, throwing beer bottles at you, calling you scum - you know, that’s hard.”
Then she offers an insightful observation: “When you’re standing on a street corner, you are stark naked whether you have clothes on or not.”
These days, Bedford is enjoying her time as a “granny nanny.” To make ends meet, her daughter works three jobs. So Bedford is helping to raise her 9-year-old grandson.
She walks him to school, packs his lunch, makes him dinner, reads him books, tucks him in at night. As a grandmother, she’s now the mother she never was. She’s also the mother she never had.
Now battling a number of health problems, including hepatitis C, Bedford hasn’t worked as a dominatrix “in many moons.” But every so often, Madame De Sade resurfaces.
“I can turn it on and off whenever I want. I don’t have to get paid. It’s a lifestyle.”
See larger photo on:
Metronews.ca.
