Revealed: ‘The Road’ Novelist Trafficked Girl, 17, To Mexico

Literary giant Cormac McCarthy had a longtime “secret muse” whom he smuggled into Mexico when she was just 17.

Augusta Britt, now 64, has come forward in a bombshell new report in Vanity Fair to reveal that she began a “relationship” with the No Country for Old Men author in 1976, when she was 16 years old and he was 42.

“I loved him more than anything,” Britt, who stayed in touch with the author until he died last year at age 89, told the magazine. She reportedly inspired more than 10 of his novels, including the acclaimed Blood Meridian.

Britt said she first approached him for an autograph at a motel where the teen, who was in foster care, used to take showers in order to avoid creepy men following her into the bathrooms at the homes where she lived.

They struck up a friendship, and a year later, when Britt was 17, McCarthy altered her birth certificate so she could get an international travel visa. Then he smuggled her to Mexico, where they became intimate. In the meantime, he had a secret wife and son he hadn’t told her about.

Throughout the piece, Britt jokes that McCarthy was a “groomer,” but she insists her “jokes” are just a defense mechanism.

“He kept me safe, gave me protection,” she said.

The whole story, however, reads like a real-life Lolita written by Humbert Humbert’s biggest literary admirer, with the author’s overwrought prose often obscuring the more disturbing details.

In her recounting, Britt reveals her younger self to be a vulnerable, young woman.

“After living with these creepy men in foster homes, it was such a relief to be with Cormac,” Britt said. “I felt safe and secure because he didn’t want anything. He was genuinely interested in me.”

But then he would also send her erotic letters telling her she was “enormously sexy” and that he dreamed about “pressing his face between her thighs.”

“It would be very confusing,” Britt said.

A year later, after Britt turned 18, she learned McCarthy was still married. A year after that, she finally discovered he had a son. She left him soon after that, before eventually re-establishing contact.

Britt describes feeling “violated” when McCarthy sent her a draft of the novel All the Pretty Horses and discovered it was full of her likeness.

Her deeply painful experiences had been “regurgitated and rearranged into fiction,” damaging her further at the exact moment in her life when she was trying to heal. When she told McCarthy that her likeness in the novel “felt weird,” Cormac laughed and said, “Well, baby, that’s what I do. I’m a writer.”

Every few months for the rest of his life, McCarthy visited Britt in Tucson partly to feed his addiction to her and partly to find new material. When she was depressed, he taught her stone masonry—and then wrote a play called The Stonemason. He watched her tame horses so he could inject his Border Trilogy with equine realism, even though he didn’t ride. He killed off character and after character that was allegedly based on her.

McCarthy’s literary depictions plunged Britt deeper into depression. In the meantime, he proposed twice to her and reneged both times. But one of his bogus proposals did make it verbatim into the film The Counselor, with Michael Fassbender uttering the words to Penélope Cruz.

Britt said she was always scared to come forward because she didn’t want to be “disloyal” to McCarthy. But now, with her letters set to become part of McCarthy’s archive at Texas State University next fall, it was just a matter of time before the whole sordid story came out.