Tera Patrick Height: How Tall Is the Former Model and Adult Film Star?

Table of Contents

Quick Bio

Detail	Info
Full Name	Linda Ann Hopkins
Stage Name	Tera Patrick
Date of Birth	July 25, 1976
Age (2026)	50 years old
Birthplace	Great Falls, Montana, USA
Nationality	American
Ethnicity	Half Thai, half American
Height	5 feet 9 inches (175 cm)
Profession	Former adult film actress, model, producer, entrepreneur, author
Major Achievement	Founded TeraVision Inc.; Penthouse Pet of the Month (February 2000); appeared simultaneously on covers of Penthouse and Playboy; AVN Hall of Fame inductee
Education	Microbiology degree, Boise State University; EMT certification, American Institute of Health Technology
Notable Publication	Sinner Takes All: A Memoir of Love and Porn (Gotham Books, 2010), co-written with Carrie Borzillo
Estimated Net Worth	Approximately $3–4 million

The Woman Behind the Name

Here’s the thing about Tera Patrick. Most people think they know exactly who she is because they know what she did for a living. And that assumption misses almost the entire story.

The woman born Linda Ann Hopkins in Great Falls, Montana, in 1976 had already lived about four different lives before she ever became the internationally recognized name she’s known as today. She was a child of a fractured bicultural household. She was a teenage model in Tokyo. She was a college student studying microbiology. She trained as an EMT. Then she became one of the most recognized faces in adult entertainment during the early 2000s, built her own production company, co-ran a talent agency, wrote a memoir, and eventually stepped back from the industry on her own terms.

That’s not a tabloid arc. That’s a genuinely complicated human life, and it deserves to be talked about as one.

At fifty years old, Tera Patrick is a woman who has outlasted the career that made her famous and built something more durable on the other side of it. That story is worth knowing.

Born in Big Sky Country, Raised in Two Worlds

Great Falls, Montana is the kind of American place that sounds more dramatic than it looks in person. It sits along the Missouri River in north-central Montana, a mid-sized city surrounded by the kind of flat, wide-open landscape that either fills you with peace or makes you desperate to leave. Linda Ann Hopkins arrived there on July 25, 1976, under a Leo sun, into a household that was already complicated before she was old enough to understand why.

Her father, David Hopkins, was an Army doctor — a man who moved through the world with discipline and a certain free-spirited quality that doesn’t always sound like it belongs to a medical professional but apparently did. He was described as something of a hippie in disposition, someone who approached life with a looseness that contrasted with his professional credentials. Her mother was Thai — a woman who had left her home country and found herself on the opposite side of the world, raising a mixed-heritage child in the very American landscape of Montana.

The household didn’t hold together. When Linda was ten years old, her mother made the decision to return to Thailand. She left. And with that departure, a ten-year-old girl lost not just the daily presence of her mother but the whole cultural thread her mother represented. She was left to grow up with her father in San Francisco, far from both the Montana landscape of her birth and the Thai heritage half of her blood.

That kind of loss doesn’t just disappear. It shapes a person’s relationship with belonging, with security, with the question of who stays and who goes. It’s a formative wound, and it shows up in everything Linda Hopkins became later in life, whether she was chasing belonging in a modeling agency in Tokyo or trying to hold a marriage together against the pull of competing ambitions.

Her relationship with her mother was eventually repaired — she discusses it in her memoir as one of the quietly significant achievements of her adult life. But the repair came decades later, after a lot of water had moved under a lot of bridges.

Tokyo at Fourteen: The Education Nobody Plans For

At age fourteen, Linda Hopkins got spotted by representatives connected to Morning Sun, the international arm of the prestigious Ford Modeling Agency. Ford is not a small operation — it’s one of the most storied modeling agencies in American history, the one that launched Christy Brinkley and Naomi Campbell. Its international division went after a teenager from Montana said something real about what she looked like and how she moved through a room.

She signed the contract. She moved to Tokyo.

Think about that for a moment. Fourteen years old. Alone in Japan, working for one of the most demanding industries in the world, in a country whose language and culture she had no foundation in. Tokyo is a magnificent city, but it’s overwhelming even for adults who arrive with a plan. For a fourteen-year-old from San Francisco navigating the Japanese fashion industry while carrying around the open wound of an absent mother and a disrupted childhood, it was a pressure cooker.

During this time, she became seriously addicted to drugs and alcohol. Her agency eventually sent her home. That’s not a small thing — losing a modeling contract over addiction at fourteen means you arrived somewhere that should have been a launchpad and ended up in a freefall instead.

Coming back to the United States without the contract, without the momentum, must have felt like failure. But it turned out to be a detour rather than a dead end.

The Surprising Academic Chapter

This is the part of Tera Patrick’s story that tends to genuinely surprise people: she went to college. Not just enrolled — she graduated. From Boise State University. With an undergraduate degree in microbiology.

Microbiology. That’s not a soft science. It’s not a hedge against an uncertain career future. It requires real intellectual commitment, a comfort with laboratory work, and the ability to sustain focus through material that doesn’t naturally accommodate distracted attention. She did it. She also obtained EMT certification from the American Institute of Health Technology during the same general period.

She was, in other words, trained to save lives. She could have gone into nursing or healthcare with that combination of credentials and chosen a professional path that looked nothing like what came next.

The story goes that she turned down a nursing position to pursue modeling instead. That’s a sentence that carries more weight than it seems. She didn’t stumble into modeling because nothing else worked out. She actively chose it over a ready-made healthcare career. That’s a deliberate choice made by someone who knew what she wanted, or at least knew what she didn’t want.

The modeling work she did after college was conventional at first — mainstream work, fashion-adjacent projects. The transition into adult entertainment came later and appears to have been made with the same deliberate quality. She wasn’t desperate when she entered that industry. She was calculating. That distinction matters enormously to how her career actually unfolded.

The Rise That Redefined Her Name

Tera Patrick emerged as a professional name in 1999, when she began working in adult entertainment. She had also used a handful of other professional aliases over the years — Tara Patrick, Sadie Jordan, Brooke Thomas, Tera Hopkins — but Tera Patrick was the one that stuck, the one that became a brand.

And it genuinely became a brand in the fullest sense of the word.

In February 2000, she was named Penthouse Pet of the Month. That was a significant platform — Penthouse in 2000 was still a major magazine with serious circulation, and Pet of the Month was the kind of feature that moved culture in that corner of the world. She built rapidly from there. She appeared on the covers of both Playboy and Penthouse simultaneously — a distinction that very few people in the industry have achieved and that made real industry news when it happened.

By the early-to-mid 2000s, she was operating at the absolute top of her field. Complex magazine ranked her in the top tier of their industry lists. She appeared in roughly 120 films across her performing career. She hosted events. She made mainstream media crossover appearances. She was inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame, which is the industry’s most prestigious long-term recognition.

She wasn’t just a performer. She was becoming an executive. And that shift is the most interesting part of the whole career story.

Building TeraVision: The CEO Chapter

The moment Tera Patrick’s career story becomes genuinely fascinating to anyone who cares about business and entertainment is the moment she stopped being just talent and became an owner.

Around 2003 and 2004, she co-founded TeraVision Inc. with her partner and future husband, Evan Seinfeld. The company’s distribution deal with Vivid Entertainment — one of the industry’s major distributors — gave TeraVision real commercial reach immediately. The model was straightforward but significant: instead of performing for studios that owned everything she created, she produced content she owned. The intellectual property, the catalog, the licensing rights — those belonged to TeraVision.

That’s not just a creative decision. That’s a financial architecture that pays dividends long after the active performing days end. It’s the difference between being an employee and being an owner, and Tera Patrick made that transition at the height of her marketability rather than after the opportunities had dried up.

TeraVision released multiple titles a month at its peak. She ran contract arrangements with other performers. She and Evan also launched a talent agency together, representing models and actors in the industry. She was simultaneously a performer, a producer, a talent manager, and a brand licensor.

In 2007, she appeared on the cover of Playboy’s American edition. Her likeness was made into a playable character in a video game. She had a cameo in a mainstream film. She appeared on episodes of a mainstream cable TV series. The crossover reach was real.

She stopped performing on camera in 2008. But she retained sole ownership of TeraVision when her marriage to Evan ended in 2009. That detail — that she kept the company — is not incidental. It reflects how seriously she had structured her professional interests from the start.

Marriage, Ultimatum, and the End of a Partnership

Tera Patrick and Evan Seinfeld married in Las Vegas on January 9, 2004. The ceremony was small and happened during the AVN Awards weekend — which says something about the world they were both living in and how seamlessly their professional and personal lives were intertwined.

Evan Seinfeld is a genuinely interesting figure in his own right. He was the vocalist and bassist for Biohazard, a hard-edged New York metal band with a legitimate cult following. He’d also played a recurring character on HBO’s Oz, the groundbreaking prison drama. He came into the relationship with his own career credentials, his own public profile, and eventually his own adult industry presence as a performer under the name Spyder Jonez.

For several years they functioned as a genuine professional and romantic partnership — performing together, building TeraVision together, appearing in media together as the industry’s most visible power couple. There’s documentary footage of them, interviews where they seem comfortable and mutually supportive. It looked, from the outside, like it worked.

It stopped working.

Tera Patrick describes in her memoir the moment she knew the marriage was finished. She gave Evan an ultimatum: stop performing in adult films, choose marriage over the career. The decision she’d made herself — stepping back from performing in 2006, then fully by 2008 — she wanted him to make too. She felt strongly that the specific dynamic of a couple where one partner kept performing with other people was a trajectory she’d seen destroy too many relationships, and she wanted out of that dynamic.

He didn’t choose the marriage.

They announced their separation in September 2009. The divorce was handled with relative public dignity — they initially indicated they would remain business partners. That didn’t last either. But she kept TeraVision. That’s the thread that held through all of it.

***Sinner Takes All*: Putting It on the Page**

On January 5, 2010, Gotham Books (a Penguin imprint) published Sinner Takes All: A Memoir of Love and Porn, co-written by Tera Patrick and journalist Carrie Borzillo.

The book covers what you’d expect — the path to stardom, the industry, the marriage — but it also covers what people didn’t expect: the childhood, the mother who left for Thailand, the Tokyo modeling crash, the microbiology degree, the deliberate business decisions behind TeraVision. The memoir frames her life as a series of complicated choices made by a person with more going on internally than her public image ever quite communicated.

She described the writing process as cathartic. She talked about how writing the book required her to honestly examine her relationship with Evan and with her estranged mother, and that the process contributed to eventually repairing the relationship with her mother that had been broken since she was ten years old.

That’s the part of the memoir that doesn’t get discussed enough. The reconciliation with her mother — a thread that runs through the whole book as a kind of emotional anchor — is the part that reminds you this was never just a celebrity tell-all. It was a person trying to make sense of her own life on the page.

The Financial Picture, Honestly

Estimates for Tera Patrick’s net worth vary considerably across different sources, ranging from around a million dollars to as high as ten million in some of the more optimistic projections. The Celebrity Net Worth estimate, which tends to use more conservative and documented methodology, sits in the three-to-four million range.

What’s knowable is this: she built her income across multiple streams rather than depending on any single one. Performance fees during the peak years were significant. TeraVision’s catalog generates ongoing licensing and royalty income. The memoir produces book royalties. A membership model has been used on her branded website. Feature dancing and personal appearance work added to the total. She structured things to pay dividends beyond the active years.

She retained the production company after the divorce. That’s an asset with ongoing value. The catalog she owns is decades of content. That doesn’t expire.

She is financially comfortable. That much is clear from her life circumstances and the trajectory of her career decisions.

Right Now: The Private Life She Chose

By the mid-2010s, Tera Patrick had pulled back significantly from public life. The performing career was long behind her. TeraVision continued operating, but she stepped out of the front-facing promotional role.

Various sources note that she eventually spent time living in Europe — a geographical distance from the American entertainment industry that reads like a deliberate reset. She also had a relationship after the Seinfeld divorce, with Tony Acosta, that lasted for several years through the early-to-mid 2010s.

As of 2025 and 2026, she’s fifty years old. She maintains a lower public profile than at any point in her career. Her website still exists. TeraVision Inc. still carries her name. But the Tera Patrick who was everywhere in 2005 — on magazine covers, at industry events, in mainstream media crossovers — has been replaced by a fifty-year-old woman who appears to be prioritizing private life over public persona.

That’s not a defeat. It looks, from the outside, like someone who got what she came for and then decided what she wanted next.

Final Words

Linda Ann Hopkins grew up without her mother, got derailed in Tokyo at fourteen, climbed back from addiction to earn a legitimate science degree, and then made a series of extraordinarily deliberate professional decisions that built one of the most recognized brands in the industry she entered. She married someone she loved and lost that marriage when he chose his career over hers. She put her real story on the page in a book that treated her audience as people who could handle complicated truths.

What makes Tera Patrick stand out isn’t the notoriety — plenty of people have notoriety. It’s the business intelligence she applied to an industry that often takes more from its performers than it gives. She owned her content. She owned her own company. When the marriage ended, she kept what she’d built. At fifty, she has the freedom to live quietly because she planned for it when the noise was loudest.

That’s a success story, however you decide to measure success.

FAQs

1. What is Tera Patrick’s real name?

She was born Linda Ann Hopkins on July 25, 1976, in Great Falls, Montana. Tera Patrick is the stage name she adopted when she entered the entertainment industry, and it became so embedded in public record that most sources use it as her primary name.

2. How tall is Tera Patrick?

She stands 5 feet 9 inches tall (175 centimeters), which is considerably above average height and contributed to her strong modeling presence from an early age.

3. What is Tera Patrick’s ethnic background?

She is half Thai (from her mother’s side) and half American (from her father David Hopkins, an Army doctor). She grew up after her mother returned to Thailand when Linda was ten, so she was raised primarily in San Francisco by her father.

4. Did Tera Patrick go to college?

Yes. She earned an undergraduate degree in microbiology from Boise State University, which surprises most people unfamiliar with her background. She also obtained EMT certification from the American Institute of Health Technology, meaning she was formally trained to work in healthcare.

5. What is TeraVision Inc.?

TeraVision Inc. is the production company Tera Patrick co-founded with Evan Seinfeld around 2003–2004. Vivid Entertainment handled distribution. The company gave her ownership of the content she produced rather than simply performing for outside studios. When she and Evan divorced in 2009, she retained sole ownership of TeraVision.

6. Who did Tera Patrick marry?

She married Evan Seinfeld on January 9, 2004, in Las Vegas during the AVN Awards weekend. Seinfeld was the vocalist and bassist for the metal band Biohazard and an actor who appeared on HBO’s Oz. They divorced in 2009 after a five-year marriage.

7. Why did Tera Patrick and Evan Seinfeld divorce?

Tera Patrick discusses this in her memoir. She gave Evan an ultimatum — stop performing in adult films or lose the marriage. She had stepped back from performing herself and wanted him to do the same. He chose not to, and she says she knew at that point the marriage was over.

8. What is Sinner Takes All About?

It’s Tera Patrick’s memoir, co-written with journalist Carrie Borzillo and published by Gotham Books (Penguin) on January 5, 2010. It covers her childhood, her mother’s departure, the Tokyo modeling experience, her time at Boise State, her entry into the adult industry, the creation of TeraVision, and her marriage to Evan Seinfeld. She described writing it as cathartic and credits the process with helping her repair her relationship with her mother.

9. What was Tera Patrick’s signature achievement in the publishing world?

Being simultaneously featured on the covers of both Penthouse and Playboy — something almost no other performer in the industry had achieved. She was also named Penthouse Pet of the Month in February 2000, which launched her national profile in a major way.

10. What is Tera Patrick’s estimated net worth?

Estimates vary widely. The most credible figures place her net worth in the three-to-four million dollar range, reflecting income from performing, TeraVision’s catalog and licensing, the memoir, website membership revenue, and personal appearances over more than two decades of professional activity.

11. Is Tera Patrick still active in the entertainment industry?

She retired from performing on camera in 2008. TeraVision Inc. has continued operating under her ownership, and her website has remained active. She has significantly reduced her public media presence since the mid-2010s, and various reports suggest she spent time living in Europe. She is not actively performing or producing at the level she once was.

12. Did Tera Patrick reconcile with her mother?

Yes. Her memoir discusses the repair of that relationship in detail. Her mother’s departure when she was ten years old was a defining wound in her early life, and working through the writing of the memoir contributed to addressing it. It’s described as one of the most personally significant outcomes of the book-writing process.

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