Shocking Revelations From Pamela Anderson’s Netflix Nearly one year after “Pam & Tommy,” Hulu’s limited series about Pamela Anderson’s stolen sex tape, the Baywatch star is revealing her side of the story in a Netflix documentary, Pamela, a Love Story and in a memoir, Love, Pamela, both out Tuesday. The actress, whose bombshell beauty is memorialized in slow motion runs in an iconic bikini on Baywatch and in the pages of Playboy, writes that she and her ex-husband, MötleyCrüe drummer Tommy Lee, never made a ‘sex tape.’ We just filmed each other, always, and lived a sexy passionate life: sweet newlyweds. Just two crazy naked people in love.”
What resulted is a video that many outlets report earned $77 million in just one year, although Anderson says she hasn’t seen a dime from it. And that’s not her only heartache. In her latest projects, Anderson, 55, also shares the devastation of childhood sexual abuse and a fruitless quest for love. News of Hulu’s plans for the eight-part “Pam & Tommy,” starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan as the ’90s power couple, gave Anderson nightmares, she says in the docuseries.
I didn’t sleep last night at all, she says. I have no desire to watch it. Not going to watch it. Never watched the tape. I’m not going to watch this. She says she texted Lee about the miniseries, and he advised her: Pamela, just don’t let it hurt you as much as it did the first time. I blocked that out of my life, she says in the film. It was a survival mechanism, and now that it’s all coming up again, I feel sick. Basically, you are just a thing owned by the world, like you belong to the world. The tape was inside a safe stolen by disgruntled electrician Rand Gauthier, who’d been working on the couple’s Malibu home.
Anderson says she and Lee first received a tape in the mail of them having sex. The lawyers basically said, ‘You’re in Playboy, you have no right to privacy.’ But to Anderson, the distribution of the video felt like a rape. Concerned over how continuing the lawsuit stress would affect her pregnancy (she previously miscarried), the pair signed over rights of the tape to Internet Entertainment Group in November 1997. After that, it just felt like that solidified kind of the cartoon image too, she says. You become a caricature. I think that was the deterioration of kind of whatever image I had.
Marital troubles lead to a suicide attempt
Lee’s jealousy tainted their fairytale union, Anderson writes. Baywatch scenes with men angered the rocker. One evening, confused, sad, tired, not in my right mind, Anderson climbed into the bathtub and washed down a bottle of Advil with vodka. She ended up vomiting. The previous day, Lee had crashed his car into a trailer on the set, she writes, punched the cabinets out in the makeup room, and thrown me into his car, driving off the set, tires spinning. He left her at their condo, where she cried all night. I couldn’t take it anymore, and I didn’t know what to do. It was a depth of despair I’d never felt – and I’d been through a lot.
Parenthood proved stressful for Lee, Anderson writes. When Anderson told Lee, You have to grow up, Tommy. It’s not just about you anymore, she writes, he lost it. His eyes went black as he grabbed the phone away from me, twisting my arm as I was holding Dylan (then 7 weeks old) in the other. My nail tore off, blood dripping down my arm. The kids were so frightened. I picked up Brandon, too, but he slid frantically down my leg and held on to it tight, hyperventilating. Tommy ripped Brandon off me and threw me and Dylan into the wall.
The divorce from Tommy was the hardest, lowest, most difficult point of my life, writes Anderson. Although Anderson says the two had sex after Lee’s release, their reunion didn’t last because neither of us could forgive the other, deep down. I tried to kill her, says Anderson. I tried to stab her in the heart with a candy cane pen. The babysitter later died in a car accident. I was in shock, she writes in her memoir, falling apart, molecules, dust, liquid My life evaporating.
I thought I was bad, and I was ashamed, she writes. It hurt me a lot, keeping this secret.
Even at her first Playboy shoot, in September 1989, she remembers getting sick after a makeup artist touched her breast. I started to feel nauseous, faint, I had to stop, Anderson writes. I ran to the bathroom and got sick.I couldn’t believe a woman had touched me there, I just couldn’t. But posing for the magazine was empowering, Anderson writes. It helped me in ways I could never articulate – I took my power back – I had to – It was a chance to realize a new life, a new adventure…
