Netflix is shining a light on the mistreatment of ‘90s icon Pamela Anderson in "Pamela, A Love Story", a new documentary debuting January 31 - the same day her memoir, Love, Pamela hits shelves.
Rolling Stone reports that one of the biggest focuses of the documentary, of course, concerns the VHS tape that was leaked of Anderson and her then-husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, engaging in a series of sex acts onboard a yacht, and elsewhere. It was the first celebrity sex tape to go mega-viral online, and turned Anderson into a media punchline. Scenes of Matt Lauer, Howard Stern and Jay Leno poking and prodding her over the tape will make you feel queasy. Anderson contends that the tapes were “stolen” from their home, and that the leak ruined not only her career but her credibility in the public eye.
“After that, it just felt like that solidified the cartoon image, too. You become a caricature,” she shares in the film. “I think that was the deterioration of whatever image I had… I knew at that point that my career was over.”
As Anderson, now 55, tells it, she and Lee had just had a baby and were six months into construction on their new house when someone — she still doesn’t know exactly who — stole Lee’s gun safe, even though it was “the size of a refrigerator” and located behind a carpeted wall. The safe was filled with Lee’s weapons and personal mementos, as well as a series of tapes of them being “goofballs” and fooling around on-camera during their honeymoon phase. The tapes were then spliced together, so that it gave the impression of being a “sex tape” versus a series of personal moments.
“One day, we got something in the mail. It was wrapped in brown paper. Tommy opened it. It was a VHS tape,” Anderson recalls. “Tommy told me to go upstairs, and he watched it. I didn’t watch it — I’ve never watched it. Later, he came upstairs and he goes, ‘This is going to be disturbing. This is a VHS tape of us having sex.’”
Penthouse founder Bob Guccione offered to buy the rights to the tape for $5 million in cash, but Anderson and Lee said, “Fuck you, give us our tapes back.” Unfortunately, it was the nineties, and the internet had just come alive. The tape not only spread like wildfire but was also mass-produced by Seth Warshavsky of Internet Entertainment Group (IEG), who distributed the video without the couple’s consent.
Read more at Rolling Stone, and watch a trailer for Pamela, A Love Story below:
