The Times Magazine 47porn studio friend when Gauthier screens the
tape for him. “It feels like something we’re
not supposed to be watching,” before adding,
with mock horror, “Imagine if it ever got out.”)
Unfortunately, Gauthier was to find porn
distributors uniquely principled, unwilling to
purchase his tape without release forms signed
by its subjects. Undeterred, he turned to the new
frontier of commerce and communication: the
internet, or as it was known then, the world
wide web. The embryonic platform, with
40 million users, 25 million of them in the
US – a number unimaginably huge at the time
- was many years off becoming a streaming
or ecommerce portal, but was a space where
advertising was free, and where a disgruntled
electrician could build a few rudimentary
pages – pamsex.com, pamlee.com, pamsextape.
com – and sell sex tapes of a TV star, with
an address to send cheques to (the New York
branch of a Canadian T-shirt company, which
then transferred the money to a bank in
Holland). The videos were then mailed out
by Gauthier in Los Angeles.
When Lee and Anderson were alerted of
the sex tape’s existence out in the world, they
hadn’t even noticed their safe had been stolen.
When they did, in January 1996, they filed a
police report and hired a private investigator
to establish what had occurred. Meanwhile, the
tape’s dissemination was snowballing. In March
1996, the couple heard that Penthouse had
acquired a copy, and launched a $10 million
civil lawsuit against the publication. The judge
quashed it, and in June that year, Penthouse
featured Anderson on its cover, with lurid
written descriptions of the contents of the tape,
including quoted exchanges. Without written
permission to use the stills, they illustrated the
piece with private Polaroids, also stolen from the
safe, which had already been published abroad.
Two months later, a judge also denied the
couple’s request for a permanent injunction
against Penthouse, because – in what seems
the most anachronistic aspect of the entire
brouhaha – since they had discussed their sex
life in interviews, and Anderson had posed
naked for shoots before, they had, the lawyer
for Penthouse argued, forfeited their right to
privacy with regards to the tape. He also claimed
that, since Anderson had publicly claimed not
to take drugs, yet the tape showed her rolling
a joint, it was in legal terms newsworthy.
Today, it would be called revenge porn.
By 1997, the internet had gained momentum,
as well as some sophistication, and people were
setting up the earliest versions of streaming
sites, with credit card processing enabled.
The first boom area was, inevitably, porn.
On November 6 that year Seth Warshavsky,
a 25-year-old internet whizz, broadcast the sex
tape on his porn site Club Love, on a loop for
five hours. Those eight minutes of intimate
action earned $77 million in online views in
less than 12 months. Variety magazine even
published a review of the, er, performance.
With its ignominious position as the first
celebrity sex tape to go viral, there has long
been the suggestion that Lee and Anderson
were not quite the victims they purported to
be and were, in fact, quietly complicit in its
leaking. Lazzeri dismisses that idea. “Pamela
was very prudish in some ways, and that just
wouldn’t have been her,” she insists. “And they
didn’t need the fame or money – they had
plenty of both.”
In a 2020 TV interview, Anderson dismissed
the notion that their home video even belongs
in the Hilton/Kardashian canon. “That was not
a sex tape,” she said. “That was a compilation
of vacations that we were naked on.”
After endless injunctions and depositions
had failed to prevent seemingly everyone
from seeing the tape, the couple came to a
settlement with Warshavsky – a poor one for
them, it turned out – which signed away theircopyright, allowed him to broadcast it online,
and would later see him strike a deal with an
adult video distribution company to produce
VHS, DVD and CD-ROM copies. By 1998,
Pamela’s Hardcore Sex Video was on sale in
most adult video stores in the US, and by
2000, Pamela Anderson was the “most
downloaded star” of all time, according to
The Guinness Book of World Records.
However, the commercial success of
the “film” was inversely proportional to the
benefits it brought for Anderson. “Hollywood
can be astonishingly puritanical, and while
she was radiantly beautiful, Pamela was not
going to get cast in, say, a Disney movie now,”
observes White. “She had been the girl next
door, but now she was associated with explicit
videos, she wouldn’t get cast for certain roles.”
Certainly, Anderson’s trajectory became
more turbulent following the sex tape. She and
Lee had two sons, Brandon and Dylan, but
less than a year after the latter’s birth, Lee was
charged with spousal battery and sentenced to
six months in jail. He had allegedly attacked
his wife while she was holding their seven-
week-old son, kicking her and leaving her
with a broken nail and bruises. Anderson filed
for divorce – the “Tommy” tattoo on her ring
finger modified to read ‘Mommy’ – retreated
to a motorhome in Malibu and healed her
broken heart with flings with male model
Marcus Schenkenberg and surfer Kelly Slater.But the love story wasn’t over; in 2008 the
couple reunited. “We’ve only given it a try 800
times – 801, here we go,” said Lee at the time.
Shockingly, the reunion was short-lived.
In the intervening years, Anderson had
married twice more, to musician Kid Rock- whom she married in August 2006, and
filed for divorce four months later – and film
producer Rick Salomon, whom she married in
October 2007, separated from in December,
and sought an annulment from in February
2008, citing fraud. She married Salomon (who,
incidentally, starred opposite Hilton in 1 Night
in Paris) for a second time in January 2014,
filing for divorce six months later.
In January 2020, she married Hollywood
producer Jon Peters, separated from him
12 days later, and later claimed never to have
been married to him at all. In December 2020,
she married her bodyguard, Dan Hayhurst.
They remain, reportedly, married. Her (first)
former husband has, in comparison, notched
up just two engagements – to Prince’s former
wife, the dancer Mayte Garcia, and singer
Sofia Toufa – before marrying social media
star Brittany Furlan in February 2019.
More fascinating, though, is Anderson’s
reincarnation as an activist and political
campaigner. She advocates for animals, the
environment and Julian Assange, whom she
regularly visits in HMP Belmarsh. She writes
impassioned letters to world leaders – and
their wives; she sent Melania Trump a vegan
coat to persuade her out of leather and fur.
She is vehemently opposed to the proliferation
of pornography and the prevailing hook-up
culture. She lives on six rural acres of
Vancouver Island that used to belong to
her grandmother, has spoken at the Oxford
and Cambridge Unions, and addressed
the National Assembly of France about
force-feeding geese to make foie gras.
In interviews now, she is quippy and self-
aware. “I don’t know how I turn boobs into
trees and whales and oceans, but I do,” she
has said. “Whatever attention I’ve gotten, I’ve
used it to get in the door of a lot of places.”
While her name may for ever be
synonymous with the birth of the celebrity
sex tape, Anderson has moved on – or at least
presents that way in public – and has not been
party to the production of the new series. “I
was really hopeful that she would be involved.
I wish it had been different,” said Lily James,
who has independently tried to contact her.
Lee, meanwhile, has responded to the show’s
imminent release with characteristic humility.
“Let everyone know we did it first,” he said
earlier this month. “Before the Kardashians,
before anyone else. Let the motherf***ers
know, we broke the internet first.” n
Pam & Tommy launches on Disney+ on
February 2‘PAM WAS PRUDISH IN SOME
WAYS. THEY DIDN’T NEED
THE FAME OR MONEY –
THEY HAD PLENTY OF BOTH’