Hulu’s new eight-part series Pam and Tommy focuses on Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson’s mid-Nineties romance, and the explosion and fallout of their sex tape.
It was one of the first big viral moments in pop culture: a stolen home video became a cause celebre thanks to the way that the internet could make sure anyone, anywhere could see it.
The couple first met at a party on New Year’s Eve 1994. Lee had been married twice before, to model Elaine Starchuk (though they separated after a week) and to actor Heather Locklear for seven years, and was engaged to model Bobbie Jean Brown. Then 32, he’d been the drummer in hair metal wallies Motley Crue since 1981.
Anderson had been playing CJ Parker on Baywatch since 1992, and prior to that had been cast in a minor role on the Tim Allen sitcom Home Improvement.
According to Lee’s friend Guerin Swing, that night Lee was acting like a bit of a giddy kipper thanks to various – ahem – ingestions, and licked Anderson’s face “from chin to temple”.
They had been around each other for a grand total of four days when Lee flew – uninvited – to surprise her on a shoot in Cancun. He proposed to her there and then, and the couple were married shortly afterwards. The groom wore shorts; the bride wore a bikini. They got tattoos of each other’s names on their ring fingers. Anderson’s mother found out about the union via People magazine.
“Tommy and I started out having a very intense, fun, crazy relationship because we were two kids,” Anderson said in 1998. “We were madly in love. It wasn’t like drugs or alcohol or anything like that. We were both just really passionate about life.”
In 1996, Anderson and Lee were expecting their first child together, which Lee recalled later in touching terms.
“The tears came flooding out when I saw this person come out of my wife, right in the master bedroom where we conceived him,” he said. “I even got to help pull him out, dude.”
The time should have been a happy one, but things quickly turned.
“One night, Pamela and I were chowing down on some dinner and flipping through television stations when we heard our names being mentioned on some news show,” Lee recalled. “On the screen, there was a dude at Tower Video stocking the shelves with videotapes. And we knew just what they were.”
They were copies of a sex tape Anderson and Lee had filmed while on holiday.
“We had taken a five-day houseboat trip on Lake Mead as a vacation,” Lee has said. “As usual, I brought along my video camera. We weren’t trying to make a porno, just to document our vacation. We watched it once when we returned home, then put it in our safe, a 500-pound monstrosity, hidden underneath a carpet in my studio control room in the garage.”
This is where things get knotty. Anderson and Lee had got some builders in to sort out their house in Malibu over three months at the start of 1995. Those builders included an electrician called Rand Gauthier.
When the builders were summarily dismissed for apparently doing a less than brilliant job and not paid the $20,000 Gauthier reckoned later that they were owed, they had the hump. When Gauthier and a colleague were warned off the property at shotgun-point by Lee when they attempted to get their kit back, it turned into something else.
“I was never really that popular with people, ” Gauthier told Rolling Stone later. “But I had never been held at gunpoint. It screwed with my head.” Gauthier hatched a plan.
“Months later, Pamela and I spent Christmas in London while some work was being done on the house,” Lee recalled. “Afterward, I finished recording in the basement and then dismantled the studio. When the carpet was torn out, I saw nothing but empty space where the safe had once been.
“There were no broken locks or windows, so it had to have been an inside job. The only people with the keys were my assistant and the construction crew, which, come to think of it, included an electrician who used to be a porn star and knew that business pretty well. The way I figured it, they must have removed the safe with a crane and had it picked or blown open. They were probably after the guns and jewellery in there, but they also ended up with everything from family heirlooms to photographs.”
Gauthier had spent the entirety of the summer of 1995 plotting the raid. He would drive over to the house and sit, watching. He hit on a plan to cover himself with a yak fur rug and crawl like a dog past the security cameras he’d installed, and into the garage.
At 3am on 4 November 1995, he went in. He claims he strapped the six-foot-by-four-foot, 500lb safe onto a trolley all by himself after disassembling a mixing console which hid the safe’s location. Then, he says, he heaved the thing onto the back of his truck. Friends of Gauthier’s doubt his story, and say other contractors were involved.
After cutting open the safe, filled with guns, jewellery and Anderson’s wedding bikini, Gauthier took a cassette tape back to the porn studio where he worked in North Hollywood. He and the owner watched it.
“We put it in and see what it is, and of course, cha-ching. The dollar signs fly before our eyes,” Gauthier said. “But we’re going, this is the kind of thing people will get killed over.”
When Lee realised the safe was gone in January 1996, he was “freaked out”. The pair filed a police report.
“The next thing I knew, there was a porn peddler from a company called the Internet Entertainment Group phoning me,” Lee recalled. “He said he had bought the tape and was going to broadcast it on the internet.”
In an attempt to stop it, the couple went to court. Anderson found it humiliating.
“It was great sitting through depositions, where old men with crusty white shit in the corners of their mouths would hold up pictures of me naked in Playboy and ask why I’d even care that the tape was out there,” she said in Lee’s 2004 autobiography Tommyland. “I couldn’t handle it. It got to a point where I could not go to another deposition with these sweaty old guys asking me about my sex life.”
Eventually they came to a conclusion. “Our lawyers and managers advised us that the best way to minimise the damages was to sign a contract saying that, since the company had us by the balls, we would reluctantly allow a one-time Webcast so long as they didn’t sell, copy, trade or rebroadcast it,” Lee said.
“We thought we had won: hardly anyone would see the video on the Internet, and we could recover the tape and start over.”
That was, alas, not what happened. Gradually, through 1996 and 1997, the tape first gained a buzz and then went viral. It’s estimated that legitimate sales topped $77 million.
Anderson and Lee’s marriage ended in acrimony in 1998, amid accusations that Lee had kicked Anderson during an argument.
In 2005, Tommy Lee took part in the Comedy Central roast of Pamela Anderson (his opener: “I came here tonight to honour my beautiful, talented, compassionate, blonde ex-wife. Unfortunately Heather Locklear couldn’t be here tonight, so let’s make fun of Pamela instead, okay?”). He capped his jokes off by calling her the “sweetest person alive” – and Pamela Anderson revealed years later that the pair slept together regularly after their divorce.
Three years earlier, the former couple had finally won a lawsuit against IEG, the company that distributed the sex tape, set up by porn kingpin Seth Warshavsky. They ended up being awarded $740,000 each – but the IEG representatives didn’t turn up to fight the case, largely because the company didn’t exist anymore. So in the end, Pamela and Tommy never saw any of that money.
The former Baywatch star married country rapper Kid Rock – a rival of Tommy Lee – in July of 2006, on a yacht in Saint-Tropez, France. "I've raised my kids alone in hope of a miracle," she wrote on her blog at the time. "Well my miracle came and went. And came back and back because he knew that I'd wake up one day and realize that I was waiting for nothing."
Tragically, a pregnant Anderson miscarried in November of the same year, and the pair divorced just seventeen days after she made the announcement.
Despite their marriage ending, Kid Rock’s simmering feud with Tommy only grew from that point. At the MTV VMAs in 2007, he punched Tommy during Alicia Key’s set (the Mötley Crüe drummer called it a “bitch slap”).
Pamela Anderson got back together with Tommy Lee in 2008 (for what they called their “801st” try). "It's awesome, man,” he told Rolling Stone. “It's definitely working. You can tell on the kids' faces — they're happy when we're together.” Alas, it simply wasn’t to be, and they split for good in 2010. Despite it all, Anderson has called Tommy Lee the “love of my life.”
A Las Vegas wedding followed with film producer and poker player Rick Salomon, the same man who appeared in Paris Hilton’s leaked sex tape, in October 2007. But Anderson requested that the courts annul the marriage in early 2o08, citing fraud, and while she subsequently remarried him at some time at the beginning of 2014, the relationship lasted just over a year and their divorce was finalised on the 29 April 2015.
Most recently, Pamela Anderson has been in the news for her close relationship with imprisoned Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. She has distanced herself from the suggestion of romance, however. "We are friendly, yes — very friendly," she told Piers Morgan on his Life Stories talk show. "I love Julian. He's one of the most interesting people I have ever met. He's very brave and there's nothing sexier than courage."
