In recent years, the documentary realm has been the place for cultural reappraisals of famous women torn asunder by the invisible hands of misogyny. A series of documentaries and investigative pieces surrounding Britney Spears, coupled with the fan-initiated #FreeBritney movement, led to the end of the pop superstar’s cruel conservatorship. A doc on Janet Jackson reassessed her unconscionable castigation in the wake of that Super Bowl wardrobe mishap, while a two-part docuseries at this year’s Sundance examined the nauseating child sexualization and commodification of Brooke Shields.
Netflix is now shining a light on the mistreatment of ‘90s icon Pamela Anderson in Pamela, a love story, a new documentary debuting Jan. 31 — the same day her memoir, Love, Pamela hits shelves. Directed by Ryan White (The Keepers), it’s a corrective that allows Anderson to walk viewers through her life. In her words, Anderson recalls her early years growing up in rural Canada, which includes several dark episodes — she was molested by her childhood babysitter, and raped by her friend’s boyfriend’s older brother, who was 25, when she was 12 — and her discovery on the jumbotron at a BC Lions Canadian Football League Game. Her story encapsulates her Playboy ascension, Baywatch stardom, animal-rights activism and redemptive role of Roxie Hart in the Broadway musical Chicago! Its diaristic approach, with Anderson at times narrating from her childhood and adult diary entries, and fly-on-the-wall feel lend it an intimacy that is usually missing from endeavors like this.
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.
“This was stolen from our home,” Anderson says. “There’s no way that people should be able to steal something from your home and sell it to the whole world.”
She and Lee ended up suing Warshavksy and IEG for their selling of the tape, in what was at the time an important right-to-privacy case. During the trial, Anderson was pregnant and worried that the stress would affect the health of her baby, since she’d already experienced a miscarriage. That didn’t stop the opposing team’s lawyers from tearing her apart in court, in particularly misogynistic fashion.
“The lawyers basically said, you’re in Playboy. You have no right to privacy,” remembers Anderson. “They would ask about my sex life. And I kept on thinking, ‘How am I getting questioned about my sexuality, and my preferences, and my body parts, and where I like to make love when it’s stolen property?’ It made me feel like I was such a horrible woman. I was just a piece of meat. This should mean nothing to me because I’m such a whore, basically.”
Pamela Anderson and her dog in ‘Pamela, a love story.’
Netflix
She continues, “It felt like a rape. Not to bring up something really heavy from my childhood, but when I was attacked by this guy, I thought everybody would know. When the tape was stolen, it felt like that. And the depositions were so brutal. I remember looking at them thinking, ‘Why do they hate me so much? Why do these grown men hate me so much?!’”
Ultimately, to protect the health of their future child and relieve Anderson of her hellish treatment, the couple agreed to end the case — though Anderson claims, “We never made a dime off [the tape]. And I hate when people say we settled on something. We never settled on anything. We just told everyone to get lost… You can’t put a monetary number on the pain and suffering that caused.”
While discussing the sex tape saga, and her subsequent treatment by the media, Anderson becomes visibly shaken. She tells producers she doesn’t feel very good and goes for a walk around her property to clear her head.
Unfortunately, the entire thing was dredged up again with the arrival of Pam & Tommy, a Hulu miniseries produced by Seth Rogen, starring Lily James as Anderson and Sebastian Stan as Lee, and chronicling not only their love affair but the sex tape’s theft and mass-production. We see her in the documentary grappling with the release of the series in real-time.
“It really gives me nightmares. I didn’t sleep last night at all. I have no desire to watch it,” she offers. “Not going to watch it. Never watched the tape; I’m not going to watch this. Who knows how they’re even going to portray it? Nobody knows what we were going through at the time. They should have had to have my permission.”
She continues: “This feels like when the tape was stolen. Basically, you are just a thing owned by the world — like, you belong to the world. I just feel like it’s just… just ignore them. Let it go.”