The Wild True Love Story at the Heart of Pam & Tommy: 4 Days, Vows on the Beach and That Sex Tape

Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee fell madly in love and the rest is sex tape scandal history, now being revisited in Pam & Tommy, starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan as the turbulent couple.

By Natalie Finn Feb 02, 2022 12:00 PMTags

Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee didn't mean to go viral. But even in 1995—before cell phone cameras, streaming and "the cloud"—content found a way.

The story of how a tape of the couple having sex, recorded with a hand-held camcorder, went from being stashed inside their garage safe to becoming one of the most infamous home videos ever made makes up the meat of the new Hulu series Pam & Tommy, starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan as the madly hot for each other duo who just wanted a souvenir of their wild 'n' sexy ways but ended up with so much more than they bargained for.

"It was a private, private tape between two people in love, and it's not a 'sex tape,' Pam had always talked about it in that way," James told E!'s Justin Sylvester in a Jan. 24 interview. "It was just such a huge violation of their privacy, that it was stolen, it was a crime against them."

Stan added, "You hear things, and you don't really know the story, so just to be able to kind of go back and go, 'Hey, wait a minute, they had nothing to do with [the tape getting out]'...They deserved that being retold."

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Stan called Lee and the rocker "seemed touched and appreciative that I took the time to reach out and connect," he told Variety. James and the production also reached out to Anderson, but she chose "not to engage," writer and co-showrunner Robert Siegel said.

Both actors wore colored contacts—brown for Stan, blue for James. She also wore prosthetic teeth, and Stan has no tattoos in real life so wearing all that fake ink as the prolifically tatted Lee especially helped get him into character, as did spending months learning how to play the drums. And neither he nor James watched the video in question.

But though the show can technically be categorized as another branch of the sprawling true crime family tree, at its heart is the over-the-top love story between Anderson and Lee that more than made up with lust, excitement and drama what it lacked in stability.

Courtesy of Hulu, Steve Granitz/WireImage

"The fact that we're still friends is amazing, because I don't know another couple who's been through more f--king bulls--t in the first two years of their marriage," Lee, who is the father of two sons with Anderson, wrote in his 2004 memoir Tommyland.

The extent to which they get along has wavered before and since, but in 2015 Anderson told People, "There was Tommy and then there was nobody else. He was the love of my life. We had a wild and crazy beginning that was too much for both of us."

She recalled, "It really was love at first sight. I only knew him four days before I married him."

Not an exaggeration, though they technically met a month before those four days unfolded.

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The clock was ticking down on 1994 during a New Year's Eve bash at Sanctuary, a Hollywood club that counted Anderson as a partial owner, when the Baywatch star and pinup bombshell crossed paths with the Mötley Cruë drummer.

As the friendly exes remembered in Tommyland, she sent a shot of Goldschläger Lee's way (she sent shots to many people, being a good hostess, Anderson insisted), so he grabbed a bottle of Cristal and went to her table, where he plopped down and licked her cheek "like a f--king big dog."

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Lee also claimed he popped half an Ecstasy pill in her mouth and took the other, but Anderson noted that all of his friends may have been partaking of the drug that night, but she did not. The lick she confirmed, however, and explained that she turned and licked the face of her friend sitting next to her, and then the gesture was repeated around the table like a game of Telephone.

Anderson shared that Lee was smashing glasses that night in a celebratory fashion and, while she was envisioning the bill for damages, she also remembered thinking, "Hmm, this is interesting."

According to the musician, he walked a ready-to-bail Anderson to her car at around 2 a.m., kissed her and was down for the count, unable to stand the idea of her jetting off to Cancún for work the next day. 

Per her recollection, she didn't go to Mexico until a month later and Lee's girlfriend at the time was also at the club on NYE. Anderson also remembered hearing a long time before they actually met that Lee was asking around about her—when he was still married to his second wife, Heather Locklear. (He and the Melrose Place actress divorced in 1993 after seven years.)

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That initially put Anderson off, though at least one of the 20 drunk messages he left on her friend's answering machine—she was staying with a pal while her condo was being remodeled—the night they met actually proved a little intriguing, Lee radiating BDE before it was a thing.

Anderson said that she agreed to spend 24 hours with Lee (they didn't have sex until they were married, according to her account) and then didn't hear from him for a month. When he called (she says she doesn't know how he got her home number; Lee insists she gave it to him the night they met), that is when she was about to leave for Cancún. She says she forbid him from going there to bother her while she was working; he hopped on a plane, even though he had no idea where she was staying and ended up calling every hotel looking for her.

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When they finally connected, she remembered telling him, "You are out of your f--king mind." His reply: "I know."

Anderson and her friends met him for what she insisted would be one drink, but "all I remember about that night is Pamela and I staring into each other's eyes for hours, only taking breaks to blink and drink," Lee wrote in Tommyland.

In turn, she recalled, "Tommy and I locked eyes, and it was one of those really romantic things that felt like love at first sight. It might have been the chemicals but when he looked at me and said, 'I've never felt like this before. I want to marry you,' I said, 'I've never felt like this before either. I want to marry you."

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So they found a priest and married each other on the beach in Cancún on Feb. 19, 1995—four days after their pivotal drink—the bride clad in a white bikini and the shirtless groom in shorts. They sealed the deal with a kiss, a dip in the ocean and getting each other's names tattooed on their left ring fingers.

As far as including Anderson's words in his book and their at-times competing versions of their courtship, Lee told Rolling Stone in 2004, "Unfortunately, everybody knows about the bad times—so overblown and completely out of context and out of control—and nobody knows about the good stuff. Of course I wanted her in there—she's the mother of my two beautiful boys. We just sat down and started reminiscing about some old stories—and she totally nailed me for my terrible memory."

On the plane ride back to California they sorted out details such as whether or not Lee was his real last name (yes) and where he lived. The answer to that was the dream property he'd recently bought atop a hill in Malibu, and that's where they headed, paparazzi who'd been waiting at the airport trailing them the whole way.

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Upon arrival the newlyweds embarked on a torrid honeymoon period—"We filmed everything… we were naked all the time," Anderson recalled on ITV's Life Stories in 2018—and renovations, down to the studs, inside and out, to turn the house and grounds into the "Love Palace" they envisioned (as seen later on MTV Cribs). 

Unlike the congenial, maybe slightly bumpy journeys we're used to seeing on HGTV, this reno was rocky AF. 

As relayed in a 2014 Rolling Stone article about the sex tape saga, which served as source material for Pam & Tommy, sometime that summer, Lee fired an electrician named Rand Gauthier and several others from the project. When Gauthier, who told the magazine he was owed $20,000 but was ready to just cut his losses and go, and a contractor returned to the house to get their tools, Lee brandished a shotgun and told them to "get the f--k off my property."

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During the first year of the Lees' marriage (Anderson went by Pamela Lee during that time), Mötley Cruë did a lot of recording amid the building detritus in Malibu, but the couple lived primarily at Anderson's condo and spent Christmas in London. The model-actress was pregnant again after suffering a miscarriage earlier in the year and being hospitalized, citing exhaustion, that October.

"He's really excited about the baby," Anderson said in a 1996 interview. "I don't want to ruin his image, but Tommy is not what you think. He loves flowers, even plants them. He cooks and cleans." Their eldest son, Brandon Thomas Lee, was born June 5, 1996.

But also in early 1996, Lee went out to the garage in Malibu to get something out of his safe—and the safe wasn't there. In Tommyland, Lee recalled wondering if maybe he had told someone to move it and just forgot. But quickly he realized they'd been robbed and, in his opinion, it had to be an inside job, people who had access and knew their way around.  

Sure enough, it was Gauthier, the disgruntled electrician who didn't take kindly to having a gun pointed at him and sought revenge by stealing Lee's safe, figuring it had to have something valuable in it. (He told Rolling Stone he acted alone, though Lee thought it was way too heavy for a one-man job.)

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Meanwhile, though Lee and Anderson had been robbed of jewelry, cash, some guns and "irreplaceable memories," he wrote in his book, they didn't think the thieves would have any use for their personal mementos. So it came as a great shock to them a few weeks later when they found out—Lee said they saw it on the news while eating dinner—that a video of them having sex on a houseboat during a trip to Lake Mead had gone public and you could buy a copy for your own home library.

According to Rolling Stone, the tape's trip to market went like this: Gauthier (played by Seth Rogen in Pam & Tommy) also apparently had a background in porn and had appeared in multiple videos, so he was familiar with the business. He hooked up with Milton Ingley (aka Uncle Miltie, played by Nick Offerman), who made a bunch of copies, destroyed the original cassette and set up a few websites from which to market what they were calling Pamela's Hard-Core Sex Movie, available for $59.95 by mail.

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"I wanted to play Rand as someone who has very little going on in his head," Rogen, who's also an executive producer on the series, told Variety in a recent interview. "Someone whose ultimately evil acts aren't done out of some amazing and deep thought process, but actually out of a complete lack of thinking and caring about how his actions would affect other people."

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Lee and Anderson's lawyers couldn't get media outlets to stop talking about it because a judge (and then an appellate judge after that, etc.) deemed the tape's existence newsworthy, which opened the doors for its contents to be reported on extensively. And once the footage itself hit the burgeoning World Wide Web, the spread couldn't be contained. The least the couple could do in the end was try to retrieve ownership of their own images.

For instance, Penthouse published a detailed rundown of what was on the tape in its June 1996 issue, but couldn't include still images from the video because it was still considered Anderson and Lee's "intellectual property." Even though at the same the same time you could go online and buy a copy of the whole thing.

"When is too much?" Stan observed to E!, describing the fuel that fired the media frenzy as seen in Pam & Tommy. "But we get pulled into it, because we like to click on what's 'interesting,' or whatever, so what is that about?"

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James added, "And it was just such an unprecedented situation, thinking where we've got to now and what the Internet facilitates in its ease and its reach is really quite frightening. And there were just no protections in place for them then and they weren't supported by the media or the legal system."

And all these years later, "Where have we arrived?" Stan said. "It sounds like we're more desensitized to this stuff than [ever]."

The deposition process in the course of their bid to get a media injunction was farcical, as remembered by Anderson in Tommyland, with lawyers for the respondents asking why, if she had already posed nude for Playboy and Lee was a rock star, they even cared that a sex tape was out there.

"It was driving Tommy and me crazy and it was ruining our relationship," Anderson, who first filed for divorce in November 1996 but didn't go through with it, recalled in the book. Still trying to salvage their marriage, their second son, Dylan Jagger Lee, was born Dec. 29, 1997, delivered at home, as his brother was.

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"Pamela and I got busy having kids so quickly that we never gave ourselves a chance to build a solid relationship," Lee relayed in Mötley Crüe's 2001 autobiography The Dirt. "I asked her much later, 'Why didn't we work on our relationship more?' 'We couldn't,' she replied. 'I was pregnant the whole time.'"

In October 1997, two years after the original footage was stolen, a judge issued an injunction against Ingley to prevent further sales of the tape—but, per Rolling Stone, he and Gauthier had already shipped off their remaining haul of copies. The following month, online porn entrepreneur Seth Warshavsky, founder of the vaguely named Internet Entertainment Group, announced that his subscription-based adult content website Club Love would be showing the tape.

Thoroughly drained, and thinking they were agreeing to the footage existing online only, Anderson and Lee signed the copyright over to Warshavsky on Nov. 25, 1997.

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Lee wrote in The Dirt that he thought this was a onetime webcast, and Rolling Stone clarified that the couple at least thought it was an end to hard copies of the tape being sold. Instead, it was available on Club Love for whomever would pay to watch, and Warshavsky contracted with adult film distributor Vivid Entertainment to sell copies of the movie on DVD, VHS and CD-ROM.

"She is as explicit and graphic as you can get while still being considered mainstream," Warshavsky told the Wall Street Journal in 1999, explaining the mass appeal of the Pam-and-Tommy tape and estimating that 300,000 copies had been sold for $34.95 each since he acquired the rights.

The couple sued him in federal court in 1998, but by the time the case was heard in court in 2002, Warshavsky had reportedly left the country and didn't show up to wage a defense. A judge ordered his company to pay the exes $740,000 each, but IEG no longer existed, and no one got paid.

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"I wish I could say we had the last laugh and financed our kids' future off someone trying to rob us," Lee noted in Tommyland, "but the truth is, I can't." Anderson confirmed as much to Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live in 2015: "I made not one dollar. It was stolen property...We never, either of us, made anything from it. It was stolen."

All the while, Lee and Anderson's marriage was unraveling for good.

In The Dirt, he admitted that he felt like the third-most important person in his wife's life after the arrival of their sons, and then she flew her parents in from Canada to help out with the kids and he felt even more out in the cold. And he did not have the coping skills to handle that properly.

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"So, unable to step back and see the situation from any reasonable perspective, I turned into a whiny, needy little brat," he wrote. "Maybe it was my way of becoming Pamela's third child, so I'd get the attention I needed, too. Now, all of a sudden, Pamela and I were arguing all the time. Our relationship had slowly degenerated from pure love to love/hate." They had a blow-out fight during what was supposed to be a romantic Valentine's Day trip to Las Vegas in 1998, and he admitted grabbing her to get her behind closed doors in their room so they wouldn't be brawling in public.

The following week at home, he recalled, another argument broke out while he was making dinner. He started throwing things around in the kitchen and yelling so much that Anderson told him he was scaring her, after which the fight only escalated.

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Lee wrote that Anderson punched him in the lower jaw. He grabbed her arm and as she as finally leaving the room he kicked her in the behind, he recalled, calling her a "f--king bitch." Brandon, then 20 months old, witnessed a fair amount of this exchange.

They were tussling over Brandon, Lee wrote, when Anderson fell over a kid-size chalkboard in the house, tearing a fingernail in the process. He claims he then took Brandon outside, which was why he was trying to take the boy's hand in the first place, and told the toddler that mom and dad loved him and they wouldn't fight like that anymore; then he went back inside and the cops showed up.

Anderson filed for divorce on Feb. 26, 1998, hours after Lee—who was already on probation after pleading no contest to battery from a 1995 altercation with a photographer outside The Viper Room in West Hollywood—was charged with spousal and child abuse and gun possession, Anderson having told police that he had some weapons in a safe.

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Lee ended up pleading no contest to felony spousal battery and, in May 1998, he was sentenced to six months in jail. The judge, warning Lee that he'd go to prison for three years if he violated his subsequent probation, ordered the rocker to undergo counseling, perform 200 hours of community service, and pay $6,200 to a battered women's shelter, a victim restitution program and a domestic violence fund.

The prosecutor said in court, per the Los Angeles Times, that Anderson had hoped Lee would avoid jail time, but she supported him getting anger management counseling.

"I couldn't understand why Pamela had followed through with pressing charges," Lee wrote in The Dirt. "She was probably scared and thought I was some crazy, violent monster; she probably thought she was doing the right thing for the kids; and she probably wanted an easy way out of a difficult situation. As much as I loved Pamela, she had a problem dealing with things." (Anderson, however, would say she put an end to a toxic, if at times intoxicating, union.)

Lee found out his soon-to-be ex-wife was dating surfer Kelly Slater while he was locked up for what turned out to be four months.

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She and Slater fizzled, but divorce proceedings continued, the sometimes-estranged, sometimes-not duo battling over custody.

In 1999 they were on an upswing and discussed getting remarried, with Anderson saying, "I picture Tommy and me…old, toothless, on a bench somewhere with our tattoos." 

That was no longer on the table in 2000 after Anderson publicly admitted to enjoying champagne with Lee on New Year's Eve, a violation of his probation that landed him in jail for five days. "They were in a child-custody battle," Lee's lawyer Harvey Slovis told Entertainment Weekly in 2002. "His drinking had nothing to do with why she ratted him out."

Lee wrote in Tommyland, "I only hope that the tough times between Pamela and me—all the custody s--t, all the divorce rage that went back and forth between us—did not register in our boys' memories. Because that time and the way we treated each other was not and is not their mom and dad."

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Anderson met Kid Rock (née Bob Richie) in 2001 and was engaged to him for the first time between 2002 and 2003, while Lee was betrothed to dancer Mayte Garcia, also parting ways sometime in 2003.

While with Richie, Anderson filed for sole custody of her and Lee's sons, claiming she felt the boys, then 5 and 3, weren't safe with her ex and alleging in court documents, "I suspect Tommy's jealousy over my new relationship has sparked his recent anger, harassment and breakdown of communication and co-parenting."

In January 2003, Anderson's lawyer told the AP that the exes had finally reached a custody settlement, and the confidential filing "contains everything you could possibly think of about how to raise the children and where they will live."

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And after they were single again, Lee and Anderson—who spent lots of time together with their boys as a family—seemed to be on the verge of a full reconciliation, Lee telling People in 2005, "We're crazy in love. We're going to take things slowly and see where they go."

Their memories always proving slightly different, Anderson denied they were back together.

Then in 2006, Anderson embarked on her nuptial whirlwind with Kid Rock that included four weddings before culminating in divorce in 2007. And then she married poker player Rick Salomon in 2007 (for the first of two times), but had their union annulled five months later. 

And in June 2008, a decade after their divorce, Lee told Rolling Stone that he and Anderson were giving their relationship try No. "801."

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"Pamela and the kids have moved in with me," he said. "It's awesome, man. It's definitely working. You can tell on the kids' faces—they're happy when we're together."

That continued until about 2010 before they parted ways for good. But oh, how they had tried.

"I had beautiful children with him," Anderson told People in 2015. "My kids are grateful to be born out of true love. Everything else I was trying to piece together."

She and her ex were "good friends" and they were getting better at co-parenting, she added. "He's such a supporter of mine and I'm really happy we're on such great terms. There's a connection there that will always be."

Pam & Tommy premieres Wednesday, Feb. 2, on Hulu.

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