No one ever captured Pamela Anderson's heart the way Tommy Lee did.
In her upcoming memoir Love, Pamela, the Baywatch alum reflects on her past relationship and marriage to the Mötley Crüe drummer, her first husband and father to sons Brandon, 26, and Dylan, 25. She writes, according to excerpts published in People Jan. 18, "My relationship with Tommy may have been the only time I was ever truly in love."
Anderson, 55, and Lee, 60, married in 1995 on a beach in Mexico after a four-day romance, catapulting the pair into one of most iconic celebrity couples at the time. During their honeymoon, they recorded a private sex tape. It was later stolen from them and distributed publicly the same year, which became one of the earliest celebrity sex tape scandals.
"It ruined lives," Pamela writes in the excerpt, of the sex tape scandal, "starting with our relationship."
The couple's marriage quickly deteriorated and turned volatile. In 1996, Pamela filed for divorce, but the two reconciled. In 1998, she filed papers again soon after Tommy was arrested and charged with spousal and child abuse following a confrontation with the actress while she was holding Dylan, then an infant. The rocker pleaded no contest to spousal battery and was sentenced to six months in jail. He served four, Rolling Stone reported.
Pamela and Tommy's divorce was finalized later in 1998. However, they continued seeing each other sporadically for years.
Pamela went on to walk down the aisle several more times, but the marriages—including those to Kid Rock and Rick Salomon—were short-lived.
The actress has long maintained Tommy was the one. "There was Tommy and then there was nobody else," she told People in 2015. "He was the love of my life. We had a wild and crazy beginnings that was too much for both of us."
She added, "My kids are grateful to be born out of true love."
In addition to her new memoir, Pamela also reflected on her relationship with Tommy and the sex tape scandal—which inspired the Hulu limited series Pam & Tommy, a project she did not endorse—in the trailer for the upcoming Netflix documentary Pamela, a love story.
"I blocked that stolen tape out of my life in order to survive," she says in a voiceover. "Now that it's all coming up again, I'm feeling sick. I wanna take control of the narrative for the first time."
Pamela, a love story begins streaming on Netflix on Jan. 31. Her memoir Love, Pamela is set for release the same day.