"This is just one girl's life, my memories, my experience. This is how I did it. This is my own fable. I can offer only my truth."
Three decades after she first burst into public consciousness, Pamela Anderson is ready to share her truth and is doing it on her terms. The Baywatch star's Netflix documentary, Pamela, a Love Story, and her memoir, Love, Pamela, were both released on Jan. 31, and Anderson held nothing back. No topic was off-limits for the 55-year-old, who reflected on her six marriages—including her infamous relationship with rocker Tommy Lee—and revealed the sexual abuse she endured as a child growing up in Ladysmith, Canada.
And, in the wake of the 2022 Hulu limited series Pam & Tommy, Anderson also opened up for the first time about having her and Lee's sex tape stolen from their Malibu home and the toll it continues to have on her life, family and public image more than 25 years later.
"I didn't feel like I had a lot of respect," she says in Pamela, a Love Story. "I had to make a career out of the pieces I had left."
But, above all else, Anderson makes it clear in the film that she is not a "damsel-in-distress."
"I want to embrace the past, embrace the truth," the mom of two says. "My life is not a woe-is-me story. I'm not a victim. I put myself in crazy situations and survived them. As much pain as we can endure in our lives is kind of like the catalyst to all the great stuff...I'm grateful for all the experiences that I had and I don't blame anybody for anything. I'm glad it happened."
And now, she's sharing how it all really went down in Pamela, a Love Story, and Love, Pamela. Here are her most surprising revelations:
"At a young age, I learned people are mostly awful," Pamela Anderson expresses early on in her memoir, Love, Pamela. "Babysitters even worse."
Anderson goes on to reveal the sexual abuse she says she endured from a young female babysitter, who forced her to "play weird games on her body," as she puts it. Continues the star, "At the time, I couldn't understand any of it. She threatened me and told me not to tell anyone. Or else."
The Canadian-American actress says in the Netflix documentary, Pamela, a Love Story, that the abuse continued for four years and that she tried to protect her younger brother, Gerry, from the babysitter.
"I tried to kill her. I tried to stab her in the heart with a candy cane pen," Anderson reveals. "I told her I wanted her to die and the next day she died in a car accident, so I thought I killed her with my magical mind and I couldn't tell anybody. I was sure that I did it."
Describing herself as "painfully shy" growing up, Anderson shares that she "hated" her body when she was younger because of the things she went through. "I had so much shame about my body," she explains. "So much shame about what had happened to me."
When she was 12 years old, Anderson says she was raped by a 25-year-old man when she accompanied a friend to a townhouse.
"He forced himself on me...and no matter how much I tried to fight him off, he was also able to get my shorts down," Anderson recalls in Love, Pamela. "I screamed with pain and called out for my friend, wanting to leave. I couldn't see, I couldn't breathe, I was blinded by pain. I ran and locked myself in the bathroom to inspect what had happened to me—there was blood and other stuff...I felt sick as I cleaned myself up, trying to get it together. I was no longer a virgin. Forced, against my will."
While Andersons says in the documentary that she tried to forget the assault, she "felt like it was tattooed on my forehead. Like, I really had this image of 'I had sex' on my forehead when I didn't want anyone to know that I had it."
Combined with the abuse she suffered from her babysitter, Anderson says the experiences made her "very, very shy." And it wasn't until her first Playboy photo shoot in 1992 that she let go of that self-consciousness.
"I was like, 'Why am I so freaking paralyzed by this shyness? I'm so sick of all this past that's created this insecurity in me,'" Anderson reflects in Pamela, a Love Story. "It's like a prison, I have to break out of it. From the first snap of a picture, I felt like I was throwing myself off a bridge and falling in…and just, like, snap. That was the first time I felt like I'd broken free of something."
"From the beginning, I've been drawn to different types of bad guys," Anderson admits in Pamela, a Love Story, detailing a scary incident with one of her first boyfriends.
"He had a habit of trying to chase me and run me off the road, like run me over if he saw me," she describes. "He kicked me out of a moving car and I did a gymnastic dismount into a ditch."
But he was far from the first of her partners to treat her poorly, with Anderson writing in Love, Pamela, "As I matured, I noticed most of my boyfriends were bad—and progressively got worse. I often wondered why. Did I turn them into assholes? Was I doing something wrong? Did I make them crazy? They would turn violent, mean, cruel, so quickly."
Another one of Anderson's earlier boyfriends once hid her in the back seat under a blanket while he went with his friends to collect money from someone. "They were successful, I guess, and came back all fired up," she recalls. "They held me down, pulled my shirt up, and put hickeys all over me. And it got worse—there were at least four, maybe six boys—I blacked out."
After moving to Hollywood, Anderson admits she "dated a few actors" and "there were quite a few men around." Some of those boyfriends included Mario Van Peebles and Happy Days star Scott Baio. In an old journal entry, Anderson wrote about possibly buying a Hyundai car from Scott's dad for $5,000.
"He was really mad because I would drive Scott's Mercedes around and he said I wasn't worth a Mercedes yet," Anderson then explains in the documentary. "That I had to drive something like a Hyundai. He was not very nice to me."
Anderson also confirms she dated Dean Cain, The Real World alum Eric Neis and David Charvet, and then details a proposal she one received from Sylvester Stallone.
"He offered me a condo and a Porsche to be his number one girl," Anderson reveals "I was like, 'Does that mean there's a number two? Uh-uh.' He goes, 'That's the best offer you're going to get, honey. You're in Hollywood now.'"
In a statement, Stallone's rep denied that this exchange took place.
"The statement from Pamela Anderson attributed to my client is false and fabricated," the rep told People. "Mr. Stallone confirms that he never made any portion of that statement."
It was love at first sight when Anderson first encountered Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee on New Year's Eve 1994 at the Sanctuary club in Hollywood. "I've never felt such a force of nature or pull of gravity," Anderson explains in her memoir. And after that first meeting, which included Lee licking the side of her face, the rock star called Anderson constantly—"Tommy was singing, My bologna has a first name, it's L-A-R-G-E," she writes of one message—but the pair didn't reunite in person until Lee followed Anderson to Cancun.
While she avoided him for most of the trip, Anderson says in Pamela, a Love Story that she decided to hang out with him on her last night in Mexico. "Famous last words: 'What could go wrong?'" she recalls. As the notorious story goes, the group went to La Boom night club, where Anderson tried ecstasy for the first time.
"The rest is all a big blur. All a big happy blur," she says. "We felt pretty invincible. Later on that night, he just looked at me and he goes, 'You wanna get married?' And I was like, 'Yeah, I do.' And he goes, 'Have you ever felt this way before?' I go, 'Never. I've never felt this way before.' And he goes, 'Okay.' And he took his friend's skull ring off and put it on my finger and that was it."
The couple got married the next day on the beach, with Anderson wearing a white bikini and a woman they met at La Boom serving as her maid of honor.
Given that they got married after just four days, Anderson and Lee didn't know all that much about each other.
"I remember asking him what's our last name," Anderson admits. "I was like, 'Oh, I thought it was Tommy Lee Jones or something! And he goes, 'No, that's somebody else!'" But, she continues, "We didn't know anything about each other and it ended up being one of the wildest, most beautiful love affairs ever."
Before she became entangled with Lee, Anderson considered professional surfer Kelly Slater to be her "big love."
"He was such a sweetheart to me and so good to me," Anderson says in the documentary, noting that their romance was constantly off and on. "Kelly and I dated all the time. Between lots of boyfriends and lots of girlfriends for him too, but it wasn't just me. He definitely was a heartbreaker. He was a free spirit."
And Anderson was technically dating Slater when she married Lee in 1995, so the 11-time World Surf League champion was the first person she called after the wedding. "He's like, 'What?!'" Anderson recalls. "That was horrible."
"What was different about Tommy is that there were so secrets, no deception, there was no game playing," Anderson writes of her first husband, dad to her two sons, Brandon, 26, and Dylan, 25. "It was just full-on heart-to-heart explosive kind of love."
But the couple was blindsided in 1996 when they discovered that not only had their safe been stolen from their Malibu house, but that someone had spliced together footage from their home videos to make a sex tape. "We were newly married," Anderson says of the footage. "We were just naked all the time and filmed each other on vacations and stuff. This was just us being goofballs."
The couple decided to take legal action after they were contacted by Penthouse's Bob Guccione about paying them for the rights to the tape. "We had to at least try to fight back," she explains, "because this was something that was stolen out of or home and there's no way someone should be allowed to steal something out of your home and then sell it in front of the whole world."
However, Anderson "didn't know she was going to be completely humiliated" during her deposition. "I remember walking into the room, all these guys in there they had up naked pictures of me, the lawyers basically said to me, 'You're in Playboy, you have no right to privacy.'"
The way she was treated by the attorneys, Anderson says, made her "feel like a horrible woman" and "a piece of meat." Describing the depositions as "brutal," she says, "I remember looking at them and thinking, ‘Why do they hate me so much? Why do these grown men hate me so much?'"
Realizing they would likely have to undergo years of fighting, a then-pregnant Anderson and Lee ultimately decided to drop their lawsuit. "I don't want this to affect the baby," Anderson explains. "It was tearing me apart. It absolutely devastated me, but I just closed my eyes and signed the papers."
After the release of their private sex tape, the couple's marriage quickly deteriorated and turned volatile, with Anderson detailing the scary incident in 1998 that resulted in Lee being arrested nand charged with spousal and child abuse. (After pleading no contest to spousal battery, Lee was sentenced to six months in jail, ultimately serving four.)
Anderson says the "terrible night" began when Lee was rocking on the floor, telling her, 'I want my wife back, I want my wife back.' At that point, I didn't know what to do. And I just said, 'I need some f—king help around here. You gotta grow up, it's not about you anymore.'"
Saying she had never spoken to him that way before, Anderson explains what happened next in her memoir.
"He grabbed the phone away from me, twisting my arm as I was holding Dylan in the other," she writes of her then 7-weeks old son. "My nail tore off, blood dripping down my arm. The kids were so frightened. I picked up Brandon, too, but he slid frantically down my leg and held on to it tight, hyperventilating."
Lee then grabbed Brandon, then 18 months, and "threw me and Dylan into the wall," Anderson recalls. "I was so scared that he was hurt—he was screaming and he was only seven weeks old. Tommy ran out the door with Brandon...I could barely breathe, trying to catch my breath through the tears. Panicked, I called 911."
After Lee was arrested, Anderson "tried to end the marriage," but the drummer "really fought for us to stay together," she says in the documentary. "I had to bifurcate the divorce because he wouldn't sign the papers. He thought we could get through it. I just took my kids and was like, 'No.' It wasn't a gray area for me. I was like, 'You can't do that.'"
Anderson admits that once Lee was released from jail, the couple did have "secret meetings, breaking the restraining order." Ultimately, their reconciliation "didn't last...neither of us could forgive the other, deep down."
In an emotional scene in Pamela, a Love Story, Anderson tells her son Brandon, "I really loved your dad for all the right reasons and I don't think I've ever loved anybody else. It's f--ked."
Explaining she wanted to be able to show her sons a traditional and healthy marriage, Anderson admits she "never got over not being able to make it work with the father of my kids."
Ultimately, she poses this might be why she's still single. "I'd rather be alone than not be with the father of my kids," she explains. "It's impossible to be with anybody else. But I don't think I can be with Tommy either. It's almost like a punishment."
In her memoir, Anderson reflects that all of her relationships after her divorce from Lee "paled in comparison," writing, "It was a losing battle. It wasn't the others' fault—they just had no shot. My relationship with Tommy may have been the only time I was ever truly in love."
Anderson writes about how struggling to balance all of her various responsibilities, including newlywed life and filming Baywatch and Barb Wire simultaneously, led her to begin taking "speedy diet pills, ephedrine," that a friend brought to her.
"I had never been into harsh drugs," Anderson writes in Love, Pamela. "I liked how the pills kept me awake, and I could get a lot more done. But the side effects meant I was losing weight fast. I looked like a bowlegged skeleton in a bathing suit, 105 pounds at five foot seven."
The stress Anderson was under ultimately lead to a scary moment: When she failed to show up to the Baywatch set one day in 1995, her driver found her unconscious at home.
"I had gotten into the bathtub the night before and tried to swallow a bottle of Advil with vodka, slowly sinking under the water," Anderson reveals. "But luckily, I couldn't stand the taste of hard alcohol and the nausea forced me out of the tub. I threw up everything, all over the stone floor, and then fell asleep in a pool of Advil-red vomit. It must have looked scary."
Anderson was taken to the hospital, where she and Lee learned that she was pregnant.
"We were totally blindsided, a happy surprise," she recalls. "All was forgiven, and we fell into each other's arms in happy tears." But, after a few weeks of bedrest, Anderson suffered a miscarriage, which left her and Lee devastated. "I blamed the pills," she writes. "The lack of sleep, the workload…everything."
Two of Anderson's six marriages have been to poker player Rick Salomon.
In her book, Anderson details how she first got romantically involved with her longtime friend. After several losing rounds of blackjack, she shares, two of her friends owed Salomon "a couple hundred thousand dollars." He agreed to forgive the debt "if I married him," she writes. "I thought he was joking. And then he upped the ante, he threw in that I'd have to have sex with him, right then. Calling his bluff, I said, Okay!"
Anderson and Salomon ultimately "made love," she shared of that night in 2007, which she says then "led to something more serious. Rick and I had an undeniable connection, and I knew that he adored me. I still can't believe I said yes and followed through."
But in Pamela, a Love Story, Anderson says Salomon "ended up being a beat drug addict," and she ended their first marriage when she says she found a crack pipe in the Christmas tree.
"He still to this day denies it," she says. "He says it's somebody else. Who else would have a crack pipe in the Christmas tree? Wasn't me. It wasn't me! It was annulled."
However, in a statement to The New York Post, Salomon denied Anderson's allegation.
"I smoked crack for 25 f--king years, but the crack pipe in the Christmas tree was 1000% not mine," he said. "[That] crack pipe has nothing to do with me, but I am a crack head."
After Salomon got sober (which he has been for 15 years), the couple briefly reconciled and remarried in 2014, but Anderson notes, "It didn't last long either."
In July 2006, Anderson married rock star Kid Rock (born Robert James Ritchie), much to Lee's dismay.
"When Kid Rock called Tommy to tell him that he loved me and wanted to marry me, Tommy told him to fuck off—and that he'd kill him," Anderson alleges in her memoir. "But Bob and I started dating anyway. We broke up a few times, mostly due to Tommy's interference or meddling, and I wasn't so sure I could take that next step."
Despite her hesitations, Anderson married Kid Rock on a yacht near Saint-Tropez, France.
"We had a great time, we had fun together. He was really good to the boys," Anderson reflects in the documentary. "But I didn't feel like this is love because I have an impression of what love is and this isn't it. We just didn't have that height, that frenzy, that I was used to. I didn't want anything less than that."
Anderson shares that one of the breaking points for the couple was a fight they got into at the Borat film premiere, when she forgot to tell him that she referenced the sex tape during her appearance in the movie.
"Bob stormed out, calling me a whore and worse," Anderson says. "He was embarrassed, and his reaction was not thought through."
For the record, no, she hasn't profited one bit from that stolen sex tape.
"We never made a dime off that and I hate when people say that we settled on something," she stresses in Pamela, a Love Story. "We never settled on anything. We just told everyone to get lost. If anyone watches it, if anyone buys it, if anyone sells it, it's just pathetic."
Not that any amount of money would be worth the pain and suffering.
"I was the punch line of a lot of jokes on talk shows," the animal rights activist recalls. "It was super humiliating. You become a caricature. I think that was the deterioration of whatever image I had."
While people made millions of dollars off of the tape, Anderson says she has no regrets about not profiting off of its release. "You could give me hundreds of million dollars, I would never take it," she stresses. "Ever."
Count son Brandon among those amazed she didn't cave.
"She would have made millions of dollars if she just signed a piece of paper," The Hills: New Beginnings alum says. "Instead, she sat back with nothing and watched her career fizzle into thin air. She was in debt most of her life."
After it was announced that Lily James and Sebastian Stan would be starring in Pam & Tommy, a limited series about the infamous sex tape, Anderson admits to having "nightmares" about its release and says she was never contacted by the filmmakers. "They should've had to have my permission," she states, before revealing what Lee said when they talked about the show. "He goes, 'Pamela, just don't let it hurt you as much as it did the first time.'"
In her autobiography, Anderson expands on the immense toll that the tape's release had on her, Lee and their family members.
"We endured years of embarrassment, harassment, and stress—not to mention what our families went through, our parents, our siblings, and how it affected our kids when they got older and were teased in school," Anderson writes . "It is still a great cause of pain for all of us. It ruined lives, starting with our relationship—and it's unforgivable that people, still to this day, think they can profit from such a terrible experience, let alone a crime."
After being introduced by the late fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, Anderson struck up a headline-making relationship with the WikiLeaks founder and often visited him at the Ecuadorean embassy in London prior to his arrest in 2019.
Describing their friendship as "invigorating, sexy and funny," Anderson writes that her "colorful conversations" with Assange "taught me so much about the world."
As for the speculation about the nature of their connection, Anderson dishes on one "slightly frisky, fun, alcohol-induced night" the pair shared, that ended with them playfully discussing marriage.
"We joked about getting hitched on the front steps of the embassy—maybe then they wouldn't arrest him?" she ponders. "But then again, he joked, why would he give up one prison for another?"
During her two season stint as Lisa on the '90s sitcom, Anderson claims that star Tim Allen flashed her on the set.
"On the first day of filming, I walked out of my dressing room, and Tim was in the hallway in his robe," she writes in her memoir. "He opened his robe and flashed me quickly—completely naked underneath. He said it was only fair, because he had seen me naked. Now we're even. I laughed uncomfortably."
Allen has since responded to the allegation, telling E! News in a statement, "No, it never happened. I would never do such a thing."
Pamela, a Love Story is now streaming on Netflix and Love, Pamela is available wherever you purchase books.