Disney's dramatisation of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's sex-tape scandal seems stranger than fiction - yet its weirdest scenes hold up.
Before Paris Hilton (and Rick Salomon), before Kim Kardashian (and Ray J), there was Pamela Anderson (and Tommy Lee), with the first celebrity sex tape scandal. The Lumière brothers of internet porn, the OG viral sensation.
An intimate home video of the couple on holiday was stolen in 1995 and sold on the nascent internet. Now a Disney+ and Hulu miniseries, Pam & Tommy - starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan, and directed by Craig Gillespie - tells the tale of pop-culture history in eight episodes. Based on the 2014 Rolling Stone article, "Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Sex Tape" by Amanda Chicago Lewis, the series tracks how one VHS went from deep inside a private safe to global sensation. The series is the latest in a performative reckoning over the treatment of women in the past public eye.
On New Year's Eve 1994, in a club on LA's Sunset Strip, Baywatch star and Playboy model Pamela Anderson met Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. They married after a four-day romance, and the public went mad for them - the beautiful blonde who bounced in and out of the sea, the tattooed heavy-metal rocker with bad-boy behaviour.
But a desperate contractor, Rand Gauthier (played by Seth Rogen) broke into their home in revenge for being sacked by Lee and stole their safe, discovering a home video documenting their boat trip to Lake Mead. The video contained eight full minutes of sex. He made a website to sell copies of the tape and the rest is online history. As Chicago Lewis later said: "People got the internet so they could see the tape."
In an era of "revenge porn" laws, data protection and sex-positivity movements, the "scandal" would play out very differently today. But although Lee gave the series his blessing, Anderson neither approved the project nor participated in it (allegedly telling an Entertainment Tonight source that she found it "shocking"). So is the series really the naked truth? Let's examine the most shocking moments so far ...
The rock star with a gun
The first episode opens with Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan, better known as Bucky Barnes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) cavorting around his house almost naked, tattooed all over and with more eyeliner than underwear. Lee is obnoxious to the point of unpalatable, most of all to the team who are renovating his Malibu mansion into a lavish "loveshack". He insists that electrician Rand Gauthier and contractor Lonnie (played by Larry Brown) move his bed a few feet to the left so that he can have a "360 view of the shower and the retractable mirror". "I don't give a f*** about cost!" he screams in their face. "Money is no object" he says, writing the abbreviation MING on a notecard for good measure. Lee's behaviour is summed up by Lonnie: "F***ing rock stars."
Lonnie and Rand beg him to pay the thousands he already owes and for any new overages upfront. Rand is lonely, desperate and skint. Meanwhile, Lee is revelling in his wealth, fame and globally beloved new wife Pamela Anderson (Lily James is uncanny as Anderson with bleached blonde hair, prosthetics, false arched eyebrows and breathy high-pitched Canadian voice). At the time, Baywatch had more than a billion global viewers.
But when Rand presses Lee to pay him upfront as promised, Lee throws him out, refusing to pay even what he already owes. Later, when Rand returns to the house to retrieve his tools, Tommy points a shotgun in his face and insists that Rand leave them as "collateral". When Rand has raced back out to his van, he discovers he has wet his pants. A flashback to his childhood shows a verbally abusive father and a similar pant-wetting.
Based on all evidence of Tommy Lee, and the words of the real Rand Gauthier, this seems pretty accurate. After all, Lee approved the show. He did fire the renovation team - although accounts differ as to why. The couple really were building a "huge adult playground" - in Lee's words, complete with a huge sex swing hanging above a grand piano.
They did refuse to pay for work that had already been carried out by electrician Gauthier, who told Rolling Stone that he was ready to write off the $20,000 already owed. But, he says, when Lee pointed a shotgun at him and told him to "get the f*** off my property", the spark of revenge was lit. The thong underwear? Better that we never know for sure.
The whirlwind wedding
After Tommy and Pam meet by chance in a club, Tommy phones her obsessively and threatens to crash her work shoot in Cancún. Despite Pam's refusal, he turns up with his crew and interrupts her work meeting. Even after some wild drug-fuelled partying, heavy petting and shared nude bath scenes, Tommy insists to his "bro" that he hasn't done the deed with Pam yet; that he wants to "wait until their wedding night".
After only four days, Tommy screams his proposal up at Pam from the dance floor, and the pair marry on a beach, with Pam paying homage to her Baywatch character in a white two-piece - "the wedding bikini". This is followed by a truly impressive sex montage - in the bath, on the balcony, on the table, it seems that there's nowhere the newlyweds didn't do it.
Shocking - or horrifying - as it might seem, this is almost totally true. Lee really did call incessantly, track her down like a stalker and turn up (uninvited) to Anderson's Cancún shoot. His friend later said that when Lee met Anderson he really had licked her "from chin to temple".
He did propose after just a few ecstasy-driven days. And Anderson did wear a white bikini, while Lee turned out in a pair of shorts. Not included: the tattoos the couples got of each other's names on their ring fingers, and the fact that Anderson's mother learnt of her daughter's marriage in People magazine. As to the consummation montage, we'll simply never know ... But it was rumoured that, at a performance of Cats on the London West End, the couple managed a quickie in the interval. A former features writer tasked with photographing the couple for The Sun later that year recalls: "It was a smouldering sex show; they were at it morning, noon and night."
The talking penis
Some images are carved into your brain. Some things you cannot unsee. War, atrocity, devastation, and Tommy Lee's penis. After a night of dancing, kissing and groping, Pam and Tommy race up to her lavish hotel suite. Tommy asks Pam: "Do you want to meet him?" We quickly discover that the "him" in question is, in fact, Tommy's ... manhood. Pam responds, blissfully: "He's beautiful."
Later, high out of his mind, Tommy stands in front of a mirror naked having a heart-to-heart - with him. The weird part? The penis talks back, bending up and backwards like an unmanned garden hose. Tommy tells his disembodied dong that Pam's the one, that he wants to marry her. Actually, it's quite sweet.
But the weirdest part? The penis, voiced by Jason Mantzoukas of The Good Place and Brooklyn 99, is talking sense. It warns Tommy against rushing into marriage with Pam, reminding him of his two previous marriages and failed engagement. "Dude, you're not thinking clearly," it tells him. (It's not actually Stan's real penis, by the way. The appendage is in fact an animatronic prop, worn by the actor and controlled by four puppeteers, with some Star Wars-style CGI. Like a phallic Yoda.)
This scene can't be true, can it? Au contraire! In his biography Tommyland, Lee wrote that he would often chat away with his own penis while on drugs. The book even begins with a dialogue between them. And while we can never know what was said in this most private of private conversations, it seems likely that the most sense Lee would ever hear would come from his penis - the most experienced of his crew.
The dog heist
Rand decides he will steal Tommy's giant safe in the garage, which housed all their guns and jewels, as recompense for the money he is owed. He had no idea that the safe contained something far more valuable - a nearly hour-long home movie that the besotted couple shot of themselves on holiday.
Far from an opportunistic smash-and-grab, Rand obsessively stakes out the Lees' home. He watches their every coming and going - even when they sleep - making detailed notes in a huge notepad entitled "Operation Karma". Eventually, he breaks into the grounds of Lee's mansion, and in a scene that seems completely beyond the realm of possibility, crosses the garden disguised under a fluffy rug - to resemble the Lees' enormous white fluffy dog. In the house, he stares at the naked couple sleeping peacefully, and flips them off.
Rand manages to heft the huge safe out of the garage, strap it onto a dolly and get it away without the couple even knowing they'd been robbed. It's only later, when he's sold most of the contents of the safe, that he by chance discovers the jackpot: a VHS tape of the couple's holiday, featuring a full eight minutes of explicit material.
True or false? Gauthier told Rolling Stone he spent a whole summer preparing for the robbery, spending several nights a week watching the home. He really was able to "case the joint" because so many unfamiliar vans were parked near the mansion all the time. Gauthier also says he did hide under a white Tibetan yak fur rug and crawl like the couple's dog, to get past the cameras that he had installed. And while we only have his word for it - Gauthier almost certainly exaggerated the brilliance of his plan, and friends say he told a different story at the time - the scene plays out how he describes.
The missing safe
The couple seem to be in wedded bliss, and are desperately praying for a baby. When Pam does fall pregnant, the happy scene is intercut with a closeup of the huge machine that the loan shark has purchased for Rand and Miltie, to copy the tape in its thousands.
Tommy sees that the photo from their sonogram has fallen from the fridge to the floor, and dashes to the garage to put it in the safe. He realises - months after the fact - that it has been stolen. The excruciating scene ends with Pam remembering, while Tommy recounts the contents to the police, the most precious object of all: their personal VHS tape. She grasps the implications far faster than he does. "I feel violated," she says.
The couple hires a private investigator, who tells them the motive was just as likely revenge as money. When Pam discovers that Tommy didn't pay the contractor or give him his tools back, it dawns on her face that she's about to be the victim of her husband's own foolish behaviour. When the PI pays a visit to Rand's house to threaten and beat him, we realise that Rand genuinely never thought he'd be caught.
In reality, the Lees discovered the missing safe when their studio was being dismantled for renovations, in January 1996. Lee knew instantly it was an inside job, as few people had the keys, and he remembered that one of the electricians had been a porn star. The discovery, wrote Lee later, made his heart stop.
But as for the happy couple? The scene is all the more shocking when you learn that in real life Anderson was a survivor of child molestation and gang rape. She understands violation better than most.
The copycat
A man in the post office sees Rand posting a video with the distinctive Pamela cover, and says that he also has it - just without the packaging. That's how Rand (and the audience) discovers that the tape is no longer only Rand's to sell. Rand tracks down a bootleg video vendor in the street selling the tapes at two for $50. Rand is outraged. "What you're doing is wrong," he shouts. "These do not belong to you. You have no right to be selling these, you are profiting off of someone else's considerable risk and labour, which is probably illegal but definitely unethical." Irony, thy name is Rand.
Credible? Not quite, although close. Copycat websites started popping up selling the same tape, and profits for Ingley and Gauthier tanked. As for Gauthier's naive stupidity? Recalling the first time he and Ingley watched the tape, he told Lewis: "The dollar signs fly before our eyes ... but we're going, 'This is the kind of thing people will get killed over."'
The Rolling Stone article writes: "The tape took two years to go from bootleg to viral, and when it did it made an estimated $77 million in less than 12 months - and that's just on legitimate sales. So how did the person who stole the safe manage to evade the police, the lawyers, the media and the biker gangs, but never see a cent?"
But when you read Rand's cannabis-fuelled interview, with musings on everything from religious symbology to conspiracy theories, it doesn't seem so strange.
Pam's discovery
Pam is on the set of Baywatch, happy, pregnant and post-meditation. The PI thinks he can retrieve the tape, while she has no idea it's already been released online. But walking past the crew trailers, she hears her own voice saying Tommy's name. She comes up behind a group of crew members, and sees that they are watching her most intimate tape, in the middle of the working day, while she is still on set. It's an eerie callback to the earlier scene when a group of men leer at a film monitor showing a close-up of her bum before a take, while the bottom of her swimsuit is adjusted to instructions of "a little more wedgie... a little less."
Cut to a scene of a panicked Pam interrupting Tommy's recording session, explaining the concept of a website and dragging him to the public library to look it up. When they type in the domain, they see what millions have already seen - the words "Pamela's hardcore sex video".
Truthful rating: low. The couple discovered the tape's publication while watching the news, which showed "a dude at Tower Video stocking the shelves with videotapes". Anderson has said on record that she has never watched the tape. But the point, about the sexist set and social double standards, holds true. As Pam shouts to Tommy: "You don't seem to understand what a big deal this is to me... this is worse for me, way worse."
"People are going to think you're cool for this, they'll high five you in the street. Me, I'm going to get looked at like a slut by the whole world."
Whether Anderson ever said those words, they would prove to be 100 per cent accurate. Lee was seen as a rocker; Anderson as a joke. And although it's unlikely the couple Googled their own sex tape in a public library, you'll never look at that Baywatch red swimsuit the same again...
The pregnancy
The stress of the robbery and the discovery that the tape has been released to who knows how many, Pam wakes up with stomach pains. The couple rush to a hospital - photographed along the way - and are devastated to learn that their baby has died.
After the miscarriage, they drive away from the hospital. Pam is crying, and Tommy reaches over to kiss and comfort her. A car pulls up next to them - it is a paparazzo with a camera, shouting: "Give us a smile, Pam!"
Both Tommy and Pam jump out, enraged. Tommy attacks the driver while Pam smashes the windscreen repeatedly with a ski. True or false? The couple really were anxious for a baby and Anderson did fall pregnant within a few months of marriage - just days before Gauthier would break into their home. She did suffer a miscarriage, and Lee wrote in his book, The Dirt, that the paparazzi were so desperate to get photos that they cut off the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The couple later went on to have two sons, before Lee was arrested for assaulting Anderson. They divorced in 1998, remarried in 2008, and divorced again in 2010. So much for the happy couple.
The Hells Angels
Tommy is less of a bad boy than he wants us to think. Instead of paying Rand a personal visit, he sends some Hells Angels biker buddies to Miltie's studio. Rand flees out the back before driving away and begging Miltie for help. Miltie, unfazed, sends him back in the dead of night to remove all evidence and copies of the tape. Meanwhile, the Hells Angels have confused their picture of Rand with the random new guy Miltie hired to help with operations. Of course, the audience knows it's far too late. There are so many copies of the VHS out there that the original makes no difference.
In this case, the source is even stranger than the series. The security for Mötley Crüe was a former Hells Angel, and Lee really did send them to rain hell on Gauthier and Ingley to get the tape back - although Gauthier thinks that the bikers were a Mexican crew called the Bandidos.
Another employee was at the studio, and bikers threatened him with a shotgun, holding a cover from one of Gauthier's porn videos to try and identify their target. The bikers would return repeatedly to the studio looking for Ingley and Gauthier, who says that Lee also sent pornstar Candy Vegas and her friend to his house to honeytrap him into giving back the tape.
In Lee's words, "the next thing he knew there was a porn peddler from a company called the internet Entertainment Group phoning me. He said he had bought the tape and was going to broadcast it on the internet." That was Warshavsky, head of internet Entertainment Group, who put the tape on a website and aired it on loop.
Meanwhile, Penthouse revealed that it had acquired a copy of the tape. In March 1996, the couple filed a $10 million lawsuit against the magazine, Ingley, Gauthier, internet Entertainment Group and others they thought were involved. A judge denied their request for a restraining order, and June's Penthouse issue featured Anderson on the cover and quotes from the tape inside. Penthouse's lawyer argued that, as Anderson had posed nude and discussed her sex life in interviews, she had no right to privacy.
Technically, the couple owned the copyright, and after a long period of legal wrangling, they settled a confidential agreement with Warshavsky, signing away their copyright and allowing him to show the tape in a one-time Webcast without selling it in stores. They were exhausted, Anderson was seven months pregnant and sick of defending herself in court. They thought they had won; that nobody cared about the internet. But over the next two years, the video would go bona fide viral, and the rest is online history. A judge in 2002 would later grant the couple $740,000 each in damages against IEG. Anderson would again end up in a celebrity sex tape, this time with Bret Michaels of Poison.
And as for Gauthier? Eventually, he went back to his life as an electrician.
• Pam & Tommy is streaming on Disney+ now
