Hulu’s new series Pam & Tommy chronicles the events that led to the release of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s infamous sex tape in the 1990s, but what happened to Anderson after the tape’s release drastically impacted her career. Lily James takes on the role of the iconic blonde bombshell in the series alongside Sebastian Stan, who stars as her violent rockstar husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. Pam & Tommy was created by screenwriter Robert Siegel, who penned the screenplay for the award-winning film The Wrestler. It takes a sympathetic look at Anderson and Lee as they became victims of a crime that thrust them into the middle of one of the biggest celebrity scandals of the 90s.
Following the true events of the scandal, Pam & Tommy opens with a disgruntled carpenter named Rand Gauthier, played by Seth Rogen, who had been hired to do renovations of Lee’s Malibu mansion but was fired and left unpaid for his work. When Gauthier returns to retrieve his tools from the house, Lee holds him at gunpoint and demands that he leave without them. Humiliated and desperate for payment, Rogen’s Rand Gauthier gets the idea to return to the house and steal a safe that Lee kept in his garage, hoping that the contents would more than pay for the work. Inside the safe, he finds the infamous tape, which he later decides to release on the internet, a move that was unprecedented at the time.
With celebrity sex tapes and nudes becoming so commonly distributed online in recent years, as well as the rise in retaliatory “revenge porn,” often against the will of the subjects, the morality of releasing such material without the consent of all involved has become a hot-button issue. However, at the time, the internet was new and the shocking content of the video helped it become one of the internet’s first viral videos. The sex tape was released just as Baywatch star Pamela Anderson’s career was on the rise, and though it didn’t ruin her completely, it effectively derailed the trajectory of her career and made it difficult for her to be taken seriously as an actress. While it impacted both Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee negatively, it was Anderson who suffered most, both personally and professionally.
When the tape leaked in 1996, Anderson was working toward advancing her career past her sex symbol status and trying to solidify herself as a bonafide movie star. When Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sued to keep the tape from being released, opposing lawyers brought up her Playboy spreads, asking why the couple would care about the tape if she had posed for Playboy multiple times. Private and intimate moments that she had shared with her husband were equated to the sexy image that she shared in her public career, with no regard to the issue of consent.
Her public image, along with her husband’s bad-boy persona, made it easy for people to believe that the tape had been leaked on purpose. The public assumed that it was a publicity stunt, which put Anderson in a somewhat negative light. Her career as an actress never truly recovered. She had only appeared on Home Improvement as a “Tool Time girl” before playing C.J. Parker on Baywatch, and when her next project Barb Wire flopped around the same time as the tape leaked, she became a punchline. The tape also put a strain on her marriage to Tommy Lee, and the couple divorced in 1998 after a domestic dispute that landed him in jail for six months.
After the events of Pam & Tommy, Pamela Anderson felt violated and was faced with a public who had little empathy for a woman who owned her sexuality. The stolen tape forever altered the way she was viewed by the public. Even still, she has enjoyed a long career in the public eye and remains to be one of the most popular and recognizable sex icons of the 1990s.
Pam & Tommy releases new episodes Wednesdays on Hulu.