Playboy and that stolen sex tape – Pamela Anderson finally reveals all

Pamela Anderson is not a damsel in distress. “I'm very capable,” she says in a new Netflix documentary, coming next week, speaking to a world that, three decades after she came to fame on Baywatch's shores, has only “an idea of who I am.” Pamela, a love story is that attempt. It was her eldest son, Brandon, who approached filmmakers, wanting Anderson, now 55, to be seen as the sum of her illustrious parts.

It has fallen to director Ryan White, the man behind Netflix’s Emmy-nominated true crime series The Keepers, to introduce us to the real Pammy. Two years ago, White met with Brandon over lunch in Los Angeles: “Everything that Brandon was telling me about his mum blew my mind, and blew up all of these preconceived notions that I had of Pamela Anderson.”

She had been a sex symbol as he came of age; the ultimate model of North American femininity. But Brandon told a different tale, of a hopeless romantic whose life had been cruelly spun into public parody, leading her to retreat almost entirely from view back in her hometown of Ladysmith, Canada (population 8,900).

Both Brandon and Dylan, her sons with Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, were sick of their mother being painted as a caricature, White says. “They really wanted her to take the reins and tell [her story] herself.” So the director, intrigued by Anderson's unexpected trajectory, got on a Zoom call with her the next day. “She was so different than what I was expecting. And I thought, if we can just bottle up the Zoom conversation, it's going to surprise the hell out of people.”

The documentary does show a wholly different Anderson to the red swimsuit-clad one of centrefolds past, with all that remains being the peroxide (though her shade of Scandinavian Blonde now comes in a $5 box). She is gentle and quick-witted, a committed diary-keeper (she journals every evening) and a free spirit without self-interest – that last attribute in particular making her the ideal documentary subject, White says. “She loves the artistic collaboration – we had a blast making it together, [and] actually shooting it. But she was very disinterested in the process itself, like the editing, or how [we were] going to use the archive or diaries, which as a filmmaker is very attractive… that makes your life a lot easier.”

Indeed the most remarkable thing in the documentary is how unguarded Anderson is for a woman who was sexualised within an inch of her life by the media, and rebranded as a “whore” after a private sex tape with then-husband Lee was stolen and leaked. They had met on New Year's Eve in 1994, and then again when he followed her uninvited to Cancun, where she was on a shoot, six weeks later. Three days after that, they married on the beach; their maid of honour was someone they met that night.

Theirs was an “explosive love,” Anderson recalls, filled with the thrill and passion she had dreamt of. They filmed each other all the time, footage that clearly shows two people intoxicated with one another (and often intoxicated), and rarely clothed. That their sex life ended up on film too seems unsurprising – they recorded everything else.

But while most remember the 1995 tape, fewer recall that it was stolen from a safe in their garage; that Anderson and Lee tried to take its illegal distributors, who made $77m, to court. That they turned down $5m for the rights to the film, never made a penny from it (nor wanted to) and dropped the lawsuit when the emotional burden, off the back of a miscarriage, became too much to bear.

Anderson, who was sexually abused by a childhood babysitter and gang-raped in her teens, says now that the theft of the film “felt like a rape”. Though willing to talk about the tape in White’s film, “it was the one subject matter that was very difficult for her… she would try to speak about it, and then she would start feeling sick to her stomach, and she would ask if we could break for the day”.

No wonder – it was that tape that made her a “punchline of pop culture,” cutting Anderson off not only from justice or even sympathy, but basic human decency. During the deposition over the illegal film distribution, her prior naked photoshoots were deemed evidence that she had no right to privacy; lawyers asked her explicit questions about her sex life and her body, reducing her to “a piece of meat.”

On TV, it was a similar story; White’s film shows a series of clips of primetime male interviewers quizzing Anderson on her breasts. In 2005, she agreed to do a Comedy Central roast if the producers gave $250,000 to PETA (for whom she has actively campaigned since the 1990s); she was introduced to the stage with a note of thanks, “for agreeing to get f----d on camera one last time”.

For all the resilience she clearly has in spades, there is much tragedy in Anderson’s story, the breakdown of her relationship with Lee most of all. It is the dissolution of that love affair, which included his being charged with spousal and child abuse and being jailed for six months, and their brief reconciliation in 2008, that has set the tone for the bad decisions that have drifted in and out of the remainder of her life; she has been married six times, most recently to a bodyguard in 2020.

“What it all comes down to is never being able to get over not making it work with the father of my kids,” she says in a voice-note to White, played in the film. “It’s impossible to be with anybody else.”

Pam & Tommy, last year’s drama series about their relationship, starring Lily James as Anderson, didn’t help. Anderson had not been consulted about its making, and didn’t watch it. The trailer aired while she was on the road in California filming with White, and “from the outside looking in, it was traumatising. It was humiliating,” he remembers.

It made him intent on “telling her life story so that people understand she’s much more than that stolen tape.” White still worries about her, he says, feeling an innate need to protect “one of the most vulnerable people I've ever met in my entire life”.

Having been so habitually exploited, though, don't the topless shots that pepper his documentary do the same? “If she had seen that as exploitative, we wouldn't have included that stuff in our film,” he says. Playboy in particular was not a sordid relationship for her, but a meaningful one. "She saw that as her sexual awakening… for Pamela, it was her taking her sexuality back from all of these individual moments where it had been stolen.”

White says that it has never been sex but romance that drives Anderson: “Everything is a fairytale, every romance, every marriage that she's had… everything is seen through this lens of romanticism. And despite how hard her life has been at times, or how many times she's been burned, I love that she still has that in her; that she hasn't been willing to let it go.”

Fame, meanwhile, has been easier to part with. Brandon's birth in 1996 kickstarted what would become Anderson's second act, this current penchant for being out of the spotlight “a reaction” to what came before. Anderson now pursues creative endeavours for the fun of it, such as writing poetry (which features in her upcoming memoir, Love, Pamela) or taking a stage turn as Roxie Hart in Chicago, collecting a cast of unusual friends including Vivienne Westwood and Julian Assange (with whom she has previously been “frisky” at the Ecuadorian Embassy) along the way. The morning after her Broadway run ends, she mulls on film: "I have no idea what I’m going to do next … maybe I’ll know next week."

White clearly has much affection for his film's “fearless” subject, and hopes its release will leave people wanting "to root for her. I feel like she's so misunderstood”. But that's less of a concern for Anderson herself, he adds. “I don’t think it’s important at all to Pamela to set the record straight… the record has not been set straight her entire life, and I think she’s come to peace with that.”

Pamela, a love story is on Netflix on January 31