This week, Pam & Tommy — the miniseries chronicling the strange-but-true tale of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s stolen sex tape — debuts on Hulu. The incident was one of many tumultuous things that happened during their three-year marriage, which lasted from 1995 — about a month-and-a-half after they first met — to 1998. So when was the tape first leaked and when did they break up?
As per Us Weekly, the tape was made early in their relationship, including footage of them on a houseboat on Lake Mead. (Anderson does not like the term “sex tape,” saying it was really “a compilation of vacations that we were naked on.”) The two met at a New Year’s Eve party in 1994. He proposed to her four days later, and they were wed in mid-February. The tape was stolen from their Malibu home later that year, pilfered by a former porn actor-turned-electrician named Rand Gauthier, and by early 1996, it was being sold to thousands. (They didn’t win their case against the distributor, Image Entertainment Group, until 2002.)
Anderson has said the scandal added “so much frustration and stress to our relationship.” But it wasn’t the main reason they divorced two years later. Their marriage had ups and downs, including fights, a miscarriage, and Lee being jailed for six months in 1998 for spousal abuse after kicking Anderson in the back while she was holding their seven-week-old son Dylan. After his release, Anderson said she was “very proud” of Lee’s attempts at reconciliation. They divorced later that year.
The pair tried to patch things up a decade later, in 2008, but that ended quickly.
You can see a version of the sex tape scandal when Pam & Tommy, starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan as the pair and Seth Rogen as Gauthier, debuts its first three episodes on Feb. 2 on Hulu.