The new Hulu miniseries Pam & Tommy chronicles one of the most shocking stories about one of the ‘90s most high-profile couples: when model/actress Pamela Anderson (played by Lily James) and heavy metal god Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan) had a tape featuring them having sex was stolen from their home and sold on the market. It was not, as Anderson has pointed out, technically a “sex tape”; she described it as “a compilation of vacations that we were naked on.”
But how did the pair first discover the tape had been stolen and disseminated.
The answer is: along with everyone else. In a new piece by Esquire recounting the history of the infamous tape, Lee describes how he and Anderson learned about the fate of the intimate footage. First of all, the two had brought a camcorder with them on their honeymoon, having married about a month-and-a-half after meeting.
Some time later, a disgruntled builder (played on the show by Seth Rogen), miffed at being fired for a job deemed by Anderson and Lee as not very good, broke into their home and stole a safe that he didn’t know contained said tape. He sold it to a retired porn star (played on Pam & Tommy by Nick Offerman), who quickly got it on the market.
Cut to early 1996. Anderson had given birth to their first child. “One night, Pamela and I were chowing down on some dinner and flipping through television stations when we heard our names being mentioned on some news show,” Lee told Esquire. “On the screen, there was a dude at Tower Video stocking the shelves with videotapes. And we knew just what they were.”
The two then began a very long legal fight to stop the sale of the tape, and broke up after two years, though not necessarily because of the pilfered tape. You can see how that went by watching Pam & Tommy, with new episodes bowing every Wednesday through Feb. 23.