Front Burner - The sex tape and Pamela Anderson’s side of the story

Episode Date: February 10, 2023

Last year, a TV show called Pam and Tommy dramatized the turbulent marriage between Canadian actress/model Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. It’s the latest in a string of documentaries and shows that revisit and reframe the cultural conversation around famous women of the ‘90s and 2000s who were often wronged in the name of entertainment. But for Pamela Anderson, Pam and Tommy was not vindication. Now the Baywatch star is speaking out against the project, and telling her own story, with an intimate new Netflix documentary called Pamela, a love story. Today on Front Burner, Constance Grady, senior correspondent on the Culture team at Vox, joins us to cover the documentary and share her thoughts.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Okay, but you don't seem to understand what a big deal this is to me. Like it's not a big deal to me?

I'm on that tape just the same as you. Yeah, but this is worse for me. I mean, this is way worse. People are going to think you're cool for this. All right, they'll be high-fiving you in the street. Me, I'm going to get looked at like a slut by the whole world. That's ridiculous. That's a clip from Pam and Tommy,

a fictional TV series from last year that dramatized the turbulent marriage between Canadian actress and model Pamela Anderson and Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee. It's the latest in a string of documentaries and shows that aim to revisit and reframe the conversation around famous women in the 90s and 2000s, who were often wronged or worse

in the name of access and entertainment. But for Pamela Anderson, Pam and Tommy was not vindication. This feels like when the tape was stolen. Basically, you are just a thing owned by the world, like you belong to the world. The tape was infamously a sex tape, and Pamela says they were spliced together from home videos that were stolen from the couple's home, then distributed and sold all over the world. It was arguably the first viral video.

Pamela Anderson was already famous for her Playboy centerfolds and her role as CJ on Baywatch, but the release of this tape and the media frenzy that ensued made her an icon and also the butt of a lot of jokes. And according to Pam, it pretty much destroyed any chance she had at a viable acting career. After that, it just felt like that solidified kind of the cartoon image, too. You become a caricature. I think that was the deterioration of kind of whatever image I had. Today we'll be talking about a new Netflix documentary called Pamela, A Love Story. How it reframes our understanding of what happened in the wake of the sex tape.

And why it matters that Pamela Anderson is reclaiming her own complicated story. To discuss all of this, I'm joined by Constance Grady. She's a senior correspondent on the culture team for Vox. Hey, Constance, it's so great to have you back on to FrontBurner. Thanks for coming by. Hey, thanks so much for having me again. It's great to have you. So Pamela Anderson in the 90s and early 2000s was famous for many things, right?

Modeling, acting, and as I mentioned, this sex tape. For those who don't know her or might need a refresh, I wonder if you could start by talking about who she is. Yeah, when I think of Pamela Anderson, the first image that pops into my head, Pamela Anderson. The first image that pops into my head, and I think this is the case for a lot of people who grew up in the 90s, is Pamela Anderson in a red bathing suit running along the beach in soft focus in California. That is basically the plot of Baywatch, such as it is. It's just beautiful people running in slow motion on the beach. And no one did it quite like Pamela. She was famous for being this sort of embodied fantasy of blondness and a sort of easygoing sexuality that was very appealing to a lot of people at the time.

From cover girl to playboy playmate, television queen to movie star, pin-up idol to international celebrity, Pamela Anderson has crested the wave of universal glamour, and her star has yet to recede. But the dark side of that is that people also did not respect her, because she seemed to embody this fantasy so thoroughly. People thought that she was stupid and kind of trashy and a bimbo. And when her sex tape was stolen and distributed, people accused her of doing it herself for the attention. You know, what was really interesting about this Netflix documentary is that,

of course, you get a different perspective on her and her life and all these different layers. And what was really striking to me and something I didn't know was that she had a really difficult childhood. Talk to me a bit about that. What stood out to you watching the doc about where Pamela came from and what shaped her. Yeah, the information about her childhood she shares in the documentary is really, really striking. According to Pamela, she grows up in a very small town. Her parents are very young when they have her. I think she says her mother is 17, her father is 19 when they get married. And they, throughout her childhood and adolescence, keep having explosive, sometimes violent arguments. And then making up, they split up and they get back together.

Pamela says that she herself is molested as a small child by a babysitter. And that she told the babysitter that she wished she would die, and the next day the babysitter died in a car crash, so Pamela thought that she somehow magically killed her with her mind. She had this very sad sort of trapped life, and for her, modeling was a way out of that, a way to escape. And specifically modeling in Playboy, doing new modeling as she did for so long, was a way for her to take control back over her body, which had been taken away from her for a very long time. Modeling had given Pamela the avenue to her dream goal of California.

She sent some of her pictures to Playboy, which caught the attention of the photo editor. Pamela was flown to California for a cover shoot for Playboy. The October 1989 issue saw the first of numerous Playboy covers Pamela Grace. Tell me more about that. Before, I'll just note, because we're a Canadian podcast, you talk about that small town. It's a little town in British Columbia, actually,

and the documentary goes back to that. Tell me more about when she started modeling at Playboy and how things changed for her. Like, what does she say about that? I know, I think at some point in the documentary, she says it felt like she was breaking free of something. Yeah, it's a really lovely description. And it's kind of a funny counterfactual to the way we normally think about Playboy, I think, which is as well the way feminists like me think about Playboy, which is kind of gross and exploitative. But for Pamela, it was a real breaking free, a place of freedom. Finding out that she is being asked to pose naked and thinking, okay, this is going to be me taking control of my body for the first time after so many other people have used it against me.

When I got to that first label and photo shoot, I just said, like, why am I so freaking paralyzed by this shyness? I'm so sick of all this past that's created this insecurity in me. From the first snap of the picture, I felt like I was throwing myself off a bridge and falling and just like snap. That was the first time I felt like I'd broken free of something. This is her choosing for herself to expose her body to the world. And the real tragedy of this story is that, of course, we know that that choice is going to be taken away from her. Her body is going to be exposed to the world against her will.

And it's going to be really traumatic for her. So in 95, Pamela Anderson is more famous than ever, thanks to Baywatch. She meets Tommy Lee and after spending about four days together in Cancun, they get married. And this kind of leads to this turning point in her life where home videos of her and Tommy having sex are stolen from her house and end up for sale on the Internet. And it completely blows up. This has been described as the first viral video. I do not think that that is an understatement. And what was the public reaction to this tape being released?

Yeah, I think there is a sort of gleefulness to the tape coming out. This sense that these people were so outrageous and over the top and considered to be a little bit tacky that the fact that the tape was released and they didn't seem to be happy about it was sort of, it sort of felt like a comeuppance in a way for a lot of people. And they felt that they were seeing something

that in a way they were entitled to see by watching these two people have sex together because they were both sex symbols of a kind. It's not funny. This is devastating to us. It is? It is. It is. Yeah, it's terrible. So even though this was a part of their life that they had intended to keep private and to themselves, the public sort of felt like, well, you've been sort of suggesting this to me for a long time, so I should be able to see the whole thing, whether you want me to or not.

Yeah. And this idea that like it was something that people felt entitled to, this actually became like a legal argument in this lawsuit. Pamela and Tommy attempted to sue the company that was selling the video. And just tell me a bit about how the lawsuit went. Yeah, so the legal argument that the company distributing the tape made was that Pamela Anderson had no right to privacy because she was a Playboy star. So in the documentary, she talks about going into this room and just seeing naked pictures of herself hung up everywhere. And lawyers asking her about her sex life, about the acts that are shown in the tape and whether she liked doing them. And just the general argument was, because she did this thing before of her own free will,

she should not get to have an issue with it happening now against her will. She'd sort of made herself the kind of woman who has no right to privacy because she was in Playboy. And we're going after them for everything because this is really ridiculous right now. Especially at this time in my life and with my children, this is absolutely horrendous. And I really feel that we'll get them. So this is, I think we can see now, kind of a really ludicrous argument. But at the time, she ended up feeling like it was so draining to go through this process of arguing against that in the courts that she and Tommy ended up settling. We signed an agreement with them that only let them out of the four minutes that they showed on the internet.

And the only reason we signed the agreement is because it was a week before I was about to give birth, and they were making threats to me, and I was giving birth at home, and I was very focused on my obviously much more important things. Yeah, and I know she had a young child at the time. And I think she says it was too much for her. Like, she feared having another miscarriage like they just basically kind of let it go right they just gave up the fight in a way yeah they gave up um they have never been given money for the tape it's essentially just out there without

their control how does she say this all affected her on a on a personal level in the doc? Like, what did she say it was like to go through this? Oh, it's a terrible, it's such a sad quote. She says, it made me feel like I was such a horrible woman. I'm just a piece of meat that they should mean nothing to me because I'm such a whore. Basically, she seems to have felt so degraded and humiliated and as though on some level she did deserve it because she'd been posing in Playboy. And what about her career? What impact do you think she thinks it had on her career? So at the time, Pamela was trying to get out of the sort of Baywatch babe area she'd been siloed into and try to do something that would have a little more heft to it.

She was appearing in this action film, Barbed Wire. Don't call me babe. She was hoping that that would sort of springboard her out of Playboy into movies, into some work that wasn't just about being beautiful in a bathing suit on the beach. And she did not get offered that kind of work after the tape came out. Instead, people only wanted to play with the sexuality of her image. So anywhere she went somewhere for an interview, she would have to talk about that. She would be asked about that. I always said my boobs had a career and I was just tagging along.

Where do I get my boobs at? Jesus, that's a personal question, but I'll let you know. Let's talk about this. I didn't know to lie or withhold anything in interviews. So when people would ask me if I had surgery or anything like that, then I would just answer. And so that just kind of set the ball rolling. You were not under endowed, though, were you?

No. And she wasn't offered any roles that were not about how sexy she was. Yeah. And just these interviews, if we could pause on that for a second. I was watching some of them yesterday, like Larry King, Letterman, Jay Leno.

These guys are all asking her about her breast implants on national TV. And I know that she's even like poked at as a survivor of domestic violence because, of course, Tommy Lee was charged and served time in jail for spousal abuse. And it makes me think, Constance, the last time you were on the show, we had a similar conversation about Britney Spears, right? And how she was treated publicly. And talk to me a bit about what kind of parallels you see here. Yeah, I think Britney and Pamela are very closely connected in public imagination. And I think that's part of why Pam and Tommy comes out just a year after Framing Britney Spears comes out, and they seem to be part of the same conversation. They are both women who were really celebrated for their sexuality, for seeming to

embody this kind of beautiful blonde bombshell fantasy, and who were also repeatedly humiliated and mocked for being so good at embodying that fantasy. Do you ever go anywhere on your own? I don't really go anywhere on my own anymore. Well, sometimes, like Natalie and I went to go to the mall sometimes and we hide out in the lingerie department, kind of put hats on backwards and higher. Yes, no one will recognize you in the lingerie department. I'm safe now, you know.

I was a big fan of your Tommy Lee sex tape. I've never seen it. You've never seen it? No. It's fantastic. And they were also, I think, both considered kind of tacky and lower class by the very culture that was also showering them with attention and in a way loved them and in a way despised them. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

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A lot of these women have been featured on the podcast You're Wrong About, which I think is really kind of the unsung pioneer of starting this conversation. And just throughout, I think since 2018, there has been this incredible interest in saying, okay, me too change the way that we talk about women and the way we talk about consent and sex. And sort of looking back at how differently we talked about these things 10 years ago, I think makes us feel as though we've come really far and made a really big change, even if that's not necessarily the case. Yeah. And flesh that out for me when you say, even though it's not necessarily the case.

Yeah, I think this is one of the big forward steps that Pamela, a love story takes forward. And I think it's part of why for me, it's much more compelling than Pam and Tommy was as a story. than Pam and Tommy was as a story. One of the things that Pamela says is that watching Pam and Tommy come out feels to her as though it's the tape coming out all over again. She has this really visceral description of just feeling sick in her whole body about how it's coming out and she has no control over it.

I blocked that out of my life. I had to in order to survive, really. It was a survival mechanism. And now that it's all coming up again, I feel sick from my whole stomach, from middle of my chest all the way down to just my stomach feels right now like it's just been punched. I don't feel good right now. So very publicly, it was announced when Pam and Tommy was coming out that Pamela Anderson wanted nothing to do with it. She did not give them her blessing. And the position that the creative team of Pam and Tommy took at the time was that, you know, they were changing the conversation around her story. The story is unbelievable. And it was an opportunity to really delve into a society and this devouring of celebrity culture. And, you know, even if she was not necessarily a fan of it, they were going to

be able to look at her story through the lens of today and change people's point of view on it. But they were doing that without her permission. So I think Pamela, a love story is very effective at drawing the line between the frame of mind that this creative team has and the frame of mind that the company distributing the sex tape had, right? In both cases, the idea is Pamela is a certain kind of woman who we have the right to expose to the world, even when she does not want to be exposed. You know, she, in the 90s, was a Playboy model, so she had made herself naked before the world before, and they would just do it again without her permission. And in Pam and Tommy, she was a wrong woman of a type that had suddenly become very, very fashionable. So Pam and Tommy would revisit her story, even if she didn't really

want to do that. What I think that Pamela, a love story really draws out is that this is essentially the same impulse, this sort of misogynistic, titillated idea of reveling in someone else's scandal. But the big difference is that Pam and Tommy sort of is virtue signaling about it and pretending that it's a feminist project. I think that that's such a fascinating point. Like I know in your piece, similarly to what you just said, you said essentially you thought that the release of Pam and Tommy, the drama's miniseries at its core was disguised with like a faux progressive veneer, which really got me when I read that. You know, on the flip side, I absolutely can see this argument about women reclaiming their own stories in their own words and how powerful that can be. But I know

there's also a conversation when people do that, when people just tell their own stories in general about whether, you know, more controversial stuff gets glossed over. And do you think that there were issues in the doc that you would have liked to have heard more of or like to have watched through a more critical lens maybe? Yeah, I think this is definitely always a problem with a documentary that's made closely in cooperation with the subject. There's always a problem with a documentary that's made closely in cooperation with the subject. There's always a little bit of it that's kind of like propaganda for that person. So Pamela Anderson has done a lot of really interesting things in her life.

But, you know, she's not necessarily a feminist hero. And I don't think she necessarily thinks of herself that way. But there's a little bit of energy in the documentary sort of pushing her in that direction. So she has built alliances with people like Vladimir Putin. Well, I wrote to him and asked him to stop the importation of seal products because this was 95% of the market. And that could potentially shut down the Canadian seal hunt, which was one of my big goals. So he did. He made it actually illegal to import seal products even into the country. And Julian Assange, who has been accused of sex crimes, she, after the Weinstein accusations came out in 2017, her take was sort of that his victims should have known what they were getting into.

It was common knowledge that certain producers or certain people in Hollywood are people to avoid. Privately. You know what you're getting into if you go to a hotel room alone. She has said things and formed alliances with figures who I think it's reasonable to give a person pause looking at that. And those issues are not things that the documentary goes into very far. So this is an uncritical look at Pamela Anderson, and I think it should be taken on that level. Right. And then, of course, maybe worth mentioning too, you know, I know it was really controversial. She's worked, of course, for years with PETA,

but, you know she traveled to Newfoundland at some point with like a check for a million dollars trying to stop the seal hunt and caused quite a bit of uproar here. Today a couple of big names in film and TV converged on St. John's to make the Canadian Sealers Association an offer they could refuse. Please leave us alone take your insane group and go away. Simon had brought a million dollar check and an offer for the sealers.

Take the money and give up the hunt. Why is it that you are coming in judgment of us? You know, there's always going to be pushback. You know, there's going to be pushback. There's people who have different perspectives and different philosophies, and I respect that. You know, Constance going to be pushback. People have different perspectives and different philosophies. And I respect that. You know, Constance, this new documentary, told in her own words, made with her cooperation. I know this is a thread you've been pulling on through this entire conversation.

But what do you think it ultimately achieves? I think the big thing that Pamela, A Love Story pulls off is that it does move this conversation forward that we've been having for about five years now about all of these women who we wronged in the 90s and the 2000s. that I've seen that actually is able to make this connection and sort of suggest that a show like Pam and Tommy can be not as flattering to us as it wants to be to suggest that we haven't maybe changed and become really enlightened and unsexist now. Maybe we are still kind of titillated and delighted and fascinated by the suggestion of misogynistic scandal the same way that we always were. Constance, thanks so much for this. This was really, really interesting. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. All right, that's all for this week. Front Burner was produced this week by Shannon Higgins, Rafferty Baker, Derek Vanderwyk, Mackenzie Cameron, Sam Connard, and Jodi Martinson. Special thanks to Eli Bahati for help with translation.

Our intern is Jack Wanan. Our sound design was by Sam McNulty and Mackenzie Cameron. Our music is by Joseph Chabison. Our executive producers this week are Nick McCabe-Locos and Shannon Higgins. And I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.