It’s been touted as ‘The greatest love story ever sold’ and that’s the story of Pam & Tommy – and their much talked about, much-watched sex tape which was stolen from their house and released online to the public back in 1995 in the earlier days of the Internet
Pam & Tommy’s sex tape went viral – largely because it showed Pamela Anderson (well-known Baywatch star) and Tommy Lee (from the band, Motley Crue) getting it on for an hour in the days when this sort of thing didn’t happen.
They pair were often in the media as people were fascinated by their whirlwind romance where they married after only knowing each other for 96 hours. Pam & Tommy is an eight-episode series which is streaming now on Disney+ and it covers the whole story. The series stars Lily James as Pam and Sebastian Stan as Tommy. Seth Rogen plays the villain of the piece – Rand Gauthier – the electrician who stole the safe with the sex tape in it. Rogen is also one of the executive producers of the series.
Pam and Tommy’s sex tape was made for them and they locked it away in a safe. But in 1995, after months of working on the couple’s home, Rand Gauthier and his team were fired for alleged shoddy work and Pam and Tommy refused to pay for the work they’d already done.
When Gauthier and his team returned one last time to retrieve their tools, Tommy pointed a gun at the men and told them to leave. That’s when, as Gauthier told Rolling Stone later, the electrician began to hatch his plan. Days later he broke into the couple’s garage and stole their safe. When he got the safe open, Gauthier found the tape and watched it.
He took it to a porn studio and the owner made copies of the tape and destroyed the original for him. Gauthier shopped the tapes around, finally passing them on to Louie Peraino, who ran an adult video production. The tapes were also sold online and around LA. In January 1996, Lee and Anderson noticed their safe and tape were missing and they sent people – namely a biker gang and lawyers – to hunt down Gauthier but by then it was too late to stop the public from seeing the tape.
According to Rolling Stone, Tommy and Pam heard that Penthouse had the tape so on March 26, 1996, the couple filed a $10 million lawsuit for both a temporary restraining order and permanent injunction against the magazine, plus lawsuits against everyone they thought had the tape, including Gauthier, to stop anyone from sharing the video.
None of these lawsuits panned out. Both the restraining order and injunction against Penthouse were rejected because the magazine’s lawyer argued since the couple often talked about their sex life to media (and Anderson had posed nude before), the Lees had “forfeited their privacy rights,” according to Rolling Stone. None of the other individuals named in the suit, including Gauthier, formally said they had a copy.
The story goes on….
The story goes on as Pam and Tommy continued to try and secure their tape back. It had gone from an underground bootleg curiosity to full-blown cultural obsession when it hit the Internet in 1997. So the series, Pam & Tommy is a love story, crime caper and cautionary tale all rolled into one. You can see there’s a lot of ground to cover but the series does a good job.
Pamela Anderson had nothing to do with the series
While the series is focused on the well-known former Baywatch star, Anderson has in fact had nothing to do with the series, despite many attempts by the series’ producers to reach out to her to see if she’d like to be involved in some way, she never responded – and nor has Tommy Lee.
Pam & Tommy is streaming now on Disney+…
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