In the third episode of Hulu’s Pam & Tommy, the new series revisiting Pamela Anderson’s most traumatic public chapter, her stolen sex tape is being shopped around the adult-film industry’s seedy underworld by electrician turned thief Rand Gauthier. Gauthier is the real-life contractor who admitted that he stole a safe from Anderson and Tommy Lee’s home in 1995, after Lee stiffed him for what Gauthier said was $20,000 in home improvements. Gauthier’s decision to profit from the home movie found inside, as payback to Lee, “amounts to what we now call revenge porn,” New York Times television critic James Poniewozik points out—though the person who suffered most was Anderson, “not the man Rand is purportedly getting back at.”
Gauthier is played by series producer Seth Rogen. In a montage scored to the funky, upbeat tempo of “Spinning Wheel,” the character and Nick Offerman’s slimy adult-film producer Milton “Uncle Miltie” Ingley try to pedal the looted property to a series of producers who won’t touch the thing. That’s accurate: According to the 2014 Rolling Stone article on which the series is based, even porn star Ron Jeremy passed on the movie, understanding that the tape was stolen and Anderson and Lee had not signed a release.
When Jeremy—a man who was recently indicted by a grand jury on over 30 sexual assault charges involving 21 women—is providing your moral high ground, it might be time to reconsider the decisions that led to where you are. (Jeremy has pleaded not guilty to all counts and has denied the charges against him.)
In the series, Gauthier is treated with understanding—even getting a childhood flashback sequence to show that he suffered emotionally as a kid. Anderson, meanwhile—who is the title character of the series, and who has spoken publicly about surviving molestation at age six, a rape when she was 12, and a gang rape in 9th grade—is not afforded a similar amount of context.
Pam & Tommy has been marketed as “the greatest love story ever sold.” But that, too, is an elision. In reality, Anderson was also abused by Lee, who pleaded no contest to a felony charge of spousal battery in 1998 after allegedly assaulting Anderson while she was holding their infant son. The abuse does not appear in the series, aside from a mention in a single title card.
Needless to say, Anderson is not listed in the credits of Pam & Tommy as a producer or consultant. Executive producer and creator Robert Siegel and star Lily James (who plays Anderson with empathy and effervescence) have both said that they reached out to Anderson in the hopes that she would want to board the series. “I wish it had been different,” James told Porter, explaining that she reached out to Anderson and held out hope until she started filming that she would hear from the actor. “My sole intention was to take care of the story and to play Pamela authentically.”
A friend of Anderson’s tells Vanity Fair, though, that participating in the series, which was developed by Rogen with Evan Goldberg, was never a real consideration: “She made a distinct decision, which took no time at all to make, to not be a part of this.” A source told Entertainment Tonight, “It is shocking that this series is allowed to happen without her approval.… She feels so violated to this day. It brings back a very painful time for her.” Last week, the blog the Mary Sue published a piece titled, “Maybe Hulu’s Pam & Tommy Isn’t Worth Making If It Re-Traumatizes Pamela Anderson.”
As Richard Lawson notes in his Vanity Fair review of the series, Pam & Tommy is the latest entertainment project to revisit female celebrities of the ’90s, including projects centering Marcia Clark, Monica Lewinsky, and Britney Spears. These films and documentaries reframe their stories and expose the misogynistic reactions the women endured from both the media and the general public. But unlike those other projects—two seasons of FX’s drama American Crime Story and a New York Times documentary—Pam & Tommy is billed as a comedy, a crime caper, and love story, a peculiar genre hybrid for a story about a woman who was the victim of a sex crime.
According to the 2014 Rolling Stone article, Anderson and Lee ended up signing over their copyright to the video because, as Pam & Tommy shows, the stress of the legal aftermath was too much for Anderson, who was then pregnant with her son Dylan. “I was thinking it was affecting the pregnancy [with] the stress, and I said, “I’m not going to court anymore,’” Anderson told Andy Cohen in 2015. “I’m not being deposed anymore by these horny, weird lawyer men. I don’t want to talk about my vagina anymore.”