Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Sex Tape
When Anderson and Lee saw physical copies of the tape being sold and rented in stores, they were furious. Or at least, they did everything in their power to appear furious – publicly explaining that they’d been duped, and suing Warshavsky in federal court. But some see the pivotal moment when the couple signed away their rights as the smoking gun that indicates a private deal to share in the profits had been made. And several people claim this is the case, including a former Vivid Entertainment employee. Ron Jeremy said he once asked Anderson whether she’d received any money for the tape, and she simply smiled and said, “Well, you know.” (Anderson and Lee have both publicly denied profiting off the tape; both declined to comment for this story.)
By 2002, when the federal suit reached court, Warshavsky had moved to Bangkok, following FBI and Department of Justice investigations into his business practices. No lawyer spoke on his behalf, and when a judge ordered his defunct company to pay Anderson and Lee $740,000 each, the couple never saw that money.
So even if Anderson and Lee worked out a deal to profit off of the tape, who could blame them? With lawyers and judges shrugging and saying there was nothing to be done, with sites all over the web using her naked image without permission, cashing in for a small share may have seemed the best possible option.
Oddly enough, St. George, who initially delivered the tape to Warshavsky, ended up managing and then taking control of the web and pay-per-view rights to the video, beginning in 2003. But in 2011, he let the license lapse.
“I feel like there’s a lot of bad karma around that video,” St. George says, explaining that after he brought the tape to Seattle his marriage started to dissolve. “I worry about myself sometimes. What did I really do?”
St. George’s change of heart is indicative of a larger shift in recent years away from the defeatist, anything-goes attitude that many brought to the Internet even five years ago. Everyone laughed derisively at the tacky rock star and his blonde bimbo when the tape came out, but over the next two decades we all faced the same loss of control.
The tape’s slippery path into the public realm is a product of its unfortunate place at the fulcrum of two eras, before and after the Internet came to dominate commerce and communication, and its popularity demonstrated what rules our new, hyper-connected world might demand. We all know that the fun-house-mirror narrative of whatever gets recorded could end up defining us on the front page or in a government database, but the web is no longer the Wild West that it once was.
“The Internet for too long has been viewed as different from traditional media when it comes to standards of ethics, as some creature that is a law unto itself,” says Hollywood First Amendment lawyer Doug Mirell, who has represented celebrity clients in many invasion of privacy lawsuits, including Hulk Hogan in a current suit against Gawker Media over his sex tape. “The courts in particular are coming to recognize that the privacy invasive potential of the Internet is much greater than many had thought.”
Indeed, 13 states have passed so-called “revenge porn” legislation, to prevent exes from posting nude or sexual videos and photographs online. Europe and Argentina are experimenting with allowing citizens to petition to remove reputation-harming information from the web, calling it the “right to be forgotten.” And these days Hollywood hangers-on are more likely to sell nude photos back to a celeb through their lawyer than risk releasing them illegally on the Internet.
Anderson and Lee have never quite been able to escape the shadow of the sex tape, but both seem to have done their best to move on and even poke fun at themselves. Lee’s memoir opens with a dialogue between him and his famous penis, and Anderson does not seem chastened when it comes to her sexualized brand: She continues to pose nude, most recently as part of her activist work for PETA. The two divorced in 1998, remarried in 2008 and then divorced again in 2010. Strangely enough, Anderson has also twice married Rick Salomon, the man in Paris Hilton’s sex tape.
But while the video turned Lee into a rock & roll hero of sorts, a big-dick-swinging rapscallion in the public’s eye, Anderson became something of a punch line. She had no sex-positive bloggers or pro-plastic-surgery tweeters around to defend her. No one stopped to dissect the notion that a woman who takes her clothes off for certain photographs has made her nude body into public property, and can’t complain that images of her in even more compromising positions end up sold, posted and shared on a global scale.
Both Ingley and Gauthier left porn for good after the tape debacle. After Peraino finally succumbed to cancer in 1999, Ingley came back to California, disheveled and broke. He soon moved in with his daughter, where he remained until he died.
“I love Milton, but he ripped us all off,” Gauthier says now. Tired of adult industry friends assuming he was hiding a small fortune, Gauthier distanced himself and began focusing on his electrical work full time.
Seven years ago he moved up the coast, where he now lives, alone. His brawn has thickened in middle age. When I went to see him this past summer, he had just been dumped by a woman he’d been dating on and off for two years, an ex-stripper who he says refused to kiss him on the lips and didn’t move during sex.
Everyone once in a while, he’ll tell someone he was the guy who stole the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape. Almost no one believes him. But he likes the fact that he contributed this small token to the world, and he’s always enjoyed watching the tape itself.
“It was cute. They’re in love and a couple and they’re just having fun with each other, and I think that’s great,” he says. “I’m jealous. I wish I had something like that.”