Pamela Anderson is getting ready to put it all out there with the her new HarperCollins memoir, Love, Pamela, and Netflix documentary, Pamela, a Love Story, both being released in tandem on Jan. 31.
Both the book and documentary will ostensibly put an emphasis on the leaked sex tape that sidelined Anderson’s career, which had been stolen by a contractor out of a safe at the home she shared with her then-husband Tommy Lee in 1995. Both the theft of the sex tape and the aftermath became the subject of the Emmy-nominated Hulu biographical miniseries Pam & Tommy last year, which was made without the Anderson’s permission.
The tape itself was likewise distributed without the 55-year-old’s permission, and because she refused to sign off on the rights, neither she nor Lee saw any money from it after losing in court in an attempt to prevent it from being distributed. Though Anderson maintains that she would still turn down the money if she had to do it all over again — surprisingly, her eldest son, Brandon Thomas Lee, 26, does’t see it that way.
In a new interview with The Sun, Brandon, who also produced the Netflix documentary, explained that he wished his mother would have at least made money off of the tape.
“When I was a kid, I always thought that everyone knew things about me and my family that they really shouldn’t have known, and everyone had this dirty little secret about my family,” he reveals in Pamela, a Love Story. Still, despite his childhood trauma, he wonders how things might have shaken out if his mother would have profited similarly to how Kim Kardashian did from her own (allegedly) leaked tape in 2007.
“Things would have been different if she had made money on that tape. But people made millions of dollars and she was like ‘no’ because she 100 per cent cared about her family being OK and me being OK. I wish she would have made the money. She would have made millions of dollars if she had just signed the paper. Instead she sat back with nothing and watched her career fizzle into thin air. She was in debt most of her life.”
Well, hindsight may be 20/20, but at the very least, Anderson is likely going to make a nice profit from the one-two punch of the book and documentary. It might not be as much of a windfall as the money from the tape would have been, but at least it’s something.
