'DIRTY LITTLE SECRET'
I wish my mum had cashed in on sex tape – instead she spent most of her life in debt, says Pamela Anderson’s son
THEY were yet to be born when their parents' infamous sex was leaked, but Pamela Anderson’s sons have revealed the devastating impact it had on their lives.
Oldest son Brandon - born in 1996, a year after the tape of their mum’s romps with new husband Tommy Lee was stolen - has told a Netflix documentary he got into playground brawls over Pamela’s past.
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“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.
“I remember in school if anyone brought up my mum I would just fight. I was very quick to flush with anger.”
The tape, filmed shortly after the couple married in 1995 following a whirlwind four-day romance, was stolen from a safe in their garage, during renovation work, before being widely shared on the internet.
In 1996, the former Playboy model launched a legal bid against video distribution company IEG but was unable to prosecute anyone for the theft and she reveals youngest son Dylan, now 25, was also affected, years later.
'My son asked about sex tape'
“I wasn’t thinking when I was in Playboy that I was going to have kids soon and they would grow up and it would be embarrassing for them,” she says.
“I always thought I’d tell them, age appropriate, but I never got the chance. They found out before I could really talk to them about it. But a tape of your parents having sex is a whole new level.”
“I remember one day after school, Dylan coming to me in tears saying ‘why did you do that tape?’”she says. “I was like ‘Really, we didn’t make a sex tape.’”
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Family before cash
Despite unfounded rumours that the couple leaked the footage themselves to cash in, Pamela insists she “would have never monetised the stolen tape” and wouldn’t even have accepted a billion dollars to share it.
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And Dylan says his mum always put the family before profits.
“Things would have been different if she had made money on that tape,” he says. “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.”
Surprisingly, despite his childhood trauma, Brandon says he would have been happier if she'd raked in a fortune - like Kim Kardashian, whose own leaked sex tape in 2007 helped her become a reality star and a billionaire.
“I wish she would have made the money,” he says. “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.”
'I was attracted to bad guys'
The two-hour documentary, available from January 31, provides a deep insight into the Baywatch babe’s life and loves, in her own words.
Now 55, Pamela opens up about a lifetime of abuse - from being repeatedly molested by a female babysitter as a small child and raped at 12, to physical and mental abuse she suffered in relationships, including her six marriages.
And she reveals her fatal attraction to macho men began at an early age.
“I was always attracted to different kinds of bad guys,” she says.
“My first boyfriend used to try and run me over if he saw me, He kicked me out of a moving car and I did a gymnastic dismount into a ditch.”
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Whirlwind romance to stormy marriage
Landing a role in Baywatch, in 1992, Pammy became an instant star whose slow motion run, in the iconic red swimsuit, was beamed to billions of viewers around the world.
Three years later her marriage to Tommy Lee, after a four-day romance in Mexico, began in a haze of happiness and home video footage shows the couple constantly kissing, springing treats on each other and playing with baby Brandon, born a year in.
But she reveals the romance began to crumble through the Motley Crue rocker's drinking and jealous rages, especially after the birth of Dylan in 1997.
He would turn up on the Baywatch set as she filmed and, on one occasion, trashed her trailer when the script called for her to kiss a co-star.
“Tommy was so jealous and I thought it was cute. I thought that’s what love is,” she says.
“He was always there, always in my eyeline. It was too much.
“I was working and had two beautiful babies and I was busy with them. I think Tommy went through a little bit of postpartum (depression).
“There was a terrible night when Tommy was rocking on the floor, Brandon was crying in the pen and I was holding Dylan. He was saying ‘I want my wife back. I want my wife back’
“I lost it and said ‘You need to grow up. It’s not about you any more.’ I’d never spoken to him like that before. He went black, I was hyperventilating, scared, Brandon was holding my leg. I called 911 and I put the receiver off.”
After attacking her and kicking her, while she held her six-week-old son, Tommy was arrested and jailed for six months.
Desperate to save the marriage, he wrote endless letters from jail but Pamela was adamant, and the couple's divorce was granted in 1998.
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“I’ve never loved someone so deeply,” Pamela wrote in her journal. “I feel like part of me has died.”
In a sweet letter to baby Dylan, then nine months, Pammy wrote: “Mummy and daddy will eventually be able to be friends, I hope, but I want you to know that I would rather be alone than ever live with that abuse again, you will always be in a safe place."
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