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News Story Investigation: Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's Violation of Privacy 

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News Story Investigation: Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's Violation of Privacy 

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COM 101 200 News Story Investigation- Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s Violation of Privacy 

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The Actual Story of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's Sex Tape

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The Actual Story of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's Sex Tape

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It's funny what being held at gunpoint will do to you. And being held at gunpoint by a megalomaniacal rock star? Well, that doesn't feel very good at all.

Not when the rock star has spent the past three months, the entire spring of 1995, living a fantasy life right in front of you, sipping martinis and passing a joint around at 11a.m. with his new wife, a pert blonde actress who inspires over a billion people around the world to drool each week as she runs across the beach in a tight red bathing suit. Not when you've been laying wires, tearing up the walls and painting again and again, because the light switch the rock star thought he wanted over here he now wants just there.

By the time Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson abruptly fired the handful of the people renovating their Malibu mansion, refusing to pay for work they said was shoddily done, electrician Rand Gauthier was so sick of the celebrity couple's demands that he was ready to simply write off the $20,000 he says they owed him. But when he and a general contractor came back to the couple's mansion on Mulholland Highway to get their tools and Tommy Lee pointed a shotgun at them, saying, "Get the fuck off my property," Gauthier got seriously pissed.

Lee made Gauthier feel small, and Gauthier had spent his entire life feeling small. Here was a guy who, on his 18th birthday, lost his virginity to a Vegas hooker. Here was an L.A. boy through and through, struggling to dissociate himself from his famous father, who starred in the original Bye Bye Birdie on Broadway and was Hymie the Robot on the Sixties sitcom Get Smart. By the Nineties, Gauthier had gleaming, tanned muscles, broad shoulders, an eager, trusting smile and a voice that's equal parts surfer and Ernie from Sesame Street. Most people dismiss him as a doofus, a conspiracy theorist who likes fast, powerful cars and dating porn stars. He even did some scenes himself, and spent his time hanging around an adult-film studio, building sets and chatting up starlets. A studio troll, they called him.

"I was never really that popular with people, " he says. "But I had never been held at gunpoint. It screwed with my head."

Now he wanted revenge. He wanted the drummer to feel vulnerable, to realize that he was just a human being, not an invincible rock god, even if he had sold 20 million records by the age of 32. So Gauthier decided to steal the giant safe he knew was tucked in the garage, the one with all of Lee's guns and Anderson's jewelry, and have a laugh at their expense.

He had no idea that the safe also contained a homemade tape that would promise him dazzling riches and then ruin his life. And instead of taking Lee down a notch, he would help cement the musician's legacy, letting the world know he had one of the biggest dicks in rock & roll.

"I made his career, is what happened," says Gauthier, now a foggy 57-year-old who still works as an electrician and grows marijuana in his garage outside Santa Rosa, California.

But Lee might not see it that way. Two years ago, Gauthier received a Facebook message from a page bearing the name Tommy Lee. All it said was: "Hey you fucking faggot."

The Pam and Tommy sex tape is the most infamous stolen celebrity artifact on the planet, with a wink usually accompanying the word "stolen." It wasn't the first time a video of a famous person fornicating appeared in the public realm, and it certainly wouldn't be the last. But it was a porno that appealed to people who didn't usually watch pornos, a voyeuristic dive into the guileless intimacy between two tabloid darlings: Anderson, perennial Playboy cover model and star of Baywatch, and Lee, the hard-partying drummer from Mötley Crüe.

Starting in the spring of 1996, as information trickled out about what was on the tape, everyone wanted to see it, whether to gawk at the home life of two superstars or condemn the empty-headed, sex-addicted narcissists who presumably leaked it themselves. The couple already had a reputation for carnal and pharmaceutical indulgence, but peeping on their love play offered an entirely new level of dirty, thrilling violation, as we leap-frogged PR flacks, centerfold photographers and even the paparazzi to land squarely in the most private of worlds.

And yet the tape was, without question, physically and illegally taken from Anderson and Lee's home. Recording themselves in the spring and summer of 1995, the couple truly didn't know anyone else was ever going to see this, so their video has none of the self-conscious posturing of reality TV and social media. You will never see a celebrity flash a smile in public that is as genuine as Tommy Lee's after he money-shots all over his wife's chest at her request.

This is not gonzo pornography - it's a 54-minute home video, depicting about eight minutes of the sex Americans are most likely to sanction: white, straight, married and in love.

"It's the greatest tape I have ever seen in my life," Howard Stern said in late 1997. "What's cool about it is that, like, you get to live their lives with them."

But what the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex tape taught us is that an unassuming individual could acquire a piece of content, offer it up to the Internet and watch it ricochet around the planet. How, exactly, this footage traveled from a locked safe to screens and store shelves worldwide warns of everything that was coming in the next two decades, everything that would shift in technology and culture and celebrity. Before Kim Kardashian, before TMZ, before RedTube, before the Fappening, there was Pam and Tommy.

The tape took two years to go from bootleg to viral, and when it did it made an estimated $77 million in less than 12 months - and that's just on legitimate sales. So how did the person who stole the safe manage to evade the police, the lawyers, the media and the biker gangs, but never see a cent? This is the story of a man who staked his livelihood on a video in the hopes that it would save him. Instead he watched his life fall apart as his greed destroyed nearly every shred of the happiness he'd carved out for his adult self.

Gauthier says he spent the entire summer of 1995 preparing for the heist, driving over to the Lees' house several nights a week to sit and stare, waiting outside until three or four in the morning. Plotting. Stewing. "I took my time," Gauthier recalls. "I cased the joint."

His plan was to throw a white Tibetan yak fur rug over his back and crawl to the garage on his hands and knees in the middle of the night, so the security cameras, which Gauthier himself had installed, would seem to show a dog like the one the couple had. Lee and Anderson lived in a three-story Spanish-style house, with a garage that had been converted into a recording studio on the bottom floor.

Unfamiliar trucks, vans and cars were often parked outside the house, so no one suspected anything. The property was adjacent to state-owned land where the paparazzi would lurk, and the couple sometimes saw boom mics hanging over the fence. At one point Lee was arrested for pointing a sawed-off shotgun at a camera he spied while he and Anderson were kissing in the garden.

Photos went for a high price, as the public was obsessed with the pair, who had married in February after a four-day, Ecstasy-enhanced courtship in Mexico. Lee's previous marriage to the actress Heather Locklear had ended in accusations of domestic violence, infidelity and drug and alcohol abuse. Anderson, with her leather dresses and her notorious double-D breast implants, seemed a better match for a guy who was known for mooning the audience. In April 1995, stolen Polaroids of the couple in bed made their way to the French and Dutch editions of Penthouse and an American skin mag called Screw. Anderson was upset, initially, but as she fatefully told Movieline later that year, "When I saw the first Polaroid, I was like, 'Whoa, baby, we should frame this' . . .In the end, who cares?"

Over the course of their multi-year renovations, the couple cycled through several rounds of contractors and workers they deemed untrustworthy, spending what was, by all accounts, an obscene amount of money building out a hedonist's paradise with heart-shaped glass and iron doors; a pillow room; a koi pond; a 20-foot mural of heaven and hell in the elevator shaft; and a 30-foot swing in the living room, hanging above the white baby grand piano.

"Basically, we made it into a huge adult playground," Lee wrote in his 2004 memoir, Tommyland.

"They were getting three-inch slabs of marble from France and Italy delivered," says Guerin Swing, an interior designer who partied frequently with the Lees that year and worked on some of the house's more artistic touches. (Swing also makes a cameo in the tape, running down a hotel hallway in a bucket hat.) "They spent money like they hated it."

Meanwhile, Gauthier was lying in wait. In early October, Anderson threw Lee a circus-themed party to celebrate his 33rd birthday at a ranch down the road, featuring carnival rides, tigers, sword-swallowers, a death-metal band from Sweden and $5,000 worth of drugs.

About five days before Halloween, Gauthier decided to make his move. The details of what exactly happened on the night of the burglary are sketchy at best, as Gauthier seems intent on painting himself as a strongman daredevil and obfuscating details that could point to potential accomplices. He acknowledges that one other person knew about his plan beforehand but insists he carried out the deed himself.

According to Gauthier, it was 3 a.m., and the Lees were at home, upstairs, asleep. He came in over the fence with the yak fur on his back and a U-Haul dolly trailing behind him. After disabling the security cameras, Gauthier claims to have gone upstairs and walked into the Lees' bedroom.

Next, entering the garage, he says he carefully moved all of the recording equipment in front of the carpeted wall concealing the safe, including what Lee later described as "a huge Neve recording console that weighs hundreds of pounds, as well as a few racks of outboard gear, each of them about six feet tall, awkward. . .and heavy." Then, he tipped the Browning safe, which was six feet by four feet by three feet, onto the dolly, strapped it down, put everything back as he had found it, and wheeled the dolly out onto the driveway, heading downhill toward the street. Suddenly, he says, the metal in the safe triggered the gate, startling Gauthier as the noise of the doors creaking open broke the silence of the pre-dawn hour.

"I almost dropped a load in my pants," he says.

To get the safe up onto the back of his truck once he got out to the road, he claims he "leaned the whole dolly and safe against the gate and I get in the dirt and I wedge my legs underneath it and I bench up 500 pounds with my legs. It was hard."

Friends of Gauthier's, however, say he told a different story back in 1995 and 1996. Lee himself wrote in his memoir that whoever robbed them "must have removed the safe with a crane." One source alleges Troy Tompkins, the general contractor who was held at gunpoint with Gauthier, helped plan the heist from the start and was waiting in a pick-up truck. Tompkins' wife at the time, a French woman named Dominique Sardell, had been doing work on Anderson's condo, and was fired along with Gauthier and her husband. Months later, when the Lees finally discovered the safe was missing, Tompkins and Sardell were the first people they suspected, as Tompkins had gushed over Lee's guns, and Sardell had advised Anderson to keep her jewelry in the safe, to protect it. (Neither Tompkins nor Sardell could be reached for comment.)

What happened once the safe left the home, however, is less ambiguous. Gauthier took it to a secure location and spent an hour cutting into the back with a borrowed demolition saw outfitted with a composite diamond carbide blade. Although he denies finding the AK-47, FNC assault rifle, .45-70 caliber rifle and Mossberg stainless steel shotgun mentioned in a later police report, he does acknowledge discovering everything else Pam and Tommy listed as missing, including family photographs, a Rolex, a gold-and-diamond Cartier watch, gold-and-emerald cufflinks, a ruby-and-diamond cross, the white bikini that Anderson wore to their beach wedding, and a Hi8 tape, the kind of cassette that could be inserted into a handheld camcorder.

Gauthier brought the tape back to the North Hollywood porn studio where he worked, and watched it with the studio owner.

"We put it in and see what it is, and of course, cha-ching. The dollar signs fly before our eyes," he says. "But we're going, this is the kind of thing people will get killed over."

In the mid-Nineties, the porn business was booming. Almost every home in America could afford a VCR, and decency laws in Los Angeles had relaxed enough to support a $5 billion dollar industry that churned out hundreds of features a year.

Gauthier first fell in with the San Fernando Valley crowd in the late 1980s, when he was set up on a blind date with porn star Erica Boyer (née Amanda Gantt), a southern girl who made great fried okra and whose father was at one point the Assistant Attorney General of Alabama. The two moved in together after only six weeks, and she convinced a few directors that her new boyfriend had done adult films before so Gauthier, who had stripped in college but had no experience doing porn, could join her on camera.

"Learning to climax on cue was not easy," he says. "They say, 'OK, let's get this over with. Everyone wants to go to lunch,' and of course then the pressure's on."

Over the course of the next decade, under the name Austin Moore, Gauthier performed in at least 75 porn videos, including Big Boob Bikini Bash (1995), Miracle on 69th Street (1992) and Willie Wankers and the Fun Factory (1994).

"I just wish my equipment had been a little larger for the industry," Gauthier says. "A lot of girls wanted me to do anal with them because it wasn't so large."

After a short marriage to Boyer, he dated actresses like Wendy Whoppers, whose massive 34H breasts he says he helped pay for, and Stacey Valentine, with whom he says he once had sex in the parking lot of a Jerry's Famous Deli, as dozens of friends cheered them on.

"I've had a real wild life," he says. "I believe in reincarnation, and this is kind of my vacation life. I have to come back and be really serious next time."

Gauthier grew up in Toluca Lake, across the street from Dick Van Dyke, with divorced parents and no access to pornography. When he was a boy, his mother became a Jehovah's Witness, forcing Gauthier to go door-to-door with her and inspiring his lifelong obsession with religions, secret societies and cults.

He is the kind of person who insists that early rabbis sodomized 12-year-old boys and believes in a mystical connection between the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, bones in the human skull and years in the solar magnetic cycle (all are 22). On the back of one hand, he has a tattoo of a Freemason symbol; he claims the group once wanted to give him a machine gun and train him as a soldier.

Even though Gauthier now calls Jehovah's Witnesses "mentally deficient," he was happier living with his mother than being around his father, Dick Gautier. Gauthier says the actor was quick to lose his temper and only brought him and his two sisters over to show them off. Once, as kid, Gauthier forgot his dress shoes at his mother's house, and his father made him wear slippers to a fancy dinner.

"I remember he got one of those '10 Best-Dressed Men' awards back in the 1970s, so it was a little uncomfortable, because he looked dapper, and I looked like a schlemiel," he says. As an adult, he changed the spelling of his last name, presumably to get out from his father's shadow. "I don't think my dad really believed in me."

Working in porn gave him the confidence he'd always struggled to achieve growing up. Still, he had to smoke weed to "take my head out of the fact that there were a bunch of dudes watching me, which was kind of grode," and he preferred working off-camera whenever possible.

Porn was a small world back then, and early on Gauthier met Milton "Uncle Miltie" Ingley, an overweight, pipe-smoking cheapskate studio owner who was partial to country music and Chambord.

After Gauthier fixed a few pieces of recording equipment around Ingley's studio, the two became fast friends. The prolific fetish filmmaker Ernest Greene (né Ira Levine), who shot at the studio a handful of times, calls Gauthier "Milton's pet idiot," explaining that Ingley would blame messes he created on Gauthier because, as Greene says, "the guy basically had a lizard brain."

So when Gauthier came to Ingley with the Pam and Tommy tape, Ingley, who died in 2006, took over. First, after making a few copies, they destroyed the original Hi8 cassette, melting the casing and cutting the tape itself into hundreds of little pieces, which they dispersed in a desolate area near Six Flags Magic Mountain. Once they'd disposed of the evidence, the next step was to find a distributor.

"Milton was the king of wheeling and dealing," Gauthier recalls. "He knew how to make a nickel into two dollars. Always schmoozing."

One of the first people Ingley approached was actor and director Ron Jeremy, a friend since the late Seventies, when Ingley used to perform under the name Michael Morrison. Jeremy had recently put out a reality-style porno featuring John Wayne Bobbitt, whose penis was famously surgically reattached after his wife cut it off.

"I got a reality star you're gonna really shit your pants over," Ingley told him.

But Jeremy and his producing partner quickly figured out the tape had been stolen, and that Lee and Anderson hadn't signed a release.

"We passed," Jeremy recalls. "Porn was so strict and scary back in those days. If you're fucking, you better believe you gotta have a release."

Ingley approached a handful of other companies, but no one wanted to take on the risk. According to Gauthier, a wealthy foreigner offered them a million dollars for the tape, but Ingley felt it was worth many times that amount.

Finally he approached Louis "Butchie" Peraino, the son of a capo in one of New York's organized crime families, the Colombos. Back when pornography was illegal nearly everywhere in the United States, the Perainos were the Medicis of the adult world, having financed and distributed the classic 1972 film Deep Throat. By 1995, the younger Peraino ran an adult video business called Arrow Productions and was close friends with many of the biggest players in porn. But even Peraino didn't feel comfortable putting out the Pam and Tommy tape in any official capacity.

Instead, he lent Ingley roughly $50,000 to cover manufacturing and distribution of the tape over the Internet, with the expectation that he would receive interest on the loan and a cut of the sales.

At this point, only 25 million Americans and 40 million people globally had Internet access. Most websites were eyesores, and there was no such thing as streaming video. But the web, with its seemingly anonymous transactions, seemed like the perfect black market to get the tape to consumers.

Now, finally, Ingley and Gauthier thought, they would be rich.

"I was looking at castles in Spain," Gauthier says.

Ingley used about a quarter of the money Peraino had given him to run off thousands of copies and to hire someone to put up a few websites: pamsex.com, pamlee.com and pamsextape.com. The sites didn't have the video itself; they merely gave instructions to send a money order to the New York outpost of a Canadian T-shirt company, which then funneled the money to a bank account in Amsterdam. With VHS copies of Pamela's Hardcore Sex Video going for $59.95, Ingley expected to soon be flush. So with Gauthier managing shipments from Los Angeles, driving around in a white Dodge van knee-deep in video cassettes, Ingley headed to New York to enjoy the rest of Peraino's loan: $500 bottles of champagne, hookers every night, a room at the Plaza and lots of cocaine.

Another Ingley Studios lackey, Steve Fasanella (whose last name has been changed at his request) hadn't been working there very long when this all started; when he saw he wasn't going to be cut in on the action, he ran off his own copies. Soon he was selling them for $175 a pop out of the trunk of his car. (He says he sold nearly 500 copies this way, making about $75,000.) Fasanella advised Gauthier to do the same, to make some cash in case Ingley screwed him over, but Gauthier remained loyal.

By the end of December 1995, when the Sunday edition of London's Daily Mail did a year-in-review issue that covered Anderson and Lee's tabloid antics, the writer mentioned that a video of the two having sex on a yacht was supposedly on sale in Los Angeles.

Two months had passed since the heist. At this point, Anderson and Lee hadn't even noticed yet that the safe was missing.

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Pam & Tommy: The Story of the World's Most Infamous Sex Tape

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Porn, guns, the mob and one very disgruntled electrician: how the superstar couple's most intimate moments went global.

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Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's reactions to Hulu's Show "Pam & Tommy"

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Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's reactions to Hulu's Show "Pam & Tommy"

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Neither star provided consent for the show to be made, both had different reactions to it being produced

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The Hulu limited series (now streaming) tells the true story behind the release of her and then-husband Tommy Lee's stolen sex tape, and a source close to Anderson tells EW that she won't be tuning in now or ever. "I do know she'll never, never watch this," the source says. "Not even years from now. Not even the trailer."

Pamela Anderson, Pam and Tommy

Both the showrunners and series star Lily James (who plays Anderson) have previously stated they reached out to Anderson during the series' development but never received a response. The source confirms Anderson was indeed contacted multiple times, first "years ago" long before filming, and again "while they were in post-production." But she still wasn't interested-unlike Lee, who EW previously confirmed spoke to Stan about the project. "Tommy doesn't get it," says the source. "He's in the same mindset he was at the time: that any publicity is good publicity."

"As a friend of Pamela, at least no one will ever ask me again if the tape was really stolen," the source says. "But imagine if a celebrity today had their nudes leaked and then Hollywood recreated not just the crime but the actual nudes - that would never happen. In the '90s, Pamela's body was deemed by a judge to be public property. There was no question the tape was stolen property, but the court decided it wasn't private property because her body belonged to the world."

The source adds that after the #MeToo movement, "Pamela is somehow still the exception to the rule. She's still up for grabs. That's messed up. Yes, it's brief clips - but to me the most damning aspect is that [ Pam & Tommy] didn't just tell the story, they recreated moments from the boat."

When it comes to James' portrayal of Anderson, the source says that Anderson "never commented on Lily's look and would never do so. This poor starlet has had to hear that Pamela thinks she's trash - it just never happened. The headlines around that are just totally screwed up."

The source believes Sebastian Stan, who plays Lee in the series, "did an impressive job" and James "did a great visual - and the voice is pretty uncanny," but the series doesn't always capture the true Anderson. "Pamela is not that meek," the source notes of moments like when James' Pamela is shown hesitant to voice her opinion on the set of Baywatch. "She is not a shrinking violet and never was."

Anderson is now "focused on her life in Vancouver," says the source. "She doesn't read the headlines" and "she's happy to be focused on her philanthropic efforts and wants any press she ever gets to be about that now."

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Pamela Anderson will 'never, never watch' 'Pam & Tommy,' source says

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The Hulu limited series (now streaming) tells the true story behind the release of her and then-husband Tommy Lee's stolen sex tape, and a source close to Anderson tells EW that she won't be tuning in now or ever. "I do know she'll never, never watch this," the source says.

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Pamela Anderson being exploited for a second time

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Pamela Anderson being exploited for a second time

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Is Hulu’s ‘Pam & Tommy’ Exploiting Pamela Anderson All Over Again?

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Hulu’s ‘Pam & Tommy’ purports to tell the inside story of Anderson’s sex tape. But without Anderson’s involvement, the series feels like a way to profit off the star’s trauma without her consent.

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How "Pam & Tommy" puts a feminist spin on the tape's release from the 90's

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How "Pam & Tommy" puts a feminist spin on the tape's release from the 90's

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As the highly anticipated series Pam & Tommy drops every Wednesday on Hulu and Disney+, audiences across the globe can get hooked on the gripping true story of Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee's marriage and the sex-tape scandal, which ultimately greatly affected the Baywatch star.

Nick Offerman and Taylor Schilling who star as Uncle Miltie and Erica Gauthier respectively in Pam & Tommy spoke to Newsweek about the misconception surrounding the couple's sex tape and the leak, as well as what they hope Anderson will feel about the show.

In the late 1990s, disgruntled electrician Rand Gauthier stole a safe in Tommy Lee's home in protest after Lee refused to pay him for the work he had carried out. Inside the safe was Anderson and Lee's private home video of their honeymoon, featuring 10 minutes of footage of them having sex. Instead of returning the tape, Gauthier took the tape to porn director Michael "Uncle Miltie" Morrison who helped him distribute the tape online.

The leak of Anderson and Lee's sex tape had damaging consequences for not only their marriage but for Anderson in particular. Not only was she vilified in the press, but her career also suffered greatly.

While Tommy Lee has been vocal of his support for the series, telling Entertainment Tonight he had been in contact with Sebastian Stan who plays him in the series, Pamela Anderson has remained silent.

Lee said: "I know Sebastian, he's playing me. From what he's told me, really beautiful story.

"I think a lot of people would think it's one thing, but it's really about privacy and how things got crazy then. There are different laws now.

"The story's actually cool. What actually happened wasn't, but [Stan] tells me it's pretty wild.

"I feel like it was forever ago. But it's a cool story and people need to know. It's cool. I'm stoked."

As for Anderson, a few articles have done the rounds citing "insiders" providing comments about Anderson's views on the series and, apparently, they are not good. Her friend, Courtney Love had also commented, in a now-deleted Facebook post on May 16, 2021-following the release of first-look images of the show-that the series was "so f****** outrageous," adding it was "further causing" Anderson "complex trauma."

Showrunner D.V. DeVincentis has confirmed Anderson did not respond to requests to work on the project in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

He said: "We particularly wanted to let Pamela Anderson know that this portrayal was very much a positive thing and that we cared a great deal about her and wanted her to know that the show loves her. We didn't get a response, but considering what she's been through and the time that we were reaching out, that was understandable."

Taylor Schilling who plays adult actress Erica Gauthier/Boyer in Pam & Tommy echoed DeVincentis' sentiments. She told Newsweek: "I hope that they're [Anderson and Lee] able to see it as as a real ode to Pamela and her bravery and her courage. I don't think that this story has been told and that people don't know the truth, and I hope that there's some vindication for her experience inside of this."

Nick Offerman, who plays Uncle Miltie also felt a similar way. He told Newsweek he was attracted to the show because it is from Anderson's point of view and becomes a "bit of feminist statement" in a way.

He shared: "I was just flabbergasted to discover that this was an actual crime that Pam and Tommy were completely the victims. The world cynically sort of assumed when it happened, that they must be involved, it must be some sort of exploitative publicity stunt or something but to discover that it was actually this sort of bumbling theft carpenter and a guy trying to like recoup his wages that had been withheld just fascinated me, I thought it was beautifully written and I also really love how it ends up taking Pam Anderson's point of view and, and becomes a bit of a feminist statement."

He continued: "To see how Pam Anderson is the victim of sexism and misogyny, as the story plays out, I think will be quite eye-opening. It'll really serve as a foundational story to so many such tales that came after. It helps point up the distance that we still have to go in terms of treating everybody equally when it comes to seeing them with their clothes off."

Offerman added he hopes the show will "set the record straight" about what really happened to Anderson and Lee.

"It's quite clear once you see all eight episodes, that the writers and producers said we really want to set the record straight here. I think I think, you know, again, an unwitting audience could make presumptions that there's something exploitative or something at all salacious about this and it's quite the opposite. I think that I think that They [Lee and Anderson] would see that the show's heart is in the right place and hopefully appreciate our efforts."

Pam & Tommy is nowhere near a glamorization of Anderson and Lee's ordeal. Instead, the series follows how it impacted the couple and is mainly told from Anderson's point of view. The series also hammers home the Hollywood couple were at the end of the day, victims of a crime despite the fact Rand Gauthier, Miltie, and other conspirators did not serve anytime behind bars.

Schilling shared with Newsweek she hopes audiences will learn the severity of the crime against Anderson and Lee and also the fact they never consented to the tape being released.

She said: "I hope that there's an understanding that Pamela Anderson was the victim of a crime and that the tape came about as a result of criminal activity. That's why it came into the public consciousness. She did not offer her consent for us to see it and she never made any money off of it. I had no idea and I imagine other people have a similar experience.

Pam & Tommy airs Wednesdays on Hulu and Disney+.

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'Pam and Tommy' cast says show is "feminist statement" while Pamela Anderson stays silent

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As the highly anticipated series Pam & Tommy drops every Wednesday on Hulu and Disney+, audiences across the globe can get hooked on the gripping true story of Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee's marriage and the sex-tape scandal, which ultimately greatly affected the Baywatch star.

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How much of Hulu's newest T.V. Show is fact and how much of it is fiction?

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The world has met "Pam & Tommy."

Hulu's sensational eight-part series is based on the true story of "Baywatch" star Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee - and the viral fallout after their stolen private sex tape was released on the 1990s internet.

Beyond the stunning transformation of British "Cinderella" actress Lily James to Anderson and "Captain America" star Sebastian Stan as Lee, the series doesn't veer far from the true story of the events.

Because neither Lee nor Anderson provided permission or support for the tale, "Pam & Tommy" producers drew from other sources, including optioning the rights to a detailed 2014 Rolling Stone article, "Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Sex Tape."

Here's what's true (the wild-and-instant star love) and what's disputed (details of the theft) from the first three "Pam & Tommy" episodes (now streaming):
More: A prosthetic chest, hours of tattoos: How 'Pam & Tommy' transformed Lily James, Sebastian Stan
When did Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee get together?

While the "Pam & Tommy" premiere touches on Anderson and Lee's paparazzi-filled relationship, the wild, rock-and-roll beginnings are fully portrayed in episode two, "I Love You, Tommy."

Neither star was looking for new love at the Sanctuary night club on New Year's Eve in 1994 (Lee even had a girlfriend, Bobbie Brown). But when Anderson bought shots of Goldschlager for the entire club during a girls' night out, Lee was wowed. "I grab my bottle of Cristal, slam the shot, and go over and sit right next to her," Lee writes in "Tommy Land," his 2004 memoir. "I don't say a word. I just, like, lick the side of her face." In the episode, Anderson then licks her girlfriend's face, and the party ensues.

Lee persistently called Anderson afterward and flew to Cancun, to be near her on a February 1995 work trip, writing in his memoir that he called every local hotel to find the star. Anderson agreed to have one drink, and during the night of wild clubbing that followed, the couple bonded. Lee writes, "I had to marry her. Right now, in Mexico." He borrowed a friend's pinky ring: "I put it on her and ask her if she'll marry me. She says yes, and four days later we did it."

The couple found a priest and married on the beach in bathing suits with cocktails before sunset on Feb. 19, 1995. After they were married, "Tommy picked me up and carried me into the water, and all those people followed us into the ocean," Anderson says in notes added to Lee's memoir.

The newlyweds were virtual strangers. On the flight home, "Pamela is asking me where I live and what I like for breakfast. It was so bizarre," writes Lee.

"I thought it was the wildest, greatest thing I ever did," Anderson adds.

The two landed amid a paparazzi feeding frenzy. "It is the beginning of all that," Lee writes.

What's up with Tommy's talking appendage?

Episode 2 features Lee's conversation with his own penis (a prosthetic voiced by "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" star Jason Mantzoukas).

This conversation is based on a literary truth. The opening of Lee's "Tommy Land," entitled "Introduction: A State of Mind, a.k.a. Straight From the Dome," features an argument between the author and his infamous appendage, which states that it should be writing the book because people will read it "to find out how long I really am."

"I'm way more famous than you. We both know that I'm the star and you're the personal assistant, that I'm Batman and you're Robin."

How did Rand Gauthier steal their tape?

The series premiere explains how electrician Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), the disgruntled contractor working for Lee, stole the couple's private tape.

In his memoir, Lee discusses the Malibu dream "Love Palace" he remodeled with his new wife with heart-shaped front doors, a mega-sized bedroom with an open shower and a 30-foot swing over the grand piano in the living room.

In the Rolling Stone article, Gauthier said he was willing to forgive the $20,000 he claimed Lee owed him after being fired from the job. But when he and a general contractor returned to the mansion to retrieve their tools, Gauthier said Lee pointed a shotgun at him, warning, "Get the (expletive) off my property" - a scene portrayed onscreen.

That summer, Gauthier said he sat outside the house several nights a week devising a plan. "I cased the joint," he told Rolling Stone. The tape, stored in a Browning safe with other valuables, was stolen from Lee and Anderson's house in November 1995.

The theft in the show relies on Gauthier's retelling of the crime in Rolling Stone - a 3 a.m. trek in which he wore a white Tibetan yak fur rug and crawled so the security cameras, which he had installed, would seem to show Lee's sheepdog. Gauthier claimed he alone strapped the safe to a dolly and wheeled it out and into a truck, just as portrayed onscreen, while a security gate loudly opened, causing Gauthier to panic.

There is some dispute on whether Gauthier could have pulled off the job solo. Fellow contractor Lonnie (Larry Brown), who is initially involved with Gauthier's plot before pulling out, is a composite character.

Lee claimed in his memoir "there's no way one guy could do it alone." Removing the safe, hidden behind heavy recording equipment would have required "a crane, a flatbed and a crew of guys," Lee wrote.

Gauthier said he took the safe to a secure location and opened it with a demolition saw. Later, he took the Hi8 tape to porn-studio owner Milton "Uncle Miltie" Owen Ingley (Nick Offerman).

The third episode, "Jane Fonda," shows Uncle Miltie and Gauthier trying to find someone to distribute the stolen video. After multiple rejections, the two eventually met with mobster Louis "Butchie" Peraino (Andrew Dice Clay), who agreed to give them $50,000 to cover manufacturing and distribution of the tape, according to Rolling Stone- "with the expectation that he would receive interest on the loan and a cut of the sales."

It took two years for the tape to go from bootleg to viral internet sensation. The trail of destruction to all parties, especially Anderson and Lee's marriage, are handled in upcoming episodes.

After a tumultuous relationship, the couple, who had two children together, divorced in 1998. Anderson has maintained that Lee was "the love of my life."

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Fact-checking 'Pam & Tommy': Pamela Anderson, Tommy Lee and the stolen sex tape

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The world has met "Pam & Tommy." Hulu's sensational eight-part series is based on the true story of "Baywatch" star Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee - and the viral fallout after their stolen private sex tape was released on the 1990s internet.