The Biggest Bombshells From Pamela Anderson's Documentary & Memoir

Anderson had an inconceivably traumatic upbringing. Her earliest memories involve her abusive father who struggled with alcoholism. Her female babysitter, who had molested Anderson throughout her childhood, further compounded the abuse. Anderson recalls, “At a young age, I learned that people are mostly awful. Babysitters even worse." After experiencing years of molestation, the young star attempted to kill her abuser, revealing, “I tried to stab her in the heart with a candy cane pen.” After wishing her dead, Anderson’s babysitter was coincidentally killed the following day in a car accident. Anderson later describes being sexually assaulted at the age of 12, and again at 14. "It made me trust people less and less," said the star. 

We all know that she was in Playboy, but not necessarily how she got there. Anderson’s career began at the age of 22 when she appeared on the jumbotron of a BC Lions football game. After getting discovered by a representative from a Canadian beer company, the next to take notice was Hugh Hefner himself. Anderson left her home in Canada for the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles shortly thereafter, where she posed for a series of nude photographs.

Anderson recalls feeling nauseous during her first shoot after a makeup artist on set touched her breast. Still, the star considered this an important turning point in her life. According to Anderson, the shoot “helped me in ways I could never articulate—I took my power back—I had to. It was a chance to realize a new life, a new adventure." Anderson went on to appear regularly in Playboy—14 times to be exact—making her the most photographed model in the publication’s history.  

While there has been much discourse surrounding their now-infamous sex tape, much less focuses on Anderson's treatment in the matter. After the tape was stolen from a safe in the then-couple’s garage, a company distributed the footage on the newly-popular Internet. The tape went on to make $77 million in just the first year of its release. To Anderson, the distribution without consent “felt like rape.” After filing a lawsuit, the star's work with Playboy was used to justify a lack of a right to privacy. As if this wasn't demeaning enough, nude images of the star were presented behind the attorneys during the deposition. 

“They ended up making hundreds of millions of dollars off the spliced-together home movies of us. We endured years of embarrassment, harassment, and stress—not to mention what our families went through, our parents, our siblings, and how it affected our kids when they got older and were teased in school." She continues, "It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever gone through. It is still a great cause of pain for all of us.” Not that any amount of money would begin to compensate, it's worth noting that Anderson never earned a dime.

In an Inception-like moment, Anderson reacts to Hulu’s announcement of the Pam & Tommy miniseries in her Netflix documentary, Pamela, a Love Story. Anderson reveals that the news made her feel immediately ill and subsequently plagued her with nightmares. After decades of attempting to block out her trauma as a survival mechanism, "it’s all coming up again." Not having provided approval for the project, the Hulu show was yet another instance of feeling like "you are just a thing owned by the world, like you belong to the world.” Retraumatized and desiring to reclaim the narrative, this was the impetus for her to tell her whole truth—and so was today's birth of a memoir and documentary of her very own, created on her own terms.