If a sex tape was stolen and illegally distributed today, there would be widespread outrage at the violation and possibly a criminal investigation. The reignited interest in the story has given pause to the way Anderson was treated back then. She was devastated by the gross invasion of her privacy, but the public had very little sympathy for the actress who had made her name posing nude. The sex tape took on a life of its own: it became a pop-culture reference, spawned copycats and is now the subject of a new TV series, Pam & Tommy, out now. At the time, Anderson was seven months pregnant with her first child and was worried the stress would hurt the baby. This was the first celebrity sex tape of its kind well before Paris Hilton and Rick Salomon in 2004, before Kim K and Ray J in 2007. The VHS tape had been stolen from a safe inside the couple’s Malibu house in 1995 by a disgruntled electrician and shopped around to the highest bidder. It was the same tabloids that first reported on a bootleg sex tape of Anderson and Lee being circulated in 1996. As Anderson’s fame began to grow, infamy struck. At its peak, Baywatch captivated an audience of 1.1 billion viewers weekly. In 1991, Anderson landed her first TV show, Home Improvement, and the next year she took on her most iconic role, as the red-swimsuit-wearing, slow-motion-running C.J. It didn’t come before Pam, it was because of Pam.” “When she got her implants, everybody at the Playboy mansion went straight to the doctor trying to emulate Pamela,” recalls long-time friend Harper Reiss. “It was a phenomenon. She was the first Playboy model to have a breast enlargement and inspired a generation of “Playmates” to do the same. LA was made for her, or maybe she was made for it. Upon her arrival in California, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner put Anderson up in a Bel-Air mansion with an opera-singing maid and a Bentley in the driveway. But this time her rebellion wasn’t so much about spite as it was about chasing down success. When Anderson subsequently decided to move to LA to pursue a career in modelling and that elusive Oscar, her boyfriend angrily threw a tray of silverware.
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