Pamela Anderson says Pam & Tommy series should have asked for her permission

Pamela Anderson is finally ready to tell her own story with her new Netflix documentary Pamela, A Love Story, and she’s not holding back when it comes to Hulu’s recent limited series Pam & Tommy – which was filmed without her involvement.

“It’s really giving me nightmares,” Anderson says in the documentary’s profile (now streaming on Netflix). “I didn’t sleep at all last night. I don’t feel like looking at it. I won’t look at it. I’ve never watched the tape – I won’t watch it. Who knows how they’ll portray it? “No one really knows what we went through back then. You should have needed my permission.”

Netflix

Pam & Tommy stars Lily James as Anderson and Sebastian Stan as Tommy Lee in a comedic take on how the tabloid couple’s ’90s home video was stolen from a safe by their electrician and sold online as a racy sextape, becoming the first viral video of all time has been . Both James and the producers reached out to Anderson during filming, but although they received neither an answer nor a blessing from her, the series went on because the producers acquired the rights to a 2014 article published by Rolling Stone detailing the true story revealed about how the band was stolen and released.

Anderson is now reclaiming her legacy with a new memoir, Love, Pamela (available now), as well as the Netflix documentary co-produced by her son, Brandon Thomas Lee. In the documentary, Anderson speaks candidly about the months leading up to Pam & Tommy’s release. “I texted Tommy the other day and said, ‘How do you feel about everything?'” she says in the film. “And he’s like, ‘Pamela, just don’t let it hurt you like the first time.’ To this day I don’t know who stole the tape. I don’t want to find out. There’s no point in finding out anything about it. The damage is done. Why would I want to go through it again?”

“Why are you mentioning something from 20 years ago that you know got someone?” Anderson’s younger son Dylan Jagger Lee says of Pam & Tommy. “The worst part of her life and turning it into a semi-comedy? Didn’t really make sense.”

The story goes on

The document also shows footage of Brandon calling Anderson the day after Pam & Tommy debuted. He reveals that he watched the first three episodes and was upset by how they portrayed Rand Gauthier (played by Seth Rogen), the man who stole the tape, in a sympathetic light. He also warned Dylan not to watch the series.

“Oh god, I’m shaking right now,” Anderson tells Brandon over the phone. “I’m just sorry you had to go through that. People think ‘poor Pamela,’ but you’re poor, Dylan, Dad, Grandma and Grandpa—yeah, that’s great conversation.”

“I put that out of my life – I had to in order to survive,” she says later in the documentary. “It was a survival mechanism and now that it’s all coming back up, I’m getting sick. My whole stomach feels like it’s been hit right now. I’m not feeling well right now.”

“It feels like the tape was stolen,” she adds. “Basically you are just a thing that belongs to the world, you belong to the world. Just ignore her, let it go.”