“Hearing someone recount your life to you can make you feel sick, while telling your own story, in your own words, can feel like a matter of survival,” Pamela Anderson stated in an Instagram post, on Tuesday.
Pamela Anderson is certainly no stranger to being made absent from her own narrative. The actress, who has the record for the most Playboy covers in history, is often only talked about in regards to the men in her life, or else the painfully publicized stolen home video which is still making headlines, almost thirty years later. But, how much of the “Pamela Anderson story” has come from the mouth of Pamela Anderson?
Anderson has never watched the stolen tape, which was taken from a safe in her garage and sold to the tabloids. She’s never watched “Pam and Tommy”, the unauthorized Hulu miniseries which followed her relationship to Motley Crue drummer, Tommy Lee, and the trial that followed the burglary. Anderson hasn’t even read the letter written to her by Lily James, the actress who portrayed in her in the series, resulting in an Emmy nomination for Best Actress.
“I blocked that stolen tape out of my life in order to survive and now that it’s all coming up again, I feel sick. I want to take control the narrative for the first time,” she stated. “Why can’t we be the heroes of our own life story?”
In her own life story, Anderson is a mother, actress, and activist. Her campaign work with PETA is well-documented. She’s an outspoken supporter of France’s yellow vest movement. She’s taken multiple trips to the Kremlin to speak out against seal-hunting. She’s personal friends with WikiLeak’s Julian Assange. If any of this comes as a shock, Anderson is disappointed, but not surprised.
“I’ve been doing this since I f***ing came to LA,” she said, in an interview to W magazine. “I’m an activist, and I’m not doing it for myself. I’m doing it for animals and people who are vulnerable and can’t speak for themselves. It was never my intention to get any credit for any of it, and people are just noticing.”
But, Anderson’s most cherished role in life is as a mother to her two sons with Tommy Lee, Brandon and Dylan.
“Brandon’s an actor and Dylan’s a musician. […] They’re both very smart boys and both got into incredible universities. They’re both big achievers,” she said. “We just wanted to make sure they knew that they could do things other than what we were doing…”
She and her sons are often seen sitting front row at fashion shows together, but even while enjoying haute couture, Anderson leans on her ethics, stating, “Dolce & Gabbana are really cool, but I don’t like that they have fur. But they’re funny and really sweet, and very generous and really good to my boys.”
Anderson will be further explaining her life, in her own words, in an upcoming memoir and documentary.
Sources:
https://www.wmagazine.com/story/pamela-anderson-activism-feminism-interview
https://comicbook.com/movies/news/pam-tommy-pamela-anderson-letter-lily-james/
https://ew.com/tv/pamela-anderson-tommy-lee-sex-tape-never-watched/
https://ew.com/tv/pamela-anderson-will-never-watch-pam-and-tommy/
deadline.com/video/pamela-a-love-story-trailer-pamela-anderson-sex-tape-scandal-netflix-documentary/
