Pamela Anderson Is Finally Vindicated – And We Should Be Embarrassed It Took This Long

It's too late to apologize to bonafide '90s icon Pamela Anderson, the woman we refused to acknowledge as a serious model, actor, and deeply layered human being with thoughts, feelings, and convictions... until now.

It's no secret that Anderson's career has been marred by controversy — namely her debut in the world's first stolen and leaked viral sex tape scandal with then-husband Tommy Lee. Sadly, instead of rallying around and supporting her amid the theft and subsequent serious invasion of privacy, society as a whole opted to vilify and ridicule her (Cue the subpar jokes and lackluster late-night punchlines usually delivered by the giant, flapping mouths of middle-aged men). 

But now, after nearly three decades, and following the joint release of Pamela Anderson's memoir "Love, Pamela," and her Netflix documentary, "Pamela, A Love Story," Anderson has taken her power back and vindicated herself once and for all, and quite frankly, we should be embarrassed it took so long.

In 1995, a private home video capturing intimate moments between Pamela Anderson and her then-husband Tommy Lee was stolen from a locked safe located inside their marital home and later sold around the world without their permission. Yet, we had the audacity to shame her for it.

"It felt like a rape," Anderson recalled about the distribution of the stolen tape in Netflix's "Pamela, A Love Story." But instead of holding the guilty parties accountable, the masses pointed their pitchforks straight at Anderson. "The lawyers basically said, 'You're in Playboy, you have no right to privacy,'" Anderson recounted about Judge Stephen W. Wilson's decision to dismiss the suit. Meanwhile, an attorney for Penthouse magazine chalked the decision up to a careless mistake on Anderson and Lee's part. "This decision teaches a vital lesson to those who video themselves having sex... and take insufficient care with respect to the tapes," he quipped in a statement, while conveniently forgetting to admonish the parties actually responsible for stealing the tapes and leaking them for all the world to see.

Listen up, people: victim blaming isn't cool now, and it wasn't cool in the '90s, either. 

Pamela Anderson walked so Tommy Lee, Kim Kardashian, and Paris Hilton others could run... and no one ever even acknowledged her for it.

It's no secret that following the distribution of her sex tape, Anderson's career evaporated into thin air. "After that, it just felt like that solidified the cartoon image. You become a caricature. I think that was the deterioration of whatever image I had," she lamented in "Pamela, A Love Story" about being shamed and essentially put in career timeout over the scandal. In contrast, however, Tommy Lee's fame and notoriety only soared. A rock star caught with his pants down during an intimate moment with his Playmate wife? Attaboy! Oh, the hypocrisy.

Alas, hindsight is 20/20. These days, the public no longer feigns shock and outrage over a female celebrity embroiled in a sex tape scandal. Instead, they relish it. Just ask reality stars Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, who not only survived but thrived once their sex tapes surfaced. By the time Kardashian and Hilton's sex tapes were available to the masses, Anderson had already unwittingly provided them with a perfect case study — Sex Tape Scandal 101, if you will — complete with all the do's and don'ts of navigating degrading exposure in the public eye. Hilton and Kardashian's fame rose to new heights once their intimate moments hit the market, and their saucy scandals became ancient history in the context of their careers. Anderson sadly never saw the same trajectory.

After nearly three decades of exploitation and public humiliation on a global scale, complete with cringey late-night talk show clips that live rent-free in our heads (cough, cough, Jay Leno), Pamela Anderson has taken the reigns back and vindicated herself of the unwarranted judgment and ridicule once and for all — and, finally, the world is willing to receive it. 

In her new, older, wiser era, Anderson is embracing her imperfect hero's journey. "I'm not a victim," she declared in her hit Netflix doc. "I put myself in crazy situations and survived them." Through years of survival, Anderson's shine can no longer be ignored. Between her 2022 Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in "Chicago," her latest endeavor with Netflix, and her new candid newsletters to fans, Anderson is reclaiming the space we shut her out from for so long. Perhaps she says it best when she posed the question in her streaming doc, "Why can't we be the heroes of our own life story?" 

While it's glaringly apparent that Anderson's happiness does not hinge on our acceptance and applause, we would be absolutely remiss not to apologize for all we put her through. We are so sorry, Anderson. It should have never taken us this long.