Tabloid: The Pam & Tommy Sex Tape Podcast Premieres

In the quantum, upside-down, inside-out world of pop celebrity, a sex tape widely distributed on social media offers newfound fame to a relative unknown (Kim Kardashian) and turbo boosts the already famous (Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee).

New York Magazine has produced and just released Tabloid: The Pam & Tommy Sex Tape via Luminary, a subscription podcast network. Experienced writer and journalist Lux Alptraum hosts the second season of the popular podcast series, which will be available on the Luminary app or on the Luminary channel on Apple Podcasts.

Tabloid investigates the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape – looking back at what we got wrong about the tape, what we got wrong about Pam and Tommy generally, and more broadly, how the tape marked the birth of celebrity culture as we know it today.

Despite the fact that it’s taken on a mythological place in our culture for being one of the first celebrity sex tapes, a lot of people don’t know the true story of how the sex tape got out. It was stolen, not leaked, and is more a portrait of two people in love than anything else.

Its mass appeal was due largely to the fact that it offered a sense of realness and intimacy that you only get from violating people’s privacy, and its legacy is that it both inspired the reality TV machine that dominates entertainment today, and created a culture online that normalized violation.

But the most enlightening part of Tabloid is its cultural analysis. The series is designed to look back at scandals we never took seriously enough. And this is definitely one. The tape changed our culture, setting new legal standards for privacy. It popularized a style for unfiltered, raw honesty which people online still imitate every day. And it created an appetite for exposure which has left us all vulnerable.

“Tabloid: The Pam & Tommy Sex Tape is our feminist take on celebrity sex tapes,” said host Lux Alptraum. “On one hand, we wanted to find out how a video of the sexiest couple of the era ended up in the bedrooms of thousands of teenage boys. On the other hand, we wanted to take a sharp, analytical approach to the scandalized tone of celebrity gossip mags and reframe them with real-world economics and real people’s issues. We track its origins as a single VHS tape locked in a safe to an international phenomenon that wound up accelerating so many trends we still live with today.”

Guests on Tabloid: The Pam & Tommy Sex Tape include Ray Manzella, Pamela Anderson’s former manager; Guerin Swing, a close personal friend of Tommy Lee’s; Amanda Chicago Lewis, the reporter who broke the story of how the tape got stolen; Cort St. George, a man who worked at the internet porn company that ended up with the tape; Kevin Blatt, celebrity sex tape broker; Vanessa Diaz, a People Magazine reporter from the early aughts; Anna Holmes, founder of Jezebel; and Sinnamon Love, an internet porn pioneer.

Each season of Tabloid, a joint production between Luminary and New York Magazine, digs into a story from the gossip rags of the past that looks totally different seen in today’s light. The first season of TABLOID was The Making Of Ivanka Trump, hosted by Vanessa Grigoriadis.

New episodes of the Tabloid: The Pam & Tommy Sex Tape podcast will be available each Monday through August 9. You can listen to the show on the Luminary app or on the Luminary channel on Apple Podcasts.

The first episode of Tabloid: The Pam and Tommy Sex Tape is available free to the public here.