By Amanda Chicago Lewis. And being held at gunpoint by a megalomaniacal rock star? Not when the rock star has spent the past three months, the entire spring of , living a fantasy life right in front of you, sipping martinis and passing a joint around at 11a.
Lee made Gauthier feel small, and Gauthier had spent his entire life feeling small. Here was a guy who, on his 18th birthday, lost his virginity to a Vegas hooker. Here was an L. Most people dismiss him as a doofus, a conspiracy theorist who likes fast, powerful cars and dating porn stars. He even did some scenes himself, and spent his time hanging around an adult-film studio, building sets and chatting up starlets.
A studio troll, they called him. It screwed with my head. Now he wanted revenge. He wanted the drummer to feel vulnerable, to realize that he was just a human being, not an invincible rock god, even if he had sold 20 million records by the age of He had no idea that the safe also contained a homemade tape that would promise him dazzling riches and then ruin his life. But Lee might not see it that way. Two years ago, Gauthier received a Facebook message from a page bearing the name Tommy Lee.
Starting in the spring of , as information trickled out about what was on the tape, everyone wanted to see it, whether to gawk at the home life of two superstars or condemn the empty-headed, sex-addicted narcissists who presumably leaked it themselves. The couple already had a reputation for carnal and pharmaceutical indulgence, but peeping on their love play offered an entirely new level of dirty, thrilling violation, as we leap-frogged PR flacks, centerfold photographers and even the paparazzi to land squarely in the most private of worlds.
But what the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex tape taught us is that an unassuming individual could acquire a piece of content, offer it up to the Internet and watch it ricochet around the planet. How, exactly, this footage traveled from a locked safe to screens and store shelves worldwide warns of everything that was coming in the next two decades, everything that would shift in technology and culture and celebrity. So how did the person who stole the safe manage to evade the police, the lawyers, the media and the biker gangs, but never see a cent?
