In 1995, a private sex tape was stolen from a safe belonging to Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and his then wife, actress Pamela Anderson; it quickly went global. Rolling Stone reporter Amanda Chicago Lewis now shares the dirty details of how the superstar couple's most intimate moments came to be seen around the world; an excerpt follows:

By the time Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson abruptly fired the handful of people renovating their Malibu mansion, refusing to pay for work they said was shoddily done, electrician Rand Gauthier was so sick of the celebrity couple's demands that he was ready to simply write off the $20,000 he says they owed him. But when he and a general contractor came back to the couple's mansion on Mulholland Highway to get their tools and Tommy Lee pointed a shotgun at them, saying, "Get the fuck off my property," Gauthier got seriously pissed.

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 32. So Gauthier decided to steal the giant safe he knew was tucked in the garage, the one with all of Lee's guns and Anderson's jewelry, and have a laugh at their expense.

He had no idea that the safe also contained a homemade tape that would promise him dazzling riches and then ruin his life. And instead of taking Lee down a notch, he would help cement the musician's legacy, letting the world know he had one of the biggest dicks in rock & roll. 

"I made his career, is what happened," says Gauthier, now a foggy 57-year-old who still works as an electrician and grows marijuana in his garage outside Santa Rosa, California.

The tape took two years to go from bootleg to viral, and when it did it made an estimated $77 million in less than 12 months – and that's just on legitimate sales. 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? This is the story of a man who staked his livelihood on a video in the hopes that it would save him. Instead he watched his life fall apart as his greed destroyed nearly every shred of the happiness he'd carved out for his adult self.

Gauthier says he spent the entire summer of 1995 preparing for the heist, driving over to the Lees' house several nights a week to sit and stare, waiting outside until three or four in the morning. Plotting. Stewing. "I took my time," Gauthier recalls. "I cased the joint."

His plan was to throw a white Tibetan yak fur rug over his back and crawl to the garage on his hands and knees in the middle of the night, so the security cameras, which Gauthier himself had installed, would seem to show a dog like the one the couple had. Lee and Anderson lived in a three-story Spanish-style house, with a garage that had been converted into a recording studio on the bottom floor.

Read the entire article at this location.

(photo courtesy of S. Granitz)