It Was Like Being Raped Again
The pain we made viral
I sit here today writing about something that viscerally revolts me.
In 1996, an intimate video of Pamela Anderson was stolen.
We laughed. In 2024, she finally tells us what it really felt like, and her words hit like a punch to the gut: it was like reliving the rape she endured at 12 years old.
Stop for a second and let that sink in.
While we were making jokes on talk shows, she was reliving rape trauma. While we were sharing the video as entertainment, she was being violated again — this time, by millions of people.
We were accomplices.
I was an accomplice.
You were an accomplice.
Every time someone laughed, shared, or commented on that video, they participated in an act of violence.
There’s no sugarcoating it. There’s no escaping this uncomfortable truth.
“It was hard to walk into an interview with Letterman when all they wanted to talk about was my breasts,” she says. Think about this.
A woman had just had her intimacy stolen and exposed to the world, and what did we do?
Made jokes about her breasts.
