Famously outspoken, she has compared Anderson and Lee to the OJ case: “People who would attack in an unprovoked way, or have problems with anger, sometimes go on to attack their wives or children. You can hear her, too, discussing the marriage, on an old Internet audio recording: “Tommy and I are really lucky, because we really have a lot of life, we have a lot of fun, we have our own thing kind of going on … we’re having a baby, you know, so it’s all good and normal, like a normal married couple … he’s a person that’s really down to earth, and really refreshing and wonderful.” Lee sold pictures of their wedding to the National Enquirer for $100,000, two reporters on the paper claimed in a recent book.

She promised to be “vigorously co-operative” in his prosecution.There are mutterings on a Motley Crue Web site that Pamela is trying to clean up her act, divorcing Tommy or even casting herself as an abuse victim, before her new TV series starts. It will be a struggle: the Internet Entertainment Group, which originally put the honeymoon tape on the Web, now has a purported sex tape of Anderson and former beau Bret Michaels. So far, it has been stopped from using it.Anderson is billed as a Queen of the Internet (Tommy Lee, meanwhile, is an avid Internet user who claims to answer fan e-mail in person) A Web search turns up a myriad of Anderson sites. Some promise full coverage of the Anderson-Lee divorce, one compares the amount of silicone in her breasts to the amount in the earth’s crust Others are links to sex sites. Instead Lee was ordered to attend “anger management” counselling, and was put on 24 months’ probation.On 26 February this year, police were called to the Lees’ Malibu home after she dialled 911 and accused her husband of assault. She had a broken fingernail, some bleeding, and redness on her lower back, according to police, who promptly arrested him. Initially, Anderson called the incident “a private matter”, but then she related how he allegedly kicked and attacked her on three occasions in front of Brandon, 20 months, and as she held Dylan Jagger, their two-month-old second son.

Having exposed her all, she has left little for historians to wonder at. She didn’t flirt with Presidents, she had sex with rockers.Anderson married Tommy Lee on the beach in Cancun, Mexico, four days after they met The happy couple wore swimsuits. The tabloids flew into a frenzy, and Anderson’s mother, Carol, refused to speak to Pamela for a week when she heard the news.Tommy Lee was a self-confessed “rock pig”, formerly married for eight years to Melrose Place star Heather Locklear. A tabloid journalist in Los Angeles puts it more brutally: “She was at her best on Baywatch. Good body and a good-looking face: perfect for bum-and-tit roles, but she couldn’t act.” Anderson left Baywatch and tried to make it in the movies. Barb Wire, her first major feature, was a soft-porn sci-fi action flick so bad it wasn’t even funny.My Korean-American hairdresser says Pamela is “real”, which is curious – everyone else says she’s plastic. A reviewer for Entertainment Weekly pounced on Barb Wire, as did almost everyone else: “Now we’re seeing her under the hot voyeuristic glare of the movie camera, it’s more apparent than ever that Pamela Anderson Lee is a constructed goddess, a creation of synthetic hair, synthetic attitude, synthetic God-knows-what.”Stories about Pamela Anderson often allude to Dorothy Stratten, the 1980 Playmate brutally murdered by her obsessive husband, but there is not the same tragic passion about her Anderson faces a different kind of mortality.

Its new headline show, Ally McBeal, starring a short-skirted Boston lawyer, has swapped in-your-face cleavage shots for a new brand of hip glibness “Anderson seems very Eighties to me. It just doesn’t sell any more,” says feminist cultural critic Lesley Haywood. Her next project is another television series called VIP, which launches in the autumn. But Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network, which used Baywatch and other series such as Melrose Place and Studs to carve out its niche with twentysomethings, has begun to change its style.