What resulted is a video that many outlets report earned US$77 million in just one year, although Anderson says she hasn’t seen any of the proceeds.

And that’s not her only heartache. In her latest projects, Anderson, 55, also shares the devastation of childhood sexual abuse and a fruitless quest for love.

“I didn’t sleep last night at all,” she says. “I have no desire to watch it. Not going to watch it. Never watched the tape. I’m not going to watch this.”

She says she texted Lee about the miniseries, and he advised her: “Pamela, just don’t let it hurt you as much as it did the first time.”

“I blocked that out of my life,” she says. “It was a survival mechanism, and now that it’s all coming up again, I feel sick. Basically, you are just a thing owned by the world, like you belong to the world.”

The tape was inside a safe stolen by disgruntled electrician Rand Gauthier, who’d been working on the couple’s home in Malibu, California, in the United States.

Anderson says she and Lee first received a tape in the mail of them having sex. She says that later they were offered US$5 million for the tape by Bob Guccione, the founder of adult magazine Penthouse. The couple declined the offer, but the tape was released publicly in 1996.

Anderson and Lee attempted to sue the distributor, and she was questioned by lawyers in October 1997 while pregnant with her son Dylan, now 25.

Concerned over how continuing the lawsuit stress would affect her pregnancy (she previously miscarried), the pair signed over rights of the tape to online pornography distributor Internet Entertainment Group in November 1997.

“After that, it just felt like that solidified the cartoon image,” she says. “You become a caricature. I think that was the deterioration of whatever image I had.”

One evening, “confused, sad, tired, not in my right mind”, Anderson climbed into the bathtub and washed down a bottle of ibuprofen with vodka. She ended up vomiting.

The previous day, Lee had crashed his car into a trailer on the [Baywatch] set, she writes, “punched the cabinets out in the make-up room, and thrown me into his car, driving off the set, tyres spinning”.

He left her at their condominium, where she “cried all night”.

“I couldn’t take it any more, and I didn’t know what to do. It was a depth of despair I’d never felt – and I’d been through a lot.”

Parenthood proved stressful for Lee, Anderson writes. His desire to be a priority for his wife erupted in a physical altercation one evening. When Anderson told Lee, “You have to grow up, Tommy. It’s not just about you any more,” she writes, “he lost it.”

“His eyes went black as he grabbed the phone away from me, twisting my arm as I was holding Dylan [then seven weeks old] in the other. My nail tore off, blood dripping down my arm.

“The kids were so frightened. I picked up Brandon [their older son, 18 months older than Dylan], too, but he slid frantically down my leg and held on to it tight, hyperventilating. Tommy ripped Brandon off me and threw me and Dylan into the wall.”

Anderson called the police, and Lee was arrested and later sentenced to six months in prison for spousal abuse.

“The divorce from Tommy was the hardest, lowest, most difficult point of my life,” Anderson writes. “We were both devastated, but I had to protect my babies.”

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Although Anderson says the two had sex after Lee’s release, their reunion didn’t last because “neither of us could forgive the other, deep down. We just weren’t equipped to get through it all.”

In Pamela, a Love Story, Anderson estimates that she was sexually abused by a babysitter for three to four years as a young child. “I tried to kill her,” she says. “I tried to stab her in the heart with a candy cane pen.” The babysitter later died in a car accident.

Aged 12, Anderson says, she was raped by a 25-year-old, and that she blamed herself for the assault. “I was in shock … falling apart, molecules, dust, liquid … My life evaporating,” she writes in her memoir.

“I thought I was bad, and I was ashamed. It hurt me a lot, keeping this secret.”

Even at her first Playboy shoot, in September 1989, Anderson remembers feeling ill after a make-up artist touched her breast.

“I started to feel nauseous, faint, I had to stop,” she writes. “I ran to the bathroom and got sick. My make-up was ruined. I couldn’t believe a woman had touched me there, I just couldn’t.”

But, Anderson writes, posing for the magazine was “empowering”.

“It helped me in ways I could never articulate – I took my power back – I had to – it was a chance to realise a new life, a new adventure.”

In a recently published cover story for American newspaper Variety, Anderson denied being a “victim” or “damsel in distress”.

“I’ve made my choices in my life,” she said. “Some obviously were made for me, but I’ve always been able to find myself again. And it’s created a strong person and a strong parent.”