Fact-Checking Pam & Tommy: Do Tommy Lee & Rand Gauthier Really Meet Face-to-Face?

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Hulu’s limited series Pam & Tommy tells the real-life story of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape being stolen by electrician Rand Gauthier and circulated via the internet in the late ’90s — but not every scene the series includes actually happens. In episode 7, “Destroyer of Worlds,” airing this week, Seth Rogen’s Rand Gauthier contacts Sebastian Stan’s Tommy Lee for a meet-up to which he asks the Mötley Crüe drummer to bring $26,938 — what he’s owed for his unpaid labor doing construction on Lee’s home plus the tools that Lee later took from him. And while we’ve established that Anderson and Lee did have a sense of Gauthier’s involvement in real life, were they so closely in contact that a meet-up like this could have occurred? Here’s what we could find out in our Pam & Tommy fact-check.

Related story Fact-Checking Pam & Tommy: Do They Really Figure Out Rand Stole the Tape?

While a lot of episode 7 stays true to what we know happened to Rand Gauthier in the year following his decision to steal Anderson and Lee’s sex tape from their home, there’s no evidence that he ever personally contacted Lee again in an attempt to be repaid. In 2014, Gauthier went public with his full story for the first time, talking to Amanda Chicago Lewis for Rolling Stone, and he described himself as being in dire straits to repay Louis Peraino the loan he’d given Gauthier and Milton Ingley for their distribution of the sex tape.

Here’s how Gauthier told the story to Lewis — it’s a scene you’ll recognize right away from Pam & Tommy‘s episode 7: “One night, Gauthier says, Peraino had him over for dinner. Over linguine and oysters, he snuck teaspoons of sherry into Gauthier’s merlot when he thought he wasn’t looking. Then, after dinner, he brought out Bing cherries soaked in Everclear. Before long, Gauthier was wasted, and Peraino was firing question after question at him.”

“Fortunately for Gauthier, he convinced Peraino he’d done no wrong,” Lewis continues — which is also how it plays out on the Hulu show, as is this next bit: “Unfortunately for Gauthier, Peraino decided that he needed to work to pay back the money that Ingley owed him. Specifically, by helping him send a message to some of the other people who owed him money. Soon, Gauthier says, he was working collections for the mob to pay off his own debt.”

In Pam & Tommy, we see Rogen’s Rand reluctantly being drawn into his work for the mob, but not until after he tries to get his debt repaid another way: by going directly to Lee and asking him for the money that he’s owed. On the show, Tommy brings the money — but then burns it in front of him, and Rand returns to working for the mob.

In real life, there’s no evidence that Gauthier ever tried to come face-to-face with Lee again after stealing from him, and Lewis instead describes how Gauthier became adept at the violence required for his mob work.

“I came up with my own idea,” Gauthier says. He would grow a beard, throw on a baseball cap and sunglasses, and approach the indebted individual, holding what appeared to be a cup of coffee,” Lewis writes. “But it wasn’t coffee; it was ammonia. Suddenly, Gauthier would throw the chemical in his victim’s face, whip out the metal handle from a mop wringer, break the guy’s collarbone, walk a few blocks, jump in his plateless Dodge van and disappear.”

New episodes of Pam & Tommy are released on Hulu every Wednesday at 3 a.m. ET. 

How to watch Pam & Tommy for free

You can watch Pam & Tommy on Hulu for free by subscribing to either the ad-supported plan or the no-ads plan. With both plans, you can watch Hulu original and exclusive content any time you want for the first 30 days of your plan. After that, the price points will kick in. Hulu’s ad-support subscription means that you’ll watch your favorite shows and movies with some advertising interruptions from time to time. After your 30-day free trial, the $6.99/month (or $69.99/year) begins.

But let’s say you’re not particularly keen on having ads interrupt your viewing time. Hulu’s no-ad plan is just a smidge more expensive. After your 30-day free trial, the no-ad subscription plan will kick in at $12.99/month. There is no annual option for this plan. Either way, you’ll get to watch Pam & Tommy for free for the first 30 days of subscription. And you can cancel at anytime.

Before you go, click here to see the best movie & TV transformations into well-known women.