Lorde’s highly anticipated fourth album, Virgin, is finally here to soundtrack our summer. Along with praise from critics and longtime fans, the Grammy winner’s latest record has faced some backlash for one of the references she laced into the project.
On the sixth track, “Current Affairs,” Lorde sings about intimate, private moments being affected by public perception. In the song’s second verse, she references Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape that was wrongfully distributed against their wishes in the ‘90s as she muses, “All alone in my room / Watching the tape of their honeymoon / On the boat, it was pure and true / Then the film came out.”
She previously teased the reference during her Rolling Stone cover story interview in May, when she revealed she had watched the infamous video after her second round of psychedelic therapy.
“I found it to be so beautiful. And maybe it’s fucked up that I watched it, but I saw two people that were so in love with each other, and there was this purity,” Lorde explained. “They were jumping off this big boat...They were like children. They were so free. And I just was like, ‘Whoa. Being this free comes with danger.’”
When the interview initially dropped, she was met with criticism from fans online, as they found she was “glorifying” the revenge porn scandal. In a subreddit, one wrote, “This seems like such an odd [thing] to fixate on lmao wtf is happening here.”
Another person on social media pointed out that The Last Showgirl has continously expressed how hurt she felt by her private video leaking in the ‘90s, writing, “Pamela has spoken out so many times about how violated she felt and still feels about it but I guess that doesn’t matter because it’s beautiful to lorde..?”
In 1995, a 54-minute home video from Tommy and Pam’s honeymoon—which contained 8 minutes of them having sex—was stolen from their home in Malibu. A contractor who was reportedly owed $20,000 after being fired from renovating the former couple’s home released the video without their consent as an act of revenge.
In her 2023 documentary, Pamela, A Love Story, the actor opened up about the incident after nearly three decades. “If anyone watches it, if anyone buys it, if anyone sells it, it's just pathetic. You can’t put a monetary number on the amount of pain and suffering it caused,” she said.
Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson have yet to respond to Lorde’s references, if at all.
