Dark Details About Tommy Lee
notorious musicians out there.
As the band's youngest member, his entire adult life has been shaped by the rock star
lifestyle, for better and for worse.
Here are some of the dark details from Tommy Lee's real-life story.
Tommy Lee's tape with Pamela Anderson is ridiculously famous, and the tale behind the tape is as
interesting as its contents.
In 1995, the couple fired several workers renovating their mansion in Malibu.
This did not sit well with one electrician, who was already so exhausted with the couple
that he was reportedly ready to walk away from the $20,000 he says they still owed him
for the unfinished work.
When the electrician returned to the house in an attempt to retrieve his tools, he found
himself facing a shotgun-wielding Lee ordering him to leave the property.
This was the final straw for the working man, who decided to exact revenge by stealing a
safe he knew Lee kept in the garage.
One successful heist later, the electrician discovered that the safe contained something
far more valuable than mere jewelry and family knickknacks: A 54-minute home video by the
most famous superstar couple of the time, featuring roughly eight minutes of extremely
personal one-on-one footage.
In an amusing twist, the electrician just so happened to be a veteran of the adult film
industry.
With the help of his contacts, the tape was replicated, and copies began being distributed
to the public, for a price.
Despite the panicked couple's best efforts to retrieve the tape, the video spread like
wildfire.
By 1997, it was such a cultural staple that Variety actually published a review.
In 2007, the MTV Video Music Awards featured an unexpected bonus performance when Tommy
Lee and Kid Rock engaged in some quick fisticuffs at the table of Sean "Diddy" Combs.
Since both men had been married to Pamela Anderson, the motives behind the animosity
seemed obvious, but Rock insists the real reason went a little bit deeper than that.
He says the fight was the culmination of a five-year stretch of personal attacks and
disrespectful actions that took place during Rock's divorce from Anderson.
Rock promised to retaliate for the long stretch of abuse, and he apparently wasn't playing:
reportedly, he had already attempted to track down the drummer and burst through his hotel
room door on the previous New Year's Eve, but got the room wrong and found himself facing
a terrified family instead.
As for Lee, he insists he had merely been socializing at the event when Rock, whom he
insists on calling "Kid Pebble," turned up, rejected a hug, and punched the drummer.
Lee insists he was fully intent on winning the ensuing battle, but security guards dragged
him out of the building.
To be fair, he did apologize for his role in the incident… to Alicia Keys, who was
performing at the time.
The death of a child is always a nightmare, but when that child dies at your house during
a kid's birthday party?
Well, that's even more disturbing.
This exact scenario played out at Tommy Lee's Malibu mansion in 2001, when a 4-year-old
boy attended the birthday celebrations of the drummer's eldest son, Brandon, and was
later found floating face-down, deceased, in the swimming pool.
According to reports, Lee made a 911 call where he admitted that the child had been
left alone and unsupervised for a brief period of time, and that the ensuing situation was
so chaotic that he didn't know what to do.
Though the boy's parents blamed the drummer for negligence and sued him for $10 million,
he was cleared of any responsibility.
The jury in the case found that the death was more the result of a tragic chain of events
in which the boy's nanny left the party early to attend a concert, while the babysitter
tasked with looking after him left him unattended.
In 1996, Tommy Lee grew angry at a cameraman outside the Viper Room nightclub in Hollywood
and threw the poor guy on the ground.
This already unwise move reportedly turned into an epic mess when it came out that the
cameraman was Jewish, and Lee had attacked him while wearing a visible swastika tattoo
in his arm.
Yes, a swastika tattoo.
Lee moved to have the tattoo covered, hoping to avoid it ever being seen by a jury.
He later said that the symbol was, quote, "a stupid tattoo obtained several years ago."
Lee had the tattoo removed and pleaded no contest to criminal charges of battery.
He was sentenced to two years of probation, anger management counseling, and a $17,500
restitution payment to the photographer.
MTV reports that Lee later settled a civil case with the cameraman, and even attempted
to make amends by shaking hands with his victim… though the cameraman's attorney immediately
stepped in to block the attempt.
In 1997, Tommy Lee and Nikki Sixx got a little too carried away during a concert in Greensboro
Coliseum, North Carolina… by which we mean they started harassing a black security guard
and trying to incite an ethnically motivated riot.
Reportedly, Sixx was the first to start attacking and throwing slurs at the guard, but Lee soon
joined in to pour a drink on the guard's head.
The poor man's extremely bad day at work further escalated when the band encouraged the 2,500
people in the crowd to attack him.
Fortunately, the situation didn't escalate into a full-blown riot, though a lawsuit does
mention that the crowd pelted the guard and his colleagues with plastic cups and that
he had to climb on the stage to escape the audience.
Sixx was arrested two years later when Motley Crue performed in North Carolina again, and
Lee promptly turned himself in as well.
The drummer was charged with assault and inciting a riot with ethnic animosity, but he was able
to avoid the racial aspects of the case by pleading no contest to simple assault, for
which he was sentenced to an 18-month probation.
The inevitable civil lawsuit by the guard was eventually settled.
The three-year marriage of Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson is one of the most colorful celebrity
relationships out there.
They got married in early 1995 after a whirlwind romance, but things took a turn for the worse
after the blissful honeymoon period.
Arguments escalated into violence, with Anderson describing incidents in which Lee attacked
her while she was holding their infant child.
Finally, one brawl inspired Anderson to call the police and file for divorce.
The drummer ended up pleading no contest to a felony count of injury to a spouse.
He served four months of a six-month sentence and was ordered to seek anger management counseling,
perform community service, and donate $5,000 to a women's shelter.
He also had to avoid alcohol and drugs and stay at least 100 yards away from Anderson.
However, in 2000 the musician violated his probation and spent a further five days in
jail as a result.
Motley Crue's members have obviously been known to indulge in substance abuse, but their
favorite vices all vary.
For his part, Lee insists he's not the "deviant alcohol abuser" people have called him, but
some of the people closest to him seem to disagree.
His son Brandon has reportedly called him an alcoholic, and that's not even the worst
thing his loved ones have said about the subject.
Ex-wife Pamela Anderson called Lee out on his alcoholism in 2018 by publishing a post
titled "Alcoholism is the Devil" on her website.
Anderson says the text is the first time she publicly discusses Lee's troubles with alcohol,
and it paints a fairly hopeless picture of the drummer and his drinking habit.
Though she does point out that Lee is a talented individual, she also calls the drummer a textbook,
quote, "narcissist/sociopath."
"Two new babies.
Tommy comes third now, instead of first.
I'm a new father.
I don't know how to deal with that."
Still, perhaps the harshest words in her writing are these:
"Nobody understands the lifetime of disappointment this man has brought our family.
Consistently the center of sadness, drama and confusion.
Jealous of his sons' talent and beauty from the day they were born.
He is sick."
A generous way to describe Tommy Lee's relationship with his family would be to say it's dysfunctional.
In 2018, his oldest son straight up punched him out.
The details are just as hazy as you'd expect from a fistfight involving a Motley Crue member,
but reportedly, it's agreed by both Lee and his fiancee that Lee's son Brandon, who was
living with his father at the time, stormed their bedroom and knocked Tommy out cold after
a brief argument.
According to Brandon, the situation was triggered when his father posted unpleasant comments
about his mother on social media.
The son also insinuates that his father's excessive alcohol use was a factor in the
fight, and the reason he was living part-time in the premises was to help Lee with his substance
abuse troubles and organize an intervention.
Regardless of the intentions, Tommy Lee was adamant on making his son pay for the punch
and wanted to press charges for what must have been an uncomfortably long time… before
finally deciding to drop it.
In early 2019, Motley Crue's star was revitalized thanks to the film adaptation of their infamous
autobiography The Dirt.
All the attention has also warranted a second glance at the book's many sordid stories,
one of which has raised some serious questions.
In the book, bassist Nikki Sixx appears to confess to a straight-up assault he and Tommy
Lee once committed at a party.
According to the book, Sixx approached Lee at the party and explained to the drummer
that he was in the middle of an intimate moment in a nearby closet, with a woman waiting for
his return.
The men agreed that Lee would sneak in the closet with Sixx so they could switch places
without telling the woman.
Without her consent, Lee subbed in to have sex with the woman while Sixx stood behind
him, playing along.
As Sixx tells it, this woman later called him to tell him that she had been assaulted
by a stranger while trying to hitchhike home from the party.
When Sixx heard this, he says, it occurred to him that for all intents and purposes,
he and Lee had assaulted her too.
Unsurprisingly, Sixx backtracked on the disgusting story once it began getting some attention,
and now says he doesn't remember these events, and that he may have completely made up the
story as a part of his drug-addled interviews for the book.
Lee, on the other hand, appears to have stayed very quiet about the incident entirely.
Tommy Lee is known for the extravagant drum solos he often performs while strapped in
complex mechanical contraptions.
One of his most famous tricks is the drum roller coaster, which comes in a couple of
flavors: a circular coaster that has Lee's drum platform circle 360 degrees, and a large
"Cruecify'" rig that carries him high above the audience.
Lee is fiercely protective of his stunts, to the point where he publicly called out
rapper Travis Scott for using similar rigs on his tour in 2018, even threatening legal
action over Twitter.
However, Scott's legal team quickly pointed out that Lee didn't invent the concept of
concert roller coasters, and the actual creator of the rigs in question had granted Scott
full permission to use them.
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