Most Recent Celebrity Sex Tapes

Most Recent Celebrity Sex Tapes
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3. Pamela Anderson and Bret Michaels (1998)

1. Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee (1995)

Paul Schrodt
Paul Schrodt is a freelance writer and editor who also contributes to Esquire, GQ, Money, The Wall Street Journal, and more.

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A connoisseur assesses the salacious genre.
I've watched a lot of celebrity sex tapes. Dozens of them. Rarely are they titillating—but more interesting is how much they do or don't offer a glimpse into the private lives of those involved. They leave you wondering: Are they being themselves? Are they acting? Are they acting well ? Why did they choose the kitchen? When you're filming your sexual activities, self-presentation is paramount.
After watching a few of these, you can easily spot the frauds, whose construction is manipulated down to the last frame (see: Kim Kardashian, who now has the best-selling sex tape of all time ). As in Kardashian's case, a sex tape can skyrocket someone to fame (or at least infamy); on the other hand, a sex tape can ultimately bring ruin to an independent media company (*cough*Hulk Hogan*cough*).
Considering this is pornographic genre of great cultural interest, I've ranked 11 pivotal celebrity sex tapes here from best to worst—as measured purely by their cinematic qualities.
Note: Esquire does not endorse theft or unpermitted distribution of copyrighted material, but these have all been widely circulated, commented upon, and in some cases publicly approved and/or mocked by the participants.
This is one of the earliest and most notorious celebrity sex tapes, having nearly ruined Lowe's career. Watching it is a dull and queasy task. It's filmed from an unlevel tripod in yellowy light (gotta remember that white balance) and filled with white noise and blurry group sex whose indistinctness only leads you to imagine the worst. Alas, the '80s were not as glamorous as previously reported.
No one asked Screech for a sex tape. But Screech felt like unleashing one upon the world, and the result is even more nausea-inducing than one might expect. Diamond films two women from central porn casting, asking them, "Do you want to see the monster?" He later admitted that he used a " stunt wang ." Sounds about right.
Durst keeps the camera on the woman (somewhat understandably), not allowing us to take in the wider mise-en-scène and forcing us to identify him by his sleeve tats, before an abrupt mid-video pan to his face in closeup. This is just sloppy filmmaking, especially from a veteran music video director .
There are about as many Paris Hilton sex tapes as entries in the Hunger Games franchise. None of them is pleasant. The most famous, One Night in Paris, is a textbook example of everything you shouldn't do with your home porno. It's introduced by sleaze Rick Salomon himself, who thinks more highly of his skills than he should (his creepy catchphrase: She likes it...). Hilton, meanwhile, is so bored out of her mind that at one point she stops to answer her phone. There's no fun in watching them debate where to station the camera on a table. (Tip: Handheld is almost always better than stationary photography, especially webcams, which feel distant and clinical.) And the video makes a compelling case for never using the night vision setting to film your own sex, thereby giving it the dreaded Blair Witch/Zero Dark Thirty effect. At one point Salomon, chewing gum and staring at a monitor displaying his own cock, comments, "It looks like we're having a good time." No, it doesn't, Rick. It really doesn't.
It's hard to feel good about Farrah Superstar: Backdoor Teen Mom . She was a former teen mom, now a regular mom craving publicity. He—he being famed porn star James Deen—has been accused of rape and sexual assault by multiple women. Abraham claimed the tape was a leak. Turns out she made $1.5 million for selling it to Vivid Entertainment. But, technically speaking, this production could have been worse. It was even good enough to spawn a sequel, Farrah 2: Backdoor and More . So there's that.
Befitting its star, this is just out-and-out weird. Simmons enters to Foreigner's " I Want to Know What Love Is " as a candle flickers in the background. He wears only a t-shirt (never a good look for a guy), and the woman seems game for anything but kissing him. The faraway stationary black-and-white photography works, for once, lending a surreal vibe to the proceedings.
It's rigorously controlled, with annoying soundtrack cues, though that should surprise no one who has followed Kardashian's career. In many ways this is the earliest glimpse into her ability to exploit her own bodily gifts for monolithic public attention. She shows little interest in the sex, but defends the naturalness of her breasts to the camera and insists that Ray J record her "bling" all the way down to her feet. She shows the slightest bit of humanity when Ray J shoots her unpacking, but it's quickly replaced by a smile. Kardashian is a pro.
Hogan's tape appears to be recorded by a security camera like some kind of voyeuristic Steven Soderbergh experiment. You can't see much, but the surprisingly clear audio and subtitles suggest a gentlemanly encounter, ended by Hogan giving the woman a goodnight kiss and telling her, "You're awesome."
It doesn't hold a candle to her magnum opus with Tommy, but Pam as always is a master of the costume. Here she's wearing knee-high boots in a Stevie-Nicks-sex-goddess look. You nearly forget Bret Michaels is in the room.
Farrell lays on the charm thick, which might be annoying if he didn't do it so well. He improvises increasingly inventive compliments for model Nicole Narain in his Irish lilt: "If a fucking camera could blush, this thing would be fucking red." "I didn't know they made bastards as sexy as you." And best of all: "Breakfast, lunch, and dinner right here." He could've turned on a couple more lights, and he's probably drunk, but who wouldn't be? Bonus points for self-deprecating jokes about his crummy photography and pubic hair.
This is the ur-celebrity sex tape, what you might call the Citizen Kane of famous people screwing, which ushered in the form's modern era. There's little you can say about this video that hasn't already been said. So I'll say this: It's sweet. You actually feel badly that the marriage didn't work out. Pam and Tommy were clearly in love during their honeymoon. They make the most of their locations—in front of a mansion, driving in a car, on a yacht, swimming in a lake—as well as the now-nostalgic analog video camera, including an artful zoom into the MAYHEM tattoo on Tommy's stomach. They unironically call each other "lover" and show the appropriate level of bashfulness. There's even suspense when they almost hit a rock (not a euphemism, a literal rock). What you get is what you want from any movie: a journey. Emotional, uh, payoff. There are few moments in cinema as tender and sincere as when Pam says, "He's gotta get me through the rest of my life." Granted, she's talking about Tommy's junk, but that's how true love works, isn't it?

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As we've pointed out time and time again (opens in new tab) , people have sex! And it's normal, and most of the time fun and great! And sometimes, people want to document that fun and great time they're having for a whole range of reasons. Maybe you and your partner want to watch it later and do some play-by-play review. Maybe just the knowledge that a camera is rolling makes the act hotter than hot (opens in new tab) —even if you never watch the video afterwards. The point is that making a consensual sex tape in the privacy of one's own home is nothing to be ashamed of.
But, when you're a celebrity, things get a little (and in some cases a lot ) more complicated. First and most obviously, there's always the possibility that said tape might get leaked, stolen, or sold without your approval. This is why there are so, so *many* celebrity sex tapes lurking on the internet—none of which we will be linking to, btw. Watching a sex tape that you know was released without the informed, enthusiastic consent of all participants is not something anyone should be watching. But the stories of how these sex tapes were released, why they were released, and how the celebs in question dealt with their release is a fascinating chapter in pop culture worth delving into. Shall we begin?
Obviously, Pam's most famous sex tape is her iconic romp with Tommy Lee, but Anderson also made a sex tape with her ex-boyfriend, Bret Michaels. The Poison musician spoke out about his efforts to stop the film's release in 1998, when he went to court and obtained a temporary restraining order against Internet Entertainment Group (I.E.G.) from releasing the tape, which the company said they were given by a friend of Michaels'.
Michaels reportedly spent at least $100,000 fighting the tape's release and expressed frustration that Anderson wasn't fighting harder alongside him in the crusade.
"What I'm jonesing to find out, and I can not figure out for the life of me, is why Pamela is not A) stopping this tape, or B) writing to these guys to stop the tape," Michaels told MTV News (opens in new tab) at the time. "It makes no sense to me. I can not figure out. I have the original copy. I have it. No one's ever touched it. No one's ever gotten to it. I have it, period, end of story, and it's never gone out, so I'm anxious to find out who gave them this tape or a copy of this tape and now they're forced to disclose it. And no, I've never taken a cent, not a penny. These guys have cost me a lot of money, and they're going to pay for it."
Dustin Diamond, aka Screech from Saved by the Bell , gave the world the sex tape it never asked for in 2006. The, um, film , which Diamond directed and released himself, had the cringiest name: Screeched – Saved by the Smell . The movie felt like a huge stunt when it was released and that's probably because, well, it was. Years later, during an interview for "Where Are They Now?" on the Oprah Winfrey Network (opens in new tab) , Diamond even claimed to have used a body double in the film and to have edited his own likeness into the footage after the fact.
"In my stupidity, I thought I could totally fake this. I could get a stunt person to take my place," he explained. "It’s my face but nothing else. Looking back now in my 30s, I realize that was really dumb."
So why make the video? The money, of course. Diamond explained during the interview that the idea came to him when he heard that Paris Hilton earned $14 million off the release of her infamous One Night in Paris sex tape.
"The sex tape is the thing that I’m most embarrassed about," Diamond explained. "And my buddy said, ‘$14 million? Holy smokes, where’s the Screech sex tape? You got to be worth at least a million.' And I thought, ‘Yeah — yeah, maybe.’ And that’s as simple as it was."
Turns out, however, that there wasn't enough of a market for Screech porn to make the whole ordeal worth it, financially.
"I definitely got some money off of it but it definitely wasn’t worth what the fallout was,” he said. "People to this day look down on me. There’s a lot of people [who think] ‘how disgusting of you’ — and I didn’t really do it."
In 2008, KISS legend Gene Simmons was the star of a celebrity sex tape (opens in new tab) that made the rounds on the internet. The video featured the musician and an Austrian energy drink spokesmodel named Elsa (her last name is never stated on camera) and was set to the soundtrack of Foreigner's, "I Want To Know What Love Is."
Simmons issued a statement (opens in new tab) about the tape on his personal website at the time, writing, "You may have heard or seen garbage that has sprung up from my past. Rest assured the proper legal team is looking at all ramifications and options."
The timing of the tape's release—just a couple of weeks before the premiere of the third season of Simmons' A&E reality show, Gene Simmons' Family Jewels —led to some speculation that the very NSFW tape wasn't an accidental leak at all, but a planned publicity stunt to generate buzz for the show.
In 1988, Rob Lowe was involved in a pre-internet age sex tape scandal that seriously threatened his future in the entertainment industry. During a 2019 interview on SiriusXM's The Jess Cagle Show (opens in new tab) , Lowe seemed to have developed a good attitude about the ordeal over the years and even credits the incident—in part, at least—with inspiring his sobriety.
"It's one of the reasons why I got sober," he said. "I, like, woke up one day and was like, 'What am I doing with my life?' People talk about it, I go, 'I think it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.' Honestly, I do, 'cause it got me sober. Sober got me married. I’ve been married 29 years, and I have two great sons. I don’t think any of that happens without going through that scandal. I really don't."
Amy Fisher, aka the infamous "Long Island Lolita," is still best known for the crime she committed as a teenager (when she was 17, Fisher shot and injured the wife of her lover, Joey Buttafuoco, who was 36 at the time).
In 2007, Fisher embarked on a major rebranding, filming several sex tapes (opens in new tab) with her husband, Louis Bellera. Later that year, several more videos and nude pictures of Fisher were released online and, by the time she was 33, Fisher had launched her own porn site, released a pay-per-view adult film (opens in new tab) called Amy Fisher: Caught On Tape , and planned a strip-tease tour (opens in new tab) of the U.S. In 2011, Fisher announced (opens in new tab) her retirement from adult films.
Teen Mom star Farrah Abraham's sex tape with porn pro James Deen was released in 2013.
“Now that you’re 21, you’ve pretty much been crying every night because you are single and alone. So, you make your own video, celebrate your awesome body (and) get your own sexy shots. So, the person you did this with has the urge to yell it out, when he should be professional and is not. But you have companies that are interested, so why not sell it? And that’s what I did," she said (opens in new tab) in a video statement explaining the deal she inked with Vivid Entertainment after the video hit the web.
Although the video was originally framed as a personal video that had leaked, it quickly became clear (opens in new tab) that it was, in fact, a professional production and that the "leak" was a marketing stunt.
Kim Kardashian is an accomplished businesswoman who's turned herself and her entire family into a brand. That fact exists separately from her sex tape. However, her career did jump-start from the tape she made with then-boyfriend Ray J in 2002. The video, known as Kim Kardashian, Superstar, was released by porn company Vivid Entertainment in 2007, and while Kim initially sued to stop the release, she settled for a rumored (opens in new tab) $5 million. The film is reported to have made $100 million (opens in new tab) since debuting.
"It was a very difficult time, and ultimately we were able to come to an agreement," says (opens in new tab) Vivid's Steve Hirsch. "It was a very difficult deal to get done. Probably [the hardest deal we’ve done]. [Kim] did not want it to happen. I know people have speculated on [whether she planned the release of the tape from the beginning], but the facts are the facts. A lot of nonsense has been reported over the years."
Kim has talked openly about the tape, telling Oprah, "I think that's how I was definitely introduced to the world, so I like to think that I am, you know, aware, I'm not naive to that fact. That's pretty much how I was introduced to the world. It was a negative way. So I felt like I really had to work ten times harder to get people to see the real me. I felt humiliated."
To this day, Kim experiences sexist backlash from the tape.
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