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In October 1995, a 500-pound safe was stolen from the garage of a Malibu mansion.
Most of the nearly hour-long Hi8 cassette was mundane.
Theres blurry, almost inaudible footage of their wedding.
They play with their dogs and talk about the tomatoes growing in their driveway.
But theres also six minutes of fucking.
Anderson and Lee werent just any celebrities.
APlayboycenterfold,Anderson represented the zenith of a certain kind of surgically enhanced bombshell.
Today, the idea that someones most intimate moments may be fodder for public consumption is utterly unremarkable.
Why document hours of your life if youre not going to upload it somewhere?
There is no attempt to curate anything for followers or make anyone look cool.
Why would anyone create that video if it were intended for wide distribution?
Yet the minute the footage got out, Anderson and Lee lost the argument.
Even as they spent huge sums to stop the videos spread, many people assumed they had engineered it.
I know because I did some of the violating.
I rarely thought deeply about why I was posting these images.
What I did felt akin to that just, you know, with a lot more tits.
A phishing campaign prompted famous people to divulge their iCloud passwords, and hackers amassed thousands of nudes.
Theres a direct line fromStolen Honeymoonto Celebgate.
What is iCloud if not the modern version of a safe in a garage?
Stolen Honeymoonhas another legacy, of course: the commercially released celebrity sex tape.
Some of these postStolen Honeymoontapes are more explicit; most contain a lot more sex.
But Id argue that many of them feel as if theyre missing something.
Whether the people involved wanted the tapes released or not, theres always a potential audience.
Anderson and Lee really believed they could go unobserved.
When we watch Anderson and Lee now, its not the sex thats startling.
