“He’s free!” she exclaims. “I’m sorry to say that I didn’t know if that was going to happen. I didn’t know if we were going to lose him in prison.”
I ask her if they’ve spoken since he was released?
“I haven’t, but I’m going to soon. And I have talked to some people that are with him right now, so I’m just close enough. It’s a little bit overwhelming for him and there’s a lot going on. I visited him in Belmarsh Prison [in 2019] and I haven’t seen him since,” she tells me.
Pamela also visited Julian regularly when he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London seeking asylum from 2012 – 2019. On one of those visits in 2018, she was pictured by paparazzi leaving at 4am after, as she writes in her memoir, falling asleep having enjoyed a bottle of mezcal and “a slightly frisky, fun, alcohol-induced night together”.
I ask her if things became romantic on this frisky fun, alcohol-induced night?
“No, no! I don’t know what you call romantic, but no!” she responds adamantly. “His sleep cycles were really strange, too, because of not knowing where the sun is,” she explains. “So, he had these lamps that came on with the sunrise and dawn, so he had some of that stuff. Four o’clock in the morning could be 12 in the afternoon. But just leaving the embassy at that hour, I thought, ‘What are people going to think? Oh, dear!’”
Conversation turns to politics closer to home and we discuss the forthcoming US election and the rolling back of women’s bodily autonomy, following 2022’s overturning of Roe v Wade.
“It’s scary. No, it’s very scary,” she says. “I wouldn’t say I’m a Republican or a Democrat. I don’t know what I am. Obviously more Democrat than Republican. But I think there’s so much out of our hands, unfortunately…the one thing you have to do is vote.”
Of Donald Trump’s potential second term, she is, however, very clear.
“You definitely don’t want a sexual predator in The White House. I feel very strongly about that. And that should just be it…that’s my red line.”
As our time together comes to an end and Pamela tells me of her plans to head to St Tropez for a holiday, I can’t help but feel that despite all that’s great and impressive in her life right now that there’s a pathos to Pamela that seems to surround her. And it’s something she herself acknowledges too,
“I feel better now, even though I always kind of walk around with this little aching feeling in my chest. I don’t know what it is. My soul, I always feel a little bit achy.”
She’s done the work, and is still doing the work, to kill off the “Halloween costume” Pamela, but this cartoon character still seems to haunt her. As do her past choices, be they romantic, professional or personal, referring constantly to ‘mistakes’ she’s made in the past. She’s hard on herself, unfairly so at times, I feel. But, despite all this, I leave our meeting with one very clear takeaway about Pamela Anderson: and that is that the woman whose existence has been defined by how she appears to the male gaze, who has been heralded as the universal ideal of sex symbol, has finally, at the age of 57, found a way to feel confident in how she looks.