Celebrity Sex Tapes tries to tell how celebrity hot videos have changed, from Pamela Anderson to Kim Kardashian

In the beginning, there were Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, engaged in intimate scenes that no one should ever have seen. The videocassette on which their moments of passion were recorded was instead stolen from the safe in their home and distributed in a gray area between legal and pirated. That footage became a true cornerstone of what we now call celebrity Sex Tapes, an Anglophone re-denomination of old homemade adult films, but starring well-known faces: celebrities more or less loved and known by the public. A&E, a production company with a well-established documentary format known as The Secret of…, has dedicated an eight-episode miniseries to this cultural phenomenon.

The goal is to find a difficult balance between information and entertainment, also offering a reflection on how the public's perception and judgment of these intimate videos have changed over time. A change influenced by the advent of the Internet and the evolution of the pornographic industry. Celebrity Sex Tapes chooses eight stories that are already quite famous, at least in the United States. Through archive footage, interviews with the protagonists (at least those willing to speak), and the contribution of some industry experts, it attempts to reconstruct the less told side, the personal, economic, and legal behind-the-scenes of this genre. Among these is Kevin Blatt, who in the past has acted both as a broker for legally sold footage and as a facilitator for those who have tried to prevent its dissemination.

Celebrity Sex Tapes attempts to narrate the evolution of the genre

Those familiar with A&E productions know that the primary purpose of The Secret of… docuseries is so-called infotainment: informative entertainment with a light touch, never truly challenging for the viewer. The format is the tried-and-tested one of editing testimonies interspersed with archive footage and voice-over. The result often resembles an episode of a reality show, with the protagonist commenting on clips of their own story; an approach that works particularly well when it comes to one of the lesser-known stories in Italy of the cycle, that of Mimi Faust. A character from US reality shows, she became famous first for participating in Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta and then for a video distributed legally with her then-partner, which became a bestseller in the genre.

Even without eliciting surprise or admiration, it is still appreciable how A&E avoids pushing the more prurient side of the topic. The series truly tries to contextualize individual cases, chosen as stages of a progression that starts from private VHS and arrives at VIPs who decide to open their own OnlyFans account. Mimi Faust's first-person account is emblematic, as her story falls into a gray area: on the one hand, voluntary participation in the profits from the sale of the sex tape, and on the other, a form of coercion exerted by a system that, despite technological and social evolutions, continues to exploit the personal vulnerabilities of the protagonists, especially women. The choice often left to them is only one: participate in the profits or get nothing.

From Pamela Anderson to Mimi Faust, remaining in the gray area of consent

Mimi's story is also emblematic for this reason. Having achieved notoriety with a public image already strongly linked to the stereotype of the quarrelsome and sexually provocative African-American woman, with a troubled family past, she finds herself in a relationship with a man who first convinces her to shoot a private intimate video and then, without her knowledge, offers it to several companies specializing in the distribution of pornographic videos in the hope of making a high sum. Watching Celebrity Sex Tapes evokes emotions similar to those aroused by the miniseries Pam & Tommy, which reconstructed the ordeal Pamela Anderson endured for years, mocked on a human and professional level for something the world should never have seen. If the A&E series has a merit, it is that of maintaining this empathetic approach also towards the men and especially the women who, after her, found themselves in similar situations. It is told how even those who voluntarily distributed their erotic videos, signing contracts and receiving percentages on sales, often did so because the alternative was to get nothing, after being faced with something very similar to blackmail.

However sensitive and attentive, the A&E series lacks a true documentary and investigative approach and, above all, direct access to the most famous protagonists of this long sequence of scandals. While at least ostensibly the sympathetic tone seems to dispel the suspicion of an operation constructed solely to stimulate the audience's titillating side, it is difficult to erase it entirely. The impression remains that it is still a more lateral and indirect, just slightly more sensitive, way of profiting once again from the people who have lived through this ordeal. It is true that the public narrative has changed (and the series also recounts the shift from a purely voyeuristic gaze to one more aware of the criminal implications related to stolen photos and videos). However, the fact remains that many stories that have fallen into oblivion, precisely because they were treated as sex crimes and not as gossip, resurface once again, exposing the victims to the curiosity of a new audience that, thanks to the Internet, is just a few clicks away from finding that material.