Pamela Anderson says hepatitis C diagnosis left her fearing she had only 10 years to live

Pamela Anderson has spoken at an amfAR Gala in Venice about the diagnosis that she says changed her life. She said doctors told her she had a fatal illness and would not live more than 10 years. “This felt like a death sentence,” she recalled.

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This felt like a death sentence.

Anderson said she contracted hepatitis C from her former husband Tommy Lee, with whom she was married from 1995 to 1998 and had two sons. She said the virus passed to her after they used the same needle while getting tattoos, turning the diagnosis into a profound shock.

Her greatest fear, Anderson said, was not death itself but what would happen to her young children, Brandon and Dylan. “It wasn’t the fear of death,” she said. “It was the fear of what would happen to my little children. It turned my life upside down.”

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It wasn’t the fear of death. It was the fear of what would happen to my little children. It turned my life upside down.

She also described the shame and guilt that followed her for years. Anderson compared the feeling to the sexual abuse she experienced as a child, saying it seemed permanently marked on her. She said she came to see herself as “a defective product” and presented herself that way to others.

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This shame and guilt stayed with me and haunts me.

Anderson learned in 2011 that she carried hepatitis C and said she was completely rid of the virus in 2015. The treatment came at a heavy financial cost: she said she spent all the money she had saved in the bank. Now 59, Anderson lives in Ladysmith, Canada, the small town where she spent her childhood, after leaving behind much of her Hollywood life.

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A defective product.