How did his son find out about his sex tape?
John Owen Lowe, Rob Lowe’s second son, was roughly three years old when Rob’s sex tape was released in 1998. In an interview with Men’s Health that was published on March 14, the 28-year-old actor said that he discovered his father’s infamous 1998 sex tape through a high school classmate.
“I was in eighth grade or freshman year of high school, and some kid said, ‘You know, your dad has a sex tape online,’” he recalled to the publication. “I was like, ‘What?’” “You know what it’s kind of like? Santa Claus. I don’t think most parents ever have that moment where they sit the kids down and go, ‘Okay, we’ve got to tell you something.’ A kid figures it out. There weren’t milestone markers, like, ‘Okay, he’s 16 now, time for them to learn about this part of our life!’”
The now-58-year-old star’s sex tape only led to starting his father-related problems. He continued by saying that he didn’t want to be near his father at the time. “The number of times I got compared to my dad, and the number of times he was brought up in conversation, made me so uncomfortable that I wanted to move as far away from that as possible,” he admitted.
The sex tape was made public after Rand Gauthier, a member of the building crew working on the property, took Pam and Tommy’s safe from their home. Pamela alleges that Penthouse contacted her over the tape and made a $5 million offer for the rights to the film.
“We were in shock,” Pamela admits. “We had no memory of filming anything so crazy.” The tape was leaked anyway after the newlyweds turned down the offer. “A VHS came to us wrapped in brown paper,” Pam reveals. “Too late. I didn’t watch it. I have not watched it to this day.”
Pam remembered that Tommy did, in fact, see the footage. Pamela recollects being in a state of shock when he first revealed what the video showed. “I felt strange, liquid, melting, leaving my body once again.” They then attempted to obstruct the company that distributed the tape, and Pam was forced to give a deposition while seven months pregnant.
“My heart sank when I saw there were naked photos of me blown up and placed behind the lawyers seated across the table,” she says. “Such a cruel tactic, apparently done to prove I didn’t care about being nude publicly. They explained that I had no right to privacy because I appeared in Playboy. Then came question after invasive question — about my body, sexual positions, sexual preferences, locations I had sex in — and suggestions that I probably liked the attention.”
Nonetheless, the release of the sex tape had an impact that continues to this day. Later on, John Owen eventually changed his mind and is now as close as he can be to his famous father.
Their newest comedy, “Unstable,” will soon be released on Netflix. Together, they wrote the script inspired by their shared experiences. “I’m so happy and proud, and it makes coming to work even more fun than it usually is,” during a conversation with Entertainment Tonight, Rob talked about working alongside his family.
“We can have a full conversation about a scene or a sequence, and I’ll forget that it’s my son, and I’ll forget that it’s my brother, and I’ll be like, man, those guys really knew what the hell they were doing!” Working with his family and thoroughly enjoying himself means a lot to John Owen.
“It’s rare you get to be best friends [with someone] and also look up to someone, and, you know, we work in the same industry, so I get to not only look up to him on an emotional level but also a career level, which is amazing for me,” he made a note of it. How lovely!