After the release of their private sex tape, the couple’s marriage quickly deteriorated and turned volatile, with Anderson detailing the scary incident in 1998 that resulted in Lee being arrested nand charged with spousal and child abuse. (After pleading no contest to spousal battery, Lee was sentenced to six months in jail, ultimately serving four.)
Anderson says the “terrible night” began when Lee was rocking on the floor, telling her, ‘I want my wife back, I want my wife back.’ At that point, I didn’t know what to do. And I just said, ‘I need some f—king help around here. You gotta grow up, it’s not about you anymore.'”
Saying she had never spoken to him that way before, Anderson explains what happened next in her memoir.
“He grabbed the phone away from me, twisting my arm as I was holding Dylan in the other,” she writes of her then 7-weeks old son. “My nail tore off, blood dripping down my arm. The kids were so frightened. I picked up Brandon, too, but he slid frantically down my leg and held on to it tight, hyperventilating.”
Lee then grabbed Brandon, then 18 months, and “threw me and Dylan into the wall,” Anderson recalls. “I was so scared that he was hurt—he was screaming and he was only seven weeks old. Tommy ran out the door with Brandon…I could barely breathe, trying to catch my breath through the tears. Panicked, I called 911.”
After Lee was arrested, Anderson “tried to end the marriage,” but the drummer “really fought for us to stay together,” she says in the documentary. “I had to bifurcate the divorce because he wouldn’t sign the papers. He thought we could get through it. I just took my kids and was like, ‘No.’ It wasn’t a gray area for me. I was like, ‘You can’t do that.'”
Anderson admits that once Lee was released from jail, the couple did have “secret meetings, breaking the restraining order.” Ultimately, their reconciliation “didn’t last…neither of us could forgive the other, deep down.”