Britney Spears has a sex tape and it’s selling faster that Pamela Andersen’s. First, she makes a music comeback and then she drops her video, bareback. Yes folks, it’s everyone’s favorite pop star, Britney Spears, and she has been thrusted, hard, into the limelight again appearing in the internet’s latest raunchy sex tape extravaganza. It’s been just a few short weeks since the tape popped up on a site calling itself “www.britney-diditagain.com”, but, as the saying goes, so far so good. In fact, it’s been “so good” that it’s the fastest selling celebrity sex tape since the Pamela Andersen HI-8 romp with Tommy Lee. The tape features Britney engaging in a wild array of sexual positions with a man who looks a lot like her ex-boyfriend, and one-time manager, Adnan Ghalib. If you remember, it wasn’t too long ago that a story broke about the very same Adnan shopping his homemade popstar porn to Vivid Video and other adult industry empires for widespread distribution. He boasted about his tape being consentually shot during his brief fling with the bipolar Britney in the midst of her total mental blowout last year. However, he later recanted his position on the existence of “said” tape, stating that he was only trying to get some well-deserved PR for his failing business and that no tape actually existed. Now, just mere months later and we find out that this imaginary tape has somehow been leaked onto a Britney Spears blog site and is selling faster than hotcakes in an Alaskan igloo. This all smelled really fishy to me so I did some investigating. I assure you all that it was in the name of good journalism and that watching the tape was nothing more than a sacrifice of labor for my craft. Laugh if you will, but what I found out is the kind of satisfaction that rewards a healthy gnawing journalistic curiousity. Anyway, it turns out that the people behind the www.britney-diditagain.com site, are also the distributors of the Ashley Dupre sex tape. For those of you who don’t know, Ashley Dupre is the world’s most famous, and infamous, call girl. She’s the rich little daddy’s girl who turned into a $4000 and hour escort for the Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, until he got exposed, fired and indicted. Yeah, well these guys have an exclusive sex tape she actually made for the ex-Governor and are selling it on a site called www.TrashleyDupre.com. With these kinds of hard to come by sex-lebrity exclusives you’d expect to find someone like Larry Flynt or Steve Hirsch to be pulling the proverbial strings, but it turns out that the masterminds are relative unknowns in the world of porndom. So, I set out to contact these purveyors of the carnal content, via. email — since there’s no phone number available on any of their sites, to get a general sense of how they acquired such high-end salacious material. It took a day or so for them to get back to me, but when they did they responded with the following:

“Dear Valued Customer,
Thanks for your interest in our product. However, we regret to inform you that we can, in no way, divulge the sources of our material, except to say that we purchased the exclusive rights to sell these tapes from a third party broker. To the best of our knowledge, all tapes were acquired in a legal manner and all parties in these tapes are currently aware of their digital distribution. We realize that we are extremely fortunate to be the only company that can provide you with these exclusive tapes. Currently, these tapes are smashing all previous records set by past celebrity tapes, especially our Britney video which is selling faster than any star sex video in history. Once again, thank you for your support and we are working to provide you with more great content in the near future.”

And, that’s it. That’s the whole story in a nutshell. This video is smashing sex tape records and no one will tell me where the hell they got it from. This mystery clearly runs deeper than the origins of Stonehendge. Now maybe I should end this here, but I’m just not going to, not yet. I’m not ending this until I impart, or more like unload, my witty Sherlock Holmes-que theory of what’s really going on here. I believe this tape is the work of none other than the stars themselves. Let me state my case. First of all, everytime a celebrity sex tape emerges from obscurity there is a formal announcement from the distributor, or TMZ (who BTW is usually getting a pay-off from the distributor), about the existence of and intent to release the video. Then there is an immediate backlash from the star’s camp / legal team and a lawsuit is filed to block the release of tape. After some wrangling, and hubub, the case dies down for a while. Then one fine day we hear that the case is settled and the star is getting a percent of the sales. A week later the tape has finally been distributed to DVD and the Internet for immediate purchase. So, why didn’t this Britney tape have the same trajectory? Well, maybe it did, but they kept it quiet this time. Suppose Adnan did really have a tape and he was going to sell it to the highest bidder. But, the highest bidder turned out to be Britney herself and she bought it. Now, on the heels of her album release and just before her Womanizer tour, she releases the tape via. a third party broker. Celebrity sex tapes command top dollar; Paris got around $20 million for her video. I think possibly she’s getting a huge percentage of sales from the release of her tape — in fact the majority of it. It’s a great insurance policy for a slumping album sales market. Furthermore, I think, she figures it will also do for her career what tapes did for Hilton, and Kim Kardashian — it will quicken it. In this crazy world of waxing and waning popularity, infamy is instant fame. I mean, what better way for her to get back in the media while simultaneously galvanizing all the sympathies of her base? It’s sort of like what Sarah Palin almost succeeded in doing on the Republican ticket. Brit’s waning fans, the one’s who have outgrown her, will hear about the sex video and say, “poor Britney, everyone’s picking on her again, I’m going to support her and see her in concert!” Yes, I know, it’s a sad planet we live on where mega-stars have to use porn to sell records and concert tickets, but I’ve heard of dumber things people have done to ascend into stardom. As a matter of fact, did you hear about the guy who got into the Guiness record book for farting 8007 times in one hour? Personally, I’d rather watch Britney Spears get shagged, but that’s just me: isn’t it?

Jack Knox is a freelance writer and blogger with a strong opinion about everything. Please don't kill the messenger