Kid Rock has said he was just doing “what any man would have done” when he punched Tommy Lee at the MTV Video Music Awards earlier this month.

Kid, who married then divorced Pamela Anderson last year, claims Tommy, the father of Pamela’s two sons, sent him “really inappropriate” emails from her Blackberry during one of their son’s birthday parties a few months earlier.

He explained to the Sun: “I just emailed Tommy back and said: ‘You know, I will see you again.’”

“MTV put the three of us in a room probably hoping something would happen, so they got what they wanted. I came back from the bathroom and the guy was sitting pretty much in my seat. That was it.”

“Tommy was always just a pain in the ass. There was a lot of years of disrespect but I was a part of his kids’ lives. So I wasn’t going to be disrespectful about him around his kids.”

Kid, real name Robert Ritchie, has his own son, Robert Jnr, as well as briefly being a step-dad to Pamela and Tommy’s sons, Brandon and Dylan. Kid insists that when children are involved, celebrity parents need to keep their private lives out of the limelight as much as possible.

He insists he tried to do that when he split from Pamela last year: “I kind of stay out of that whole scene, I just really don’t want any part of that world.”

“That’s the best thing for me, and my son, and the people that were around me that I kind of dragged through that whole thing. It’s really not anywhere I want to be, at all.”

“My private life and my home life is something I keep private. You’ll never see me on the MTV Cribs shows or any of that stuff. I keep something back for my son and for myself.”

He added that other celebrities need to learn that too: “Britney Spears doesn’t have a clue and she doesn’t have anyone to kick her ass and say ‘get the f*** out of LA’, go back to wherever you’re from, Louisiana or wherever it is, look after your two kids properly and just calm down.”

“I mean, I’m by no means a fan, I would be the first one to talk s*** about her. But when there’s kids involved, get the f*ck out of there. There’s places where there aren’t cameras, you can go there. You’re putting yourself in the middle of it all so I don’t have a lot of sympathy for you.”

“I feel bad that you don’t have some good advice around you or good people around you. [But] as much as I might act like I care, I don’t give a f***. I got my own kid to worry about.”