Anna Nicole Smith's Unfathomable Sorrow Worth Low To Mid Six-Figures
On Friday, our East Coast big sister Gawker noted that an email had landed in the inbox of all the celebrity weeklies' top editors, offering them the once-in-a-newscycle opportunity to cash in on someone's else's tragedy. Getty Images informed them that for $200k, plus an assurance of "no negative press," they could have 17 photos of Anna Nicole Smith beaming in a hospital bed with newborn daughter and Daniel, the son who would be found mysteriously dead in the same building the very next day, at her side. A bidding war ensued, with third-tier glossy In Touch reportedly scoring the World's Most Depressing Photoset for a sum well north of $300k, now rightly theirs to splatter across a cover accompanied by 190-pt, canary-yellow block-lettering screaming some variation of, "ANNA NICOLE'S LAST MINUTES OF HAPPINESS." The personal snapshot nature of the photos—some previews of which are above, the rest over at Gawker—has raised questions of how Getty obtained them in the first place, and who is benefitting from the winning bid.
A forensic pathologist privately hired on behalf of Smith, meanwhile, has said he is still waiting on toxicology reports, but that Daniel was taking anti-depressants for a bout of depression that had started "about 4-6 weeks earlier but that he does not know whether the medication played any role in his death." The story therefore seems to still be unfolding—however slowly—and we should have a fuller picture of exactly what happened after the toxicology results come in, and Star narrowly beats out Life & Style and the National Enquirer for the exclusive rights to publish them.
