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'It felt exploitative': Anna Nicole Smith's Netflix documentary slammed by journalist close to late model

Caroline Graham, a journalist who was once close to Anna Nicole Smith, said the late model was 'smart, sassy and curvaceous'

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Anna Nicole Smith’s Netflix documentary titled ‘Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me’ has chronicled the model’s journey from the Guess jeans girl and 1993’s Playboy Playmate of the Year to her tragic death from a drug overdose at the age of 39 in 2007. Despite being the second most popular show in the UK, journalist Caroline Graham, who had the chance of seeing Smith from a close distance, has heavily criticized the documentary.

“Netflix has touted it as her definitive story but, as someone who knew Anna, it felt distressingly exploitative,” Graham wrote for the Daily Mail. Smith’s former lover Larry Birkhead, who shares a daughter with the late model, also echoed similar thoughts and dubbed the documentary as a “poorly reviewed cesspool of a project.” “It is hard not to agree with him,” Graham said. “As I watched the Netflix show, I wondered how many of those interviewed – a random uncle, a woman who danced alongside Anna at a Houston strip club – really knew her?” the journalist added. “After all, Netflix has form – not least with The Crown – when it comes to fabricating narratives about real people’s lives,” Graham alleged.

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‘The Anna I remember was no victim’

“I got to know Anna Nicole in the 1990s,” Graham revealed. “She burst on to the Hollywood scene and quickly became the hottest ‘It’ girl in town. She was on the front of newspapers and magazines globally and there was an insatiable appetite to know everything about her,” the journalist recalled. “Netflix’s depiction of a manipulative airhead who used men to get ahead doesn’t tally with the woman I knew,” she stated.

Graham shared that she has had the chance to interview Smith “several times” as the West Coast correspondent for a major British newspaper. She also went out for dinner with the model and occasionally visited her at home, the “Marilyn house” in the beginning and a “relatively modest bungalow in Bel Air” later in life. The writer noted that Smith bought the bungalow at the age of 26 after she married the 89-year-old, wheelchair-bound oil tycoon J Howard Marshall in 1994.

She also recalled how Smith would often turn up late for memorable photoshoots, “bleary-eyed from partying the previous night away but immediately “came alive” in front of the camera. “If people ask me who the most beautiful star I’ve met during my three decades here in Los Angeles is, there is always surprise when I don’t reply Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones – but Anna Nicole Smith,” Graham mentioned. “In person, without make-up, she was pretty. But in front of a camera she had that magical ‘X’ factor. She was luminous. She also had street smarts in spades,” she wrote. 

“Netflix covers her transformation from small-town Mexia, Texas, where she was born plain Vickie Lynn Hogan, into a Hollywood bombshell and portrays her as a victim of abuse, poverty, men, grasping Hollywood agents and the press,” Graham explains, before saying, “But the Anna I remember was no victim – she knew what she wanted and went all out to get it.” “She was smart, sassy and curvaceous at a time when ‘heroin chic’ models such as Kate Moss ruled fashion catwalks,” Graham wrote.

Graham also shared that like Monroe, who Smith was “obsessed” with, the latter “suffered problems with prescription drugs, which began after she underwent several breast-enhancement procedures.” However, “Anna was funny, feisty and nobody’s fool,” she recalled. “Sure, Anna had her problems. It was obvious she was on pills. There were containers of painkillers next to her bed and in her bathroom. She would slur her speech late at night. But she never neglected her son,” Graham stated.

Some moments in Netflix documentary left Caroline Graham baffled

Graham mentioned that there were several moments in Smith’s Netflix documentary that left her baffled. “There are moments in the Netflix documentary that left me baffled,” she wrote. “A woman who gives her name only as ‘Missy’ claims she had a long-term lesbian relationship with Anna and said they lived together as a couple, raising Daniel together,” Graham pointed out. “Of course, this could be true but it’s strange that in the hundreds of interviews she gave and the hours and hours she spent with friends, Anna never mentioned this person,” she mentioned.

“Anna was never shy about discussing sex. She was never ashamed to talk about her sexual conquests and openly said she ‘experimented’ with girls. But she preferred men,” Graham revealed. She also said that the late star held genuine love for her 89-year-old husband. “When she married J Howard Marshall in 1994, the jokes were brutal. In the Netflix show, Anna is accused of spending freely on his credit cards. Sure she did. But I genuinely believe their love for each other was real,” the journalist wrote.

“After Marshall died, she sobbed uncontrollably for weeks,” Graham recalled. “I remember asking her why she loved him: ‘He’s the only man who never wanted anything from me. He’s the kindest man I’ve ever met. He’s never hurt me,’” she shared from her conversation with Smith. “It was her greatest regret that Marshall died before adopting Daniel, which he had promised to do,” Graham said. The author also noted how Smith was involved in “a bitter court battle” over Marshall’s $2 billion fortune for the rest of her life but ultimately lost the fight.

‘Anna deserved better’

Graham noted that Birkhead, Smith’s former lover, and father of her now 16-year-old daughter Dannielynn, also slammed that Netflix documentary in the wake of its release. “We declined to participate as I did not want my daughter in an overwhelmingly poorly reviewed cesspool of a project about her mother, where people were allowed to invent things and rewrite history,” he said, as per the Daily Mail.

The writer mentioned that Birkhead, who calls Smith “the love of my life” is making his own film about the late Playboy star. “Anna deserved better and that day will come,” Birkhead stated. Graham also visited Smith’s hometown of Mexia and briefly spoke to Billy Smith, her first husband, and father of her late son, Daniel. Billy said he never stopped loving Smith even when their marriage came to an end and she left the place with their son. He said he knew Smith “always had big dreams” and “never wanted to hold her back.”

Caroline Graham on the final days of Anna Nicole Smith’s life

In her article, Graham revealed that she lost touch with Smith in the late 1990s, when the latter went on to have her own reality TV show, “a precursor to shows such as The Kardashians” as the former calls it. “But as her drug problem worsened her work started to suffer and her career waned,” Graham noted. The writer also recalled the close relationship Smith had with her son, Daniel, and how she became pregnant by Birkhead.

In the wake of the pregnancy, Smith allegedly fled to the Bahamas from Los Angeles with her lawyer Howard Stern, who said their move was to “escape the relentless paparazzi.” Graham noted Daniel was nearly 20 and already had appeared in some of his mother’s TV shows when his half-sister, Dannielynn, was born on September 7, 2006. Unfortunately, Daniel died three days after Dannielynn’s birth from an accidental overdose of methadone and antidepressants.

“I remember hoping against hope that Dannielynn’s birth would give Anna the strength to survive Daniel’s death. Sadly, it did not,” Graham remembered. “Anna spiraled into depression and addiction and died of an accidental overdose on February 8, 2007. She was 39,” she wrote. “Anna Nicole Smith’s ultimate tragedy is that, after having the daughter she longed for, she lost the son she could not live without,” Graham mentioned. “It is a tragedy that Netflix, by treating her as a ‘hustler’ who married an octogenarian billionaire, brutally diminishes a complicated woman and very proud mother,” she concluded.

‘Didn’t do her justice’

While Smith’s Netflix documentary is garnering massive viewership, many fans took to Twitter to share similar opinions to Graham and Birkhead. “The fact that they painted Anna Nicole Smith in the new Netflix documentary as this greedy manipulative liar & are saying her childhood trauma was all a lie is really disgusting,” one wrote. “the way they talked about larry birkhead in the anna nicole smith netflix documentary disgusts me. I can see why he wanted no parts of the documentary,” another mentioned.

“I didn’t like the Anna Nicole smith documentary on Netflix, they skipped so much of her life we could’ve done a 5 part series,” a third user commented. One said, “I just saw there is another documentary about Anna Nicole Smith on Netflix and I have to wonder how much money are people willing to make off her tragic death” while another added, “Last night I watched the Netflix movie of Anna Nicole Smith, that movie didn't do her justice, so many contradictions from interviews I recall of her. Either way, I really admired her she was so beautiful, and most of all she came from NOTHING and turned herself into something.”

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