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Ten years after Playboy model and actress Anna Nicole Smith overdosed on prescription drugs, her onetime lover has spoken out to say she foresaw her own early death.
“Anna Nicole always told me she would not live long,” fitness instructor and chef Alexander Denk, 49, told the Daily Mail. “She was very intuitive, believe it or not.”
The Naked Gun star died aged 39 on February 8, 2007, after making global headlines fighting for—and losing—half the $1.6 billion estate of her late husband J Howard Marshall.
An oil tycoon, Marshall died in 1995 aged 90, 13 months after marrying the former strip club dancer.
“She was a simple Texas girl who just wanted to be loved,” said Denk. “She had a good head on her shoulders but people ripped her off.”
Denk met Smith in 2002 when he auditioned for her reality TV series, The Anna Nicole Show. He became her personal trainer and dated her until shortly before her death: “I probably knew her better than anyone.”
The first time he was on Smith’s show, she wore a “tight grey t-shirt with two red cherries on the front and sweat pants,” he recalled.
“I was like, ‘Wow. I’d like to pick your cherries.’ She cracked up laughing.”
The sometime-stuntman (Batman Forever, Collateral Damage) helped yo-yo dieter Smith lose 48kgs by overhauling her exercise and diet regimen. “She was a big girl, tall and heavy,” he said. “It took a long time.”
After they became lovers, Smith made bizarre requests, said Denk: “She’d call me and ask me to come over and change the locks because she was concerned for her safety.”
Sometimes, he said, “She’d just call me at 2AM to talk about her idol, Marilyn Monroe.”
Still, he denies her behaviour was the result of a drug problem, and says Smith “would have a margarita here or there. Most of the time she was fine.”
He claimed she would beg him to “rent a place and have babies” but “I couldn’t settle down with her. She was a celebrity.”
In September 2006, Smith gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn. When the baby was three days old, Smith’s son Daniel was visiting his mother in the hospital when he died of a drug overdose.
Two weeks later, Smith married her longtime lawyer Howard K Stern in the Bahamas.
Smith herself died five months into the marriage, leaving a messy paternity battle over Dannielynn. A DNA test proved the little girl belonged to photographer Larry Birkhead.
Dannielynn, now a 10-year-old child model who lives with her dad in Kentucky, “looks like her mum so much,” said Denk.
“I have emails, photographs and memoirs to share with her when she is grown up,” he said. “I will see her and talk to her privately.”
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