Two Marilyn Monroe experts on the popular celebrity blog Defamer.com are calling into question the claim of a memorabilia dealer who told the New York Post earlier this week that he brokered a deal of a rare Monroe sex film.
Mark Bellinghaus and Ernest W. Cunningham (along with freelance writer Jennifer J. Dickinson) had harsh words for the dealer, Keya Morgan, who told the Post of the purported $1.5 million sale of a rare bootleg copy film from the 1950s to an undisclosed New York businessman -- a copy of film still-classified by the FBI.
In the film, Morgan claims that it's Monroe performing a sex act on an unidentified male.
Bellinghaus and Cunningham first noted that Monroe testified in court in 1952 to protect her reputation from accusations that she was part of a mail order pornography ring was selling pictures of her -- and that she and her attorney debunked those claims. As a result, they said, the two men who created the scam were convicted of a misdemeanor conviction.
The experts go on to call the current revelation, 56 years later, "a fabricated pornographic claim." They criticized Morgan for not disclosing the names of the seller or buyer of the film, and saying "he has not been able to provide evidence that this alleged sale even occurred."
The experts -- who said they interviewed the dealer in 2007 -- accuse Morgan of being "a namedropper, especially when it came to those notorious for supporting the conspiracy theories involved with the story of Marilyn Monroe."
"At the time of our conversation with him, we immediately discerned that he was one of them only out to exploit Marilyn Monroe and to come up with something new to fuel the rumor mill of her life," Bellinghaus and Cunningham wrote on Defamer.
The article points out different examples of debunked Monroe nude photo and film claims in the past, and accuses Morgan of glomming onto the actress' conspiracy movement and using it for personal promotion.
"The most recent sensationalism of this supposedly existing film footage generated by Mr. Morgan, ties in with the usual opportunistic conspiracy theories that are out there," the experts said on Defamer. "What Keya Morgan is promoting equates to questionable stories generated simply to sell another book or push another cheesy documentary."
In the Defamer piece, Bellinghaus and Cunningham questioned among other things why, if the film was still classified by the FBI, wouldn't the FBI stop the sale and destroy the copy of the film. They also criticized Morgan's claim that the person in the purported film is Monroe because it shows the "famous mole."
The experts queried, "Just because this alleged film has a person with a mole, it's instantly Marilyn Monroe?"
Bellinghaus and Cunningham also pointed out Morgan's claim to them that he had dated singer Mariah Carey and actress Renee Zellweger.
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