REAL OR FAKE? Enquirer's 're-creation'

No wonder the National Enquirer wasn't more sheepish about its phony photos of Anna Nicole Smith's corpse. They weren't phony after all—or so sources at publisher American Media are claiming.

"The photos were real," says one tipster at the company. "They were taken with a cell phone. The Enquirer had to say that they were fake to protect their source. There are only a couple people who had that kind of access to the body."

An AMI insider backs up that account, adding that legal issues had also come into play. The results: A caption claiming the images of a blue-lipped Smith in a body bag were "a photo re-creation" and editor in chief David Perel's slipperiness when asked how they'd been produced. ("There were so many different layers of how to achieve it, I couldn't even begin to describe it to you.")

[Closer comparison of the two Enquirer photos after the jump!]

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