The final nail has been driven deep into the coffin of the Marilyn Monroe sex tape myth. The FBI tells NBC it does not and never did have a 15-minute "French-style" reel depicting Marilyn Monroe giving oral sex to an unidentified man. (Radar and the Smoking Gun gave this a hard examination last week.)

Artifacts dealer Keya Morgan was, however, able to drum up attention from gullible media, who reported as fact that Morgan brokered the sale of a copy of the nonexistent tape for $1.5 million. Both the seller and buyer were unnamed. Morgan never provided still pictures or any other incontrovertible evidence of its existence. But he still was given air time on the major networks and news outlets to perpetuate the myth of the Marilyn tapes, which he said he discovered by way of a secret FBI source while working on his forthcoming documentary. Since there was never a real buyer or seller and never a tape to sell, it was a nearly perfect hoax, with no living fraud victims other than the news outlets who didn't check out his story.

In a previous interview, Morgan touted his longstanding, impeccable reputation as an artifacts collector and seller, but the new NBC report delves even deeper into his past, calling attention to claims on his website that he has "actively been in the pursuit of buying and selling authentic historical items" since 1989. An older version of the site says he has been in business since 1986. Morgan declined to give his age to NBC, and he has told Radar that Defamer in its report on the alleged Marilyn tape stated his as 38, off by several years. But NBC tracked down records that show him being born in 1975, which would mean he'd been in business since age 11—or age 14, at best.

Morgan provided NBC with a bill of sale for the alleged sale of the Marilyn reel, but the buyer and seller's names were blacked out. He never returned Radar's request for a follow-up interview, but questioned by NBC as to why he never offered stills or any other proof of the video's existence, Morgan cited a confidentiality agreement. He did not, however, produce that document.

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