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.