14 DAY TRIAL // A couple of days ago, Softpedia was the only media outlet that managed to break the story of Mark 'Hollywood' Hatten, Anna Nicole Smith's fianc? for a period of over two years and who is now claiming that he is the father of Dannielynn Hope, Anna's infant daughter. As a side note, this child is also the potential inheritor of a fortune estimated at around $1 billion, which is about how much the late Anna should have gotten from her former husband, oil tycoon Howard J. Marshall, if his family hadn't challenged the will.
Yesterday, the toxicology tests in the case of Anna Nicole's death were made public, ruling out every possibility of foul play or suicide. What this actually means is that now the fight is on for the custody of Dannielynn because, obviously, who gets to keep her, also gets to keep the money she will inherit from her mother. The men who are now all claiming (with proof, they say) that they're the real father are: Howard K. Stern (Anna's attorney/lover), Larry Birkhead (former lover), Prince Frederic Von Anhalt (Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband and allegedly one of Anna's lovers), Johnny Soto (another alleged lover) and Mark 'Hollywood' Hatten (lover). Oh, and there's also one of her bodyguards who claimed they used to have a 'weekend affair' which might have resulted in the birth of Dannielynn.
Aside from these men, there are also other variants as to whom might be the father of the disputed child: various tabloids and including Anna Nicole's half sister claimed that she had frozen the old man's sperm (Howard J. Marshall's, that is) to make sure she had the 'golden ticket' to his fortune, while others went completely out there and stated that Daniel Smith (the model's own son) might have lent a hand in Danni's conception. I know, this last part is gross but it just goes to show what things can come out of some people's mouths. So, we can safely say that Anna Nicole Smith got around... a lot, if you know what I'm talking about. And I know you do.
As I was telling you, we made contact with one of these men and got his side of the story. Mark Hatten is currently incarcerated in a California prison, where he is serving the last months of a seven-year sentence for stalking Anna. As he told us in letters, when things got too serious between them, Howard K. Stern broke Anna and got her to split with Mark, whom he later framed to go to jail. The whole story is HERE, exactly as he told it to us but, since I posted it, many people started asking me 'What if it's not true?'.
I thought this might be just the right opportunity to present to you now the other side of the glass, the one that's empty. Because everybody is entitled to his own voice in the media, I refrained from making any comments the first time I covered Mark's story but maybe we should cast objectivity aside for just a second and look at the facts the other way around. Of course, this doesn't mean that we're dismissing Mark's statement or that we're stating it's not true. Call it an exercise of the intellect, just to see what arguments people could bring to contradict it.
Let's start from the beginning: Mark says that Stern came in between him and Anna Nicole and that he framed the whole stalking thing. Initially, Mark was facing charges of stalking, making terrorist threats and assault with a deadly weapon stemming from a 911 call Anna made from her home when Mark came to 'collect his belongings'. This is exactly where one could see the first flaw in his story: while he now says that they lived together in the same house for two years or so, at the first court hearing he told the judge that he and Anna Nicole only had 'sporadic relations' in the course of the same period. I might not be quite the ninja with words, but 'sporadic' means 'occurring at irregular intervals; having no pattern or order in time', which basically eliminates the possibility of him living under the same roof as Anna.
Then again, if he loved her so much (as he still professes), why would he go and put a knife at her throat? That's what Anna stated in court, under oath, immediately after she addressed the jury and recounted how Mark used to pop by her house, threaten her and even beat up her neighbor once. We all know that Anna sucked as an actress so, if she was lying, the jurors would have seen it right away.
Mr. Hatten also told me that Danni is his daughter because he was asked by Anna to donate a 'sperm sample to the Anna Nicole Smith sperm bank'. What would a skeptic have to say about this? What, was Anna Nicole some kind of sperm collector who used to go around asking people she slept with to leave something to 'remember them by'? And why would she wait for so many years to go by until she used that sperm to get pregnant? Couldn't she have had the procedure done the next day or the next month, when she was ovulating or something?
There are many things one could pick on in Hatten's story but the most important one is that he is a convicted felon, a man considered dangerous, who attacked his girlfriend of two years with a knife - or, at least, that's how the court labeled him. Plus, his timing is more than convenient: while Anna Nicole was alive, not a single word was heard of or from him. Now that she's dead and buried, there are too few people who could contradict or corroborate his story, one of them being Howard K. Stern, who stood by Anna for years. But Mark says Stern is out to get him, whack him, silence him, so anything that Stern would say from now could be (re/mis)interpreted to the media as an act of revenge.
The last thing that any cynic would immediately see through in Mark's story is this bit of his statement: 'If in fact I am proven to be the biological father of Dannielynn Hope, I am OFFICIALLY announcing to drop the "BIGGEST PROBATE CASE IN HISTORY", yeah the one that ruined Anna Nicole and her son Daniel's life!!! I don't need the "BLOOD MONEY" nor do I want any part of the evil attached to it! (Marshall vs. Marshall).' Call me naive or whatever, but $1 billion is not quite the kind of money you could find while crossing the street on your way to work. On the contrary, it's more than enough to go and buy yourself a small island, with dolphins swimming around it and naked bimbos on its beaches, where you could live the rest of your life without being bothered. If there is one person in the world who would give up that kind of money without a second thought, that would probably be God. And maybe Bill Gates, since he's already crapping money 24/7. But not the same can be said about a con who may have lost so many years of his life on false charges, as he claims...
Any way, let me reiterate what I said in the beginning: this post is not meant to be read as an annulment of Mark Hatten's official statement. On the contrary, this is supposed to give you a better idea of how things stand, starting from the premise that what he told me might not be true. In this way, you, as readers, are presented with the whole story and not only half-measures. And, by the way, the title isn't supposed to imply that Anna Nicole Smith was a whore (although her many former lovers would certainly make her more, cough, libertine) - take a wild guess and see who would charge 5 bucks for a BJ, 10 for a lay and a child for $1 billion!
You can find the whole Mark 'Hollywood' Hatten official story HERE.
