Anna Nicole Smith’s Friend Missy Says They Had a Romantic Relationship: “She Was a Very Good Lover”

Netflix’s new Anna Nicole Smith documentary, Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me—which began streaming today—criticizes a society obsessed with celebrity gossip… while also indulging in quite a bit of celebrity gossip. What did you expect?

Directed by Ursula Macfarlane, who also directed the 2019 Harvey Weinstein documentary Untouchable, Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me attempts to piece together who, exactly, was the woman behind “Anna Nicole Smith,” via interviews with the late model’s friends and family. Most notable? Smith’s former longtime friend “Missy,” who speaks frankly about maintaining a romantic and sexual relationship with Smith, when she was still known by her given name, Vickie Lynn Hogan.

“I was really in love with her. I was her first female lover, I guess,” Missy says in her talking head interview in the film. “She had an insatiable appetite for sex, just like everything else. She enjoyed having sex.”

Though she is only credited by her nickname “Missy” in the documentary, she has gone public with her stories about Smith in the past—including writing a book under her real name Melissa Byrum, which she published in 2008, a year after Smith died of a drug overdose. Byrum and Smith (then Hogan) met when the two worked at a strip club together in Houston in the ’80s. The two moved in together, and became close friends, sharing stories of their childhood traumas. According a 2008 blogpost from Byrum, after Smith got her big break with Playboy and started to become a celebrity, Byrum stayed close to the model, working as Smith personal assistant and manager, and remained her roommate until 1993.

During that time, Byrum says that she and Smith also became more than friends. Byrum recalls the two of them coming home after a meeting with the famed directing duo, the Coen Brothers, which landed her Smith’s first feature film role. To celebrate, they had an impromptu photo shoot in their home, with Missy taking photos of Smith in lingerie.

“She was so beautiful,” Missy says in the film, before stating that she and Smith had a sexual relationship. “She was an exceptional—she got a lot of practice, she was good at what she did,” she added with a laugh. “She was a good lover, a very good lover.”

Though Missy does not assign her or Smith’s sexuality a label in the film, she does say, “I found it impossible to be intimate with a male, I didn’t trust men. But I found it very easy to be intimate with her. That kept me fulfilled for a very long time. I loved her.”

Smith was also publicly dating men and got married to billionaire J. Howard Marshall in 1994, whom she met at the strip club in Houston. Missy says in You Don’t Know Me that eventually, her friendship with Smith soured as her fame grew and her substance abuse problems got worse, they parted ways.

“She told me all the time that she was going to die young, and I felt really bad. I should have believed her,” she says, while tearing up. “I shouldn’t have said the stuff I said because now I can’t take it back.” But years after they stopped speaking, Missy says she saw in an Anna Nicole Smith documentary on TV, in which, she says, the model claimed Missy’s abusive childhood trauma as her own.

“She said that she was raped at home, that she had to run away from home, and that she was beaten,” Missy says. “I was shocked, because I knew that was not her childhood coming out of her mouth. That was my childhood. That’s exactly the way it happened to me, and the way I relayed it to her.” Missy goes on to defend Smith’s mother. In her 2008 blog, Byrum writes that it was seeing Smith’s mother vilified in the media that prompted her book, When You Wished Upon A Star “The Evolution of Anna Nicole Smith.”

It’s an unexpected ending to a disjointed documentary. Obviously, Smith can’t be there to speak for herself or verify or deny any of Missy’s claims. But all of the above certainly adds an interesting new wrinkle to the legacy of Anna Nicole Smith.