Documenting someone’s life after they’ve died is complicated in any context. When you’re attempting to paint an accurate portrait of someone as high-profile and controversial as Anna Nicole Smith (born Vickie Lynn Hogan), peeling back the layers requires a different degree of fact-finding. In some ways, Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me director Ursula Macfarlane anticipated the many versions of the truth she was trying to tell. In fact, that’s exactly what drew her to Smith in the first place.

“There’s this whole mythology about her — she married a billionaire, she was a gold digger, she got into drugs, she tragically died,” Macfarlane tells Tudum. “When you actually start to dig beneath and find out who she truly was… the more you uncover, the more complex you realize it is.”

And in a story full of twists and tangles, there’s perhaps no more shocking moment than the one that comes during the last 10 minutes of the film. 

“I wanted everyone to see that she was a human being,” Smith’s longtime best friend Missy says. “She was someone's daughter, and she was someone's friend. There were a lot of people that really loved her.”

What happens at the end of the Anna Nicole Smith documentary?

Shortly before her death in 2007, Smith gave a television interview to Entertainment Tonight about growing up with her mother, Virgie Hart-Arthur. In it, she says she left home at 15 after being beaten and sexually assaulted. It’s a deeply troubling story — even more so when it’s revealed that it might not have been Smith’s story at all, but rather that of her longtime best friend Missy (who prefers her last name not be used), one of the key figures in the documentary. 

“I was shocked,” Missy says in the film. “Because I knew that wasn’t her childhood coming out of her mouth. That was my childhood — that’s exactly what happened to me, in the way that I told her.”

In an interview with Tudum, Missy explains that watching Smith recount the stories of her own childhood was disconcerting, but somehow convincing — in other words, even though Missy knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that what Smith was saying wasn’t true, Smith made it feel real.

“I was watching her and thinking, ‘Oh my god, is she so inebriated now that she believes it?’” Missy remembers. “Has she said it for so long, she’s convinced herself it’s true?”

In the film, Missy claims that Smith’s mother was actually one of her biggest cheerleaders, “coming to her rescue over and over again” over the years. 

“Her mother was the most chaste person I’ve ever met,” Missy tells Tudum. “She never smoked a cigarette. She never had one drink. Not a sip of alcohol ever touched her lips. They were vilifying her in the media, making her look like some kind of monster, which was completely untrue.”

Others corroborate the story, including Smith’s brother Donald Hart who says in the film, “Vickie told people that my mom abused her, and she did not abuse her. My mother was a very sweet and loving person.”

Though Hart-Arthur died of cancer in 2018, a few years before the filming of You Don’t Know Me, Macfarlane included footage from a TV interview with her, recorded after Smith died. 

“She would tell these stories about what a horrible childhood she had,” Hart-Arthur says in the clip. “I asked her one time, ‘Why do you tell such lies?’ [and] she said, ‘I wish you could just understand — I make more money telling sad stories than I make telling good stories.’”

“It was magical to watch,” Missy says about the first time she and Smith saw her Guess billboards in Los Angeles. “I'm so glad that she allowed me to be part of it with her, because that early part right there was just … the whole thing, it was just pure magic.”

Was Anna Nicole Smith lying about her life?

Though the film’s last few moments feel like a hard turn away from a story meant to inspire empathy for Smith, Macfarlane and producer Alexandra Lacey say those final notes reflect how they uncovered the truth while filming. 

“It fully mirrored our journey as filmmakers,” Lacey tells Tudum about discovering the bombshell fact. “It was one of the last things we found out, and we felt it [was] really important to let the audience know — but we also wanted the audience to be taken on that journey of Anna’s own narrative.”

Macfarlane says that it’s also important to note that much of the way that Anna Nicole Smith told her own story is unequivocally the truth, especially when it came to the aspects of her life that were the most scrutinized. For example, she says, though Anna Nicole Smith was widely viewed as a gold digger, her relationship with billionaire J. Howard Marshall was real.

“Everyone we spoke to who actually witnessed their relationship, as opposed to people just chattering and gossiping about it, said they genuinely loved each other and were good for each other,” Macfarlane says. She also hopes the film emphasizes another important truth: Anna Nicole was an incredibly loving and devoted mother, both to her son, Daniel, who died in 2006, and her daughter, Dannielynn. 

“She worked so hard to provide a good home for Daniel,” Macfarlane says. “A lot of people don’t know she was a loving mom. It wasn’t always easy for her, but she tried her best.”

In the midst of all this, though, the realization that Smith did fabricate some of her life story with the intention of garnering attention or sympathy still comes as a surprise. Macfarlane says she interpreted their discovery as Smith “tweaking the edges” of her own story — in other words, enhancing the narrative of her struggle toward success with a more rags-to-riches, against-all-odds tale that, for whatever reason, Smith believed would lead people to take her more seriously. 

“I think back to the strip club [scene] actually,” Lacey says. “They’re all sitting around and talking about what they were going through. Missy tells that story about Anna trying to heat up the water in their outdoor pool, and Missy says to her, ‘Honey, you’re going to have to have a better story if you’re going to hustle here.’ I think that stuck with her.”

Missy elaborates on that time in the strip club, saying, “I don’t know if it was therapy or what, but we’d all trade war stories. We were all abused in some form or another — but she wasn’t. She started making things up, and Virgie kept getting worse and worse as her story progressed. We all knew she was full of it, but we just let her do it because we loved her.”

Despite everything, Missy emphasizes that the built-in forgiveness and compassion she had for her friend hasn’t waned. Smith was deeply loved.

“The upside of time passing is that it doesn’t hurt anymore,” Missy says. “She was so so much more than the character she created — that wasn’t who she was. She was truly a beautiful human being. She was kind, empathetic and humble, and she could always laugh at herself.” 

Both Macfarlane and Lacey say that while the ending of You Don’t Know Me might feel shocking, it also speaks to the true nature of Anna Nicole Smith — a woman who, despite being under a microscope for much of her life, was impossible to fully know.

“The ending is a moment to reflect and look back and think, ‘OK, did she lie about everything? Did she lie about some things? Why did she lie? Do we have empathy for her? Do we realize that she did it for survival reasons?’” Macfarlane says. “It’s not a tied-in-a-bow Hollywood ending.”