Paternity claims
Larry Birkhead
Birkhead was a freelance celebrity photographer in Los Angeles, California. Birkhead denied receiving money for media interviews, though he has received royalties for archived pictures he took of Smith.
According to Birkhead's testimony on February 10, 2007, while on the stand, he and Smith dated on and off from August 2005 to February 2006.[7]
Howard K. Stern
Stern was Smith's attorney who was named executor of her will which was drafted in 2001 by Eric James Lund, Esq. During the case, Stern denied that he had received money from media interviews he has conducted since Smith's death, though he admitted that he gave an interview to Entertainment Tonight on a flight that the show chartered immediately after her death.[8] As a lawyer of Smith's in the continuing litigation over the estate of her late husband, billionaire J. Howard Marshall, he would be entitled to a contingent fee of roughly $5 million, five percent of any money she was awarded.[9]
Following the death of the baby's half-brother Daniel Wayne Smith, Smith put Stern's name on the disputed second birth certificate issued for the baby then known as Hannah Rose.[10]
In an interview on CNN's Larry King Live after the death of Smith's son, Stern said that he and Smith had been in a relationship for "a very long time", and claimed he was the father.[11]
Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt
Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, the husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor at the time, asserted that he had a 10-year-long affair with Smith. He claimed that he could potentially be the father of Smith's daughter and threatened to file a lawsuit if the courts granted custody to either Howard K. Stern or Larry Birkhead.[12] On February 12, 2007, Prinz von Anhalt publicly announced his intention to pursue a paternity claim and acknowledged that his marriage might come to an end if his claims of being the father were proven true.[13] Subsequently, on February 15, 2007, he submitted legal documents at a courthouse in Santa Monica, California, seeking a DNA test to establish whether he was the biological father of the baby.[14]
On February 20, 2007, he took a lie detector test in his attorney's office in Los Angeles. Prinz von Anhalt passed three lie detector tests that week, according to his attorney. The tests included questions about whether he had an affair with Smith and whether he could possibly be the child's father.[15] On March 23, 2007, he submitted a DNA sample to a Los Angeles clinic even though he was not involved in the paternity suit between Stern and Birkhead. He did not have a sample of the baby's DNA to analyze against, nor did he have a court order to submit to testing, but had stated that he wanted to be prepared if his paternity case had continued.[16] On April 10, 2007, after the paternity test results were made public, representatives of Prinz von Anhalt released this statement wishing Birkhead well with raising the baby: "We never intended to take Dannielynn from anyone, we were just here in case Prinz von Anhalt was the father. We wish Larry luck in raising Dannielynn and we wish him the best."[17]
Alexander Denk
Denk is an Austrian-American film actor and was the personal bodyguard of Smith until her death on February 8, 2007.
He revealed to the entertainment news show Extra that he had engaged in a two-year romantic relationship with Smith after he was hired to play the chef on The Anna Nicole Show and subsequently became her bodyguard. Denk said “there’s always a possibility” that he's Dannielynn's father when the interviewer directly questioned him about it.
When asked if Smith ever revealed to him the identity of her daughter's father, Denk responded, "She always told me she wanted to have her kids with me. Denk was not certain he was the baby's father and claimed that Smith "always told me I want you to be there and care for Dannielynn no matter what, no matter who is the father, because I took care of Anna with her health and everything, and she wanted to make sure her baby is healthy. And also this thing about the dieting and stuff, she doesn't want her baby to be overweight and obese. She wants to make sure she is healthy."[18]
J. Howard Marshall
J. Howard Marshall II, also deceased, was Smith's second husband. In February 2007, the New York Daily News claimed to have seen an unpublished manuscript by Donna Hogan, Smith's younger half-sister, saying that Smith had become pregnant by Marshall: "To her family, she hinted that she had used the old man's frozen sperm, and would be giving birth to Marshall's child".[19]