The Valley star Jesse Lally is explaining his connection to the late Anna Nicole Smith.
“I met her. [We] did a photoshoot for TrimSpa in Miami, and we remained friends for, like, a year and a half,” Lally, 43, said of Smith during a Tuesday, May 21, appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen.
The TrimSpa commercial in question, which was shot during the early 2000s, depicted Smith and Lally rolling around on a beach together and canoodling in the water. Lally also carried Smith on his back and kissed her neck in the steamy advertisement.
The commercial claimed that Smith lost more than 69 pounds while using the dietary supplement designed for weight loss.
“Get the attention you deserve. TrimSpa: be envied,” voiceover narration said as Smith and Lally frolicked in the waves.
Smith was a spokesperson for TrimSpa from 2003 until her death from combined drug intoxication at age 39 in 2007. Years after Smith’s death, Lally shared a throwback photo of himself and the Playboy model.
“#Tbt keeping it classy with #annanicolesmith,” he captioned a December 2013 Instagram snap of him and Smith posing with their tongues out in matching white bathrobes.
In addition to her success as a model, Smith made headlines during her career for her highly publicized second marriage to billionaire J. Howard Marshall, who was 63 years her senior. Marshall died at age 90 in 1995, one year after the pair tied the knot. Smith was accused of marrying Marshall for his money, which she denied.
Smith shared son Daniel, who died at age 20 in 2006, with ex Billy Wayne Smith and daughter Dannielynn, 17, with ex Larry Birkhead. Dannielynn enjoyed an outing with her father at the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Kentucky, earlier this month.
“We are having a great time,” Birkhead, 51, exclusively told Us Weekly during the event on May 4. “Dannielynn is enjoying, for one of [her] first years, getting into the fashion of the Derby. She wore a dress that was Janet Jackson’s on Friday and got a major haircut because she wanted ‘another look’ for Derby Day.”
When Dannielynn was a baby, Birkhead filed a lawsuit against Smith’s then-live-in partner Howard K. Stern, who was listed as the father on Dannielynn’s birth certificate, to establish his paternity rights. After a high-profile legal battle, the results of the paternity test were made public in April 2007, revealing that Birkhead is Dannielynn’s father.
Birkhead told Us in January 2020 that public perception of his relationship with Smith does not match the reality.
“People think it was, like, a one-night stand that I had with Anna and then I got lucky and won this DNA lottery, when it was, like, a two-year relationship with, admittedly, highs and lows,” he said at the time. “But it was a crazy love story.”
The Valley airs Tuesdays on Bravo at 9 p.m. ET.