Something From Nothing: Top 14 Famous Gold Diggers

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14) Anna Nicole Smith

She’s known worldwide as the most famous gold digger of all, but she ended up with practically nothing for all her troubles. She’d been a model and actress before sliding downhill to the job of strip club dancer when she met 87-year-old billionaire J. Howard Marshall. Of course it was love at first sight. During their two-year “affair,” he proposed several times and gave her dozens of gifts. She divorced her husband at the time and married Marshall in 1994. She immediately set up the sweetest deal of the century, while constantly maintaining she wasn’t a gold digger.

She never lived in the same house with Marshall, never had sex with him, and only kissed him on the mouth less than a dozen times. She still maintained that he was the love of her life. Fourteen months later, Marshall was dead and Smith thought she had her payoff coming. She claimed that Marshall had promised her half his estate if she married him, and a decade-long court case between her and Marshall’s children began. Tied up in legal wrangling, it went all the way to the U.S.. Supreme Court. The entire case still hadn’t been decided when Smith died, although it’s still being pursued in the name of her daughter.