![]() “If I can help one woman not do what I did - and what Brittany did - it would be worth it,” she said. Despite time's passage, Ragsdale recalled, she was hesitant: “Why do I have a horse in this race?” Then she spoke to her son, now 22, who encouraged her to share the story she’d only ever written in a yet-to-be-published memoir. On a tip from former People magazine reporter Sara Hammel, Hill turned to Ragsdale, who'd declined to talk in the aftermath of Murphy's death. Numerous relatives and members of her management team declined to participate, though Hill had better luck with fellow directors who’d worked with Murphy, like Amy Heckerling (“Clueless”) and Shawn Levy (“Just Married”). (CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images)īut even a dozen years after Murphy’s death, few were willing to talk about her. Someone in Hollywood who seems to have it all can also be one - and Brittany was.”īrittany Murphy as Tai Frasier in 1995's "Clueless," one of the roles that shot her to fame. Hill had previously made an Emmy-nominated HBO documentary about domestic violence and was interested in exploring how “you don’t have to be a poor woman living in rural North Carolina to be a victim of this. In the HBO Max series, Murphy’s co-stars and filmmakers allege that Monjack was interested in Murphy for her money and also controlled various elements of her life: He allegedly urged her to lose weight, forbade her from doing intimate scenes with other men and cut out her agents and managers.Ĭynthia Hill, the director of "What Happened, Brittany Murphy?" began looking into Monjack last summer, when Blumhouse Television asked if she’d be interested in pursuing a nonfiction series about the star. He was an independent film producer with scant credits to his name and a history of legal and financial problems, forced to pay more than $500,000 in a pair of lawsuits in 20 and with four evictions on his record. She had previously dated wealthy performers like Eminem and Ashton Kutcher. And through it all fans and tabloids alike questioned the nature of Murphy's relationship with Monjack. Forensic experts explained that traces of heavy metals found in Murphy's hair, which her father Angelo Bertolotti claimed as evidence of poisoning, were consistent with someone who regularly dyed their hair. Both were found dead at the Hollywood Hills home they shared.Īn investigation by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health ruled out toxic mold in their house. Murphy's cause of death, according to an autopsy, was pneumonia, anemia and multiple drug intoxication his was acute pneumonia and severe anemia. Monjack, who himself died in 2010 at age 40, just six months after Murphy, has long been at the center of that mystery. For the next 14 years, she kept the story private - until this year, when filmmakers approached her about participating in “What Happened, Brittany Murphy?” The two-part docuseries, premiering Thursday on HBO Max, investigates Murphy’s unexpected death in 2009, at age 32 - an event that has been shrouded in mystery and spawned endless conspiracy theories. He needs to pay child support and you’ve got a lot of money, so you pay it for him.’” “I thought the letter probably would have seemed like me saying: ‘He’s got a kid. And he’d never met Elijah, the boy she claimed was his son. She wanted to tell the star how he’d lied to, cheated on and ghosted her when she was four months pregnant with their child.īut by then, Ragsdale had not been romantically involved with Monjack for nearly a decade. She wanted to tell the 29-year-old newlywed that she felt Us Weekly was right: Monjack was a con man. “It was: ‘That poor woman.’”Īlmost immediately, Ragsdale said she began writing a letter to Murphy. It wasn’t: ‘How could he do this?’” she recalled. “The first feeling I had wasn’t jealousy. ![]() ![]() The guy who proposed to her with a diamond ring from Tiffany’s just two weeks after they met. There, next to the "Clueless" and "8 Mile" actor, was Simon Monjack, the man Ragsdale had once loved. But just as she was about to sink into the magazine's tales of Lindsay Lohan and Brangelina, Ragsdale noticed a cover line that alarmed her: Riding the Paris Métro home from her office in 2007, Elizabeth Ragsdale began flipping through an issue of Us Weekly given to her by the receptionist at the law firm where she worked as a paralegal. Their mysterious deaths are explored in a new HBO Max series. Brittany Murphy, left, with husband Simon Monjack in 2007.
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