Meet The Private Eye Who Recorded JFK And Marilyn Monroe Having Sex

Fred Otash was a character out of a pulpy crime noir. He looked like a guy who’d walk around with a stogie in his mouth, never seen in public without a cheap suit. He was a private eye, someone who, according to the Hollywood Reporter, “charged hundreds of dollars per day and spied on everyone from Rock Hudson to [Liberace],” back when TMZ’s Harvey Levin was filling his comically-sized water bottle with apple juice. Oh yeah, and one of the inspirations behind Jake Gittes also happened to record JFK and Marilyn Monroe having sex.

“Marilyn wanted a mini-phone listening device,” Otash claims in the notes, adding that he spied on her even while she was paying him to install recording equipment so that she could tape her own phone calls. “You could hide it in your bra. The microphone was a wristwatch. You could also put a suction cup on the phone. Later on, she wanted a sophisticated system put in her house. We wired up her phone because it started looking stupid with a suction cup.”

Otash listened in on Marilyn having sex with Kennedy when he was watching Lawford’s house in Malibu, allegedly while working for Howard Hughes, who was seeking general information with which to discredit the Democrats. “When the original Lawford house was wired, Monroe was not part of the plan,” Otash says in the files. “It was to find out what the Democrats were up to on behalf of Howard Hughes and Nixon. Monroe became a by-product.”

The files include notes that he left for Colleen, in which he says he was conducting surveillance of Marilyn Monroe on the day she died.

“I listened to Marilyn Monroe die,” he claims in the notes, without elaborating, adding that he had taped an angry confrontation among Bobby Kennedy, Lawford and Monroe just hours before her death: “She said she was passed around like a piece of meat. It was a violent argument about their relationship and the commitment and promises he made to her. She was really screaming and they were trying to quiet her down. She’s in the bedroom and Bobby gets the pillow and he muffles her on the bed to keep the neighbors from hearing. She finally quieted down and then he was looking to get out of there.” (Via)

Read about the rest of Otash’s “secret files” at the Reporter, and try to imagine how the press would have covered a story as “shocking” as an attractive president having sex with a gorgeous actress in a Perez Hilton world.

The white is semen.

(Banner via) (Via the Hollywood Reporter)

×