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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader Spencer Henry and today we're trying something different. So get this. I'm on the phone with my friend Caroline. She's one of my best friends. Actually, my sixth grade girlfriend for all of 10 hours before I culture that evening and said, hey, let's just be friends. But here we are. Still friend. 18 years later, still in a relationship of the friendly kind. But you know what else Caroline is? Caroline is?

Caroline is a cult babe. She is dedicated. She listens every week. Her parents listen just the best. Anyway, so we're chatting on the phone the other night and I was planning out my April episode. Well, this was actually a few weeks ago. I was planning out my April episodes and we start chatting about the OJ Simpson case that I covered in March. It's one of her favorite cases to talk about. And she was like, wait, would you ever cover Marilyn Monroe? And I was pretty quick to shut it down because listen, the 1950s, 1960s, definitely my favorite era influences a lot of the music that I listen to.

A lot of the music that I listen to came from the 1950s, 1960s and it's also where I get a lot of like style inspiration from. I just love it. But it was just was just never interested in covering this specific case. But I did want to know more because I knew that Marilyn Monroe's death. I was like, yeah, I was either, you know, an accidental overdose or, you know, she died by suicide. And I also knew that there was a lot of like, headspiracies around it, a lot of questions around her death. Like was JFK involved. But I thought they were just kind of like,

those woo-woo conspiracy theories like pull out your foil hats. But I'm like, listen, I want to learn more. So I start listening to this book. It's called Goddess, the Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe by this guy named Anthony Summers. And it's a super famous book talks about her relationships, her psychiatrist, the author interviewed over 600 people for the book. So it is packed full of information. And once I started listening to this book, I just got hooked. I went to Reddit and went down that whole wormhole. And then I started reading all these different articles online and I'll source them in the description for

today's episode. But now here we are. I guess we're doing it. We're talking about the tragic life and death of probably one of the biggest names in Hollywood history. I also feel the need to clarify before we dive into all of this. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. This is the first time I can really think of us talking about something like this other than when we've maybe talked about Britney Murphy's death, which was pretty questionable. So I don't even know if you guys are going to be into this. I hope you find it interesting and listen with an open mind because I think you'll be pretty shocked by the end. And if you

guys like it, let me know. Super open to talking about more instances like this in the future. But again, that's on you. Please rate and review on iTunes if you enjoy listening. And if you want to see pictures from each

week's episode, follow Colt leader at Colt leader podcast on Instagram. We'll start at the very, very beginning. She was born Norma Jean Mortensen in Los Angeles,

California on June 1st of 1926 to her mom, Gladys Pearl Baker, her father unknown. On her birth certificate, her dad is listed as Edward Mortensen,

which is Norma's ex-husband, though it's very unlikely he was the actual father. And here's why. So Edward, his real name was Martin Edward Mortensen.

He married Gladys Monroe on October 11th of 1924, but the couple separated just seven months after their

nuptials on May 26th of 1925. The separation they cited the cause of divorce as having no desire for further contact.

Now, if the timeline plays out as it's been historically recorded, it's highly unlikely that three months after divorcing,

again, after wanting no further contact that they met up had sex. So it rolls him out because that's when Norma aka

Maryland would have been conceived. Gladys uses her maiden name, Monroe on the birth certificate, but used Mortensen for

the baby's name in order to avoid the social stigma of having an illegitimate child. So who's her father? Though it's not for sure,

it's most likely a man named Charles Gifford. He was handsome, he was actually Gladys' boss. Gladys was a film cutter

at consolidated film industries, and if you look at pictures side by side of Edward Mortensen and Charles Gifford,

it's pretty apparent that if one of these two men was the father, it was definitely Charles. He has more of like a rounded

face, similar features, whereas Edward Mortensen was very much more of like a square face, not so much of a

looker. In an interview later on, Maryland's first husband said Maryland herself believed that Charles was

her father, so if she's saying I'm buying it. Now this wasn't Gladys' first attempt at a family either.

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