Fever Dreams From My Real Father #1: The Nude Photos Debunked

At the center of Gilbert's theory that Frank Marshall Davis is Obama's father is a series of nude and fetish photographs. They were the focus of his second promotional video for the DVD. They're featured prominently on his website, and he consistently references them in radio interviews. Radio host Peter Boyles has called them the "Rosetta Stone" that will unlock Obama's secret past, and Alex Jones declared "It's her in these photos."

The "her" to which Jones refers is Obama's mother Ann Dunham, who Gilbert claims is the woman depicted in these photos. Three of the photos were originally posted on the website of The Astute Bloggers in October 2008, where it was claimed that they had been forwarded by a reader. Even though one photo plainly bore a watermark of "free-vintage-porn.com", some people were convinced that the photos were of Ann Dunham. Over time, the claim evolved so that it was Frank Marshall Davis who was said to have taken the photos as well (perhaps an unsurprising development, as The Astute Bloggers website was also responsible for starting the rumor that Frank was Obama's father).

Here's what the narrator of Dreams From My Real Father has to say on the matter:

"At some point, she agreed to pose. These photos were taken a few weeks before Christmas 1960, when Mom was about five weeks pregnant with me. There's no mistaking: this is MY mama."

Gilbert has further elaborated on the photos outside the film itself. In his website Q&A:

I also obtained seven indecent photos of Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, taken at Frank Marshall Davis’ house, suggesting an intimate connection between Dunham and Davis...

What new revelations are in Dreams from My Real Father?
First, I make the case that Barack Obama’s real father was Communist Frank Marshall Davis. Next, the relationship between Davis and Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, is illustrated with seven indecent photographs of Dunham, some including other women, taken at Frank Marshall Davis’ house in Honolulu.

On the 'Breaking News' portion of his website:

Racy photos of Barack Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, have recently surfaced in vintage fetish and bondage magazines. The photos, taken at Frank Marshall Davis' house in Honolulu, appeared in Bizarre Life, Exotique, Secret Pleasures, and Battling Babes.

And in interviews:

But if you look at the many, many photos of Ann Dunham and the naked girl in the pictures -- especially you can see her teeth; she has some recessed teeth on the left side -- it's very obviously Ann Dunham.

Most people didn't take the photo claim very seriously, because the woman in the pictures doesn't really look all that much like Ann Dunham. Sure, she bears a passing resemblance, in the same sense that as a bespectacled young white guy, I bear a passing resemblance to Daniel Radcliffe. Frankly, the woman in the photos looks a lot more like Joan Collins than Ann Dunham.

Since their original appearance in 2008, some have attempted to debunk the photos by identifying the model. This has proven fruitless, and unsurprisingly so; many mid-century nude and fetish models were nameless faces, anonymous to the world at large.

To his credit, Gilbert did somehow locate additional photos of the mystery woman he claims is Ann. And as noted above, he named several magazines where he claims they appeared. Both on his website and in Dreams, he shows the covers of six specific issues, and the website (on the right) flatly states "Frank Marshall Davis' photos of Ann Dunham appear in these vintage men's magazines." The magazines Gilbert shows are:

Exotique #2
Exotique #4
Exotique #6
Exotique #14
Secret Pleasures
Battling Babes
Bizarre Life #9

The last three magazines were published in 1958, 1957, and 1969, respectively. Exotique was published between 1955 and 1959.

Curiously, though, the pictures Gilbert shows appear in NONE of the issues he identifies. I consulted with the owner of a fansite for these magazines, who checked and confirmed that Gilbert's photos are nowhere to be seen in these issues. I personally reviewed copies of Exotique #14, Battling Babes and Secret Pleasures, and they included NO pictures of the mystery model.

What Secret Pleasures DID feature, on page 26, was this photo:

Who is the woman? I have no idea. But look at the chair she's seated on. At the pillow in the chair. At the window behind her. At the record player to her right, and the records peeking out below her leg. At the cabinet behind her, and at the floor beneath her. Look familiar?

That's right, it's the exact same setting as the 'Ann' photos. Published in a 1958 men's magazine. And it's not the only one. From Exotique #25, pages 7 and 40, respectively:

Again, does that setting look familiar? Same couch, same floor, same picture on the wall, even the same random pillow arrangement on top of the couch as seen in other photos in Gilbert's videos. The woman is even wearing the same spiked-ball earrings as Gilbert's 'Ann'. Who is she? I don't know, but she looks an awful lot like the woman who appears with Gilbert's 'Ann' in several photos in his movie.

Now granted, these photos alone don't prove that the mystery model couldn't be Ann. Perhaps Davis took these in 1958, and he didn't change the arrangement of his room for two years. That's odd, and hardly the most compelling explanation, but it's not impossible. (Even though Gilbert himself would likely concede that these are from the same photoshoot.)

Unfortunately for Gilbert, that's not all. Further up this post, there's a screenshot of Gilbert's own website, with a video still that shows the woman he claims is 'Ann' sitting on a couch, pulling a black opera glove onto her left arm. That image appears in Gilbert's Dreams and in his promotional videos as well, but he's never released a full-size copy of that photo.

I found one, however:

This picture appeared in Exotique #23, on page 22. In 1958. When Ann Dunham was only 15 years old. Two years before Ann Dunham even moved to Hawaii.

It can also be found reprinted in volume 2 of the 3-volume Exotique hardcover collection.

We may never know who the mystery model is. But the Dunham family didn't move to Hawaii until the summer of 1960. Unless Ann Dunham had access to a time machine in the 1960s, it simply cannot be her.

Moreover, Joel Gilbert knows this. He found that opera glove photo; it was not circulating the web as an 'Ann' photo prior to his videos. He knows it came from Exotique, a magazine that ceased publication in 1959. From WND: "Gilbert found that several of the photos in the collection appeared in a magazine called Exotique, published by pin-up photographer Leonard Burtman, who worked in New York City."

Thus he knows this picture was published two years before Ann first stepped foot in Hawaii, years before she could have met Frank Marshall Davis. And yet he explicitly claims, multiple times, that the photo was TAKEN at Christmastime 1960. This is not a lie of ignorance or mistake; it is a lie of pure, fully-informed malice.

And that's the BEST-case scenario for Gilbert. Gilbert knows that Ann was born in 1942, and he knows he found these pictures in 1958 magazines. If Gilbert truly believes that these ARE somehow pictures of a 15-year-old Ann, then he's been distributing hundreds of thousands of DVDs featuring nude and erotic pictures of someone he believes to be an underage girl.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gilbert has thus far refused to disclose the actual sources of the erotic photos he put in his videos. He identified six issues, none of which checked out, and five of which contradict his 1960 date anyway. As shown above, to disclose the true issues would be to destroy his own claim that the photos are of Ann, and to let his audience know that he's lying to them. And so he refuses to cite his sources, even when they're just magazine issue numbers.

So there you have it. The people who've said 'Frank Davis took naked pictures of Stanley Ann Dunham in December of 1960' are provably wrong. The woman they claim is Ann was having her photographs from this very shoot published at least as early as 1958. When Ann was a 15-year-old in Washington, years before she ever stepped foot on Hawaii or could have conceivably even met Frank Marshall Davis. Joel Gilbert has unnecessarily obscured the actual publication dates of the pictures he found, because he knows those simple facts will prove to everyone that he's lying about them being taken in 1960, and lying about Frank Marshall Davis taking them of Ann, and lying about them being evidence of an intimate relationship between Frank and Ann.

As I wrote in my first post in this series, "I can't promise that I'll convince everyone that Joel Gilbert is a charlatan and his film is a joke, but I think by this time next week, anyone who continues to trust Gilbert has some depressingly low standards for what they'll believe." I'm sure some people will still prefer to believe in him and his photos, and nothing will convince them otherwise. To them, I can only say this: just as Joel Gilbert has known for months, you now know that his photos were being published in 1958. Possibly even earlier. So if you still want to believe that the woman in those photos is Ann Dunham, that means you also have to believe that the woman in those photos is no more than 15 years old. Keep that in mind as you talk about them, and post them online, and save them on your computer. I know you're not doing anything illegal or morally disgusting (because it's not Ann), but what are you telling yourselves?

Finally, even though I've reached #1 in this series and I think I've solidly proven my case, I had two more research developments on Monday that I'll be typing up in the next few days. So be sure to keep an eye out for those to come.