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The National Enquirer's latest cover story is a piece called "Whitney's Final Minutes," meant to be a recreation of Whitney Houston's death in her Beverly Hills hotel room on Saturday.
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The tagline claims to tell readers "what REALLY happened," and a morbid picture of Houston unconscious on a bathroom floor is splashed across the magazine's cover.
The idea of exploiting Whitney Houston's tragic death before her body is even in the ground by reliving her final minutes is questionable enough.
But if disturbed readers look closer at the Enquirer cover, they'll see the words "Photo Re-Creation" printed at the bottom.
Because The National Enquirer didn't just devote an issue to Whitney Houston's death. They paid a model to pose as Whitney Houston's dead body.
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Dodai Stewart, who broke the story for Jezebel, was beside herself at the magazine's actions. Slamming the publication as a "diabolical tabloid," Stewart called the coverage of Houston dying "the worst Deathsploitation ever."
The inside of the magazine, if possible, is even worse (you can check out scans from the issue here).
Another picture, opposite a photo entitled "Her Last Meal" that looks to be a random room service tray, is another photo of the fake Houston, this time actually lying in a bathtub.
The main article, penned by eight (yes, eight) different authors, asserts that the reason Houston was "dulled from booze and drugs" was that her doctors told her she had ruined her voice, driving her to reckless abandon.
And if that weren't enough, The National Enquirer also decided to collect all the covers they'd done on Whitney Houston, including a fake drug bust and the assertion that she was dying, in a collage dedicated to proving how the magazine had supposedly predicted the singer's death.
"In Denial!" the blood-red text screams. "As The Enquirer Tracked Her Descent into Hell, Whitney Refused to Admit She Had a Problem."
In the past, The National Enquirer has shocked Americans on the rare occasions when the newspaper has been correct in its findings.
The exposure of former Sen. John Edwards' adultery and the Ennis Cosby case caused some people to start viewing the tawdry tabloid as something more than a place to grab a few laughs about Angelina Jolie's mutant twins in line at the grocery store.
Nobody's laughing now. Whitney Houston's history of substance abuse is well-known, and the details of her death have been a source of public fascination for days.
But to pose a model as the singer's corpse, and then to say "I told you so" to a dead woman by claiming to have predicted her passing, is beyond laughable. It's despicable.
