Spencer Pratt has confessed to selling a photo of teenage Mary-Kate Olsen partying with Henry Winkler’s son Max Winkler for an astonishing sum of money.
“The Hills” alum discovered Mary-Kate’s “photo shrine” in her friend Max Winkler’s bedroom in 2004, she confessed in an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, “The Man You Hated: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain,” scheduled for release on January 27.
“I think it was around $90,000,” Pratt recently told Page Six Radio’s Danny Murphy, Evan Real and Ian Moll about the amount he raised for the photo of then-teenage Olsen. And he added that the first photo he ever sold of the “Full House” star, 37, was sold to entertainment publication In Touch for $50,000.
“These lovely people are already millionaires,” he said of the big-name actress, noting, “I didn’t sell anything…. You wouldn’t post[on your Instagram account].”
Pratt, 42, said the problem was caused by another photo that he didn’t actually sell.
“There’s a picture of me from a semi-formal, and Mary-Kate, she looks drunk,” he told Page Six Radio.
“I didn’t sell that photo,” he added. “I’m in it too. It’s someone else that I get a little excited about. But my pictures were beautiful.”
When asked if he had heard from her, Pratt joked that he had received a “Christmas card” from Lowe’s fashion designer.
Representatives for Mr. Olsen and Mr. Winkler did not immediately respond to Page Six’s requests for comment.
Pratt wrote in his memoir that he stumbled across the photo during the “golden age of tabloid voyeurism” in 2004 and seized the opportunity to “monetize” his “proximity to fame.”
“Young love captured in European hotels, Hollywood parties and stolen moments,” he wrote of Max’s “photo shrine” to ex Mary-Kate. “I realized this is a wasted resource.”
“I asked Max if I could remove the photo from the wall, as you know, for his healing process,” he wrote. “He didn’t say no, so I took it as a yes.”
Pratt walked away with the photo and, in a “moment of no return,” eventually contacted the editors of Us Weekly and asked for suggestions for images that would “show her as a normal teenager, partying.”
He was contacted by a photo agency, he wrote, who then gave the photos “as if arranging a drug deal rather than trading teenage love photos.”
“At 20 years old, I was turning a friend’s romantic misfortune into startup capital,” he wrote about the experience.
“Less than a week later, proof of my entrepreneurial genius was staring back at me from the InTouch cover at the gas station. Beyond the ‘TEENS GONE WILD!’ cover,” he recalled.
“A shot of the constellations in the sky and Mary-Kate – ‘Look at all the sky!’ – and I was in the background, frozen mid-shaka. I wasn’t selling that frame. Others were shopping, and now I was part of the product, not just a seller. My face was now forever associated with Mary-Kate Olsen’s wild figure, preserved in grocery store checkouts across America.”
He later wrote that he opened an envelope containing a “$50,000 check” and whispered to himself, “I’m rich.”
