In 2002, Anna Nicole Smith was interviewed by Howard Stern. He tried to weigh her so he could win a bet.

Anna Nicole Smith's short life was full of amazing highs and devastating lows.

As a young girl, she dreamed of being a glamorous Hollywood starlet like her idol Marilyn Monroe. In her own way, she achieved that dream. She was named Playboy's Playmate of The Year and starred in a bunch of movies and TV shows. But as with her idol, the cost of that fame was steep.

By 2002, Smith was starring in her own reality TV series, The Anna Nicole Show, and she had become the punchline of late night talk show hosts, comedians and radio shock jocks around the world.

No topic of conversation was off the table when it came to the actress. Men openly discussed Smith's body, her weight and made sexual comments about her.

Watch: The official trailer for Netflix's Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me. Post continues after video.

In one episode of The Howard Stern Show, Howard Stern and his co-hosts openly discussed Smith's weight gain. A clip of the segment was included in the new Netflix documentary, Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me.

"For some reason she doesn't think she's heavy," Stern said to his co-hosts while discussing the reality series. "I would say she weighs 300 pounds at least."

A co-host then said: "I bet you a hundred bucks she's not over 300 but it's got to be so close, I think she's got to be 280/290."

"OK, let's do this. The person who comes closest within five pounds of her weight..." Stern said.

"We'll have a pool!" added his female co-host.

They then brought Smith into the studio for an interview. "Why are you always calling me fat all the time?" she asked as she sat down in front of the microphone. She was visibly upset and outnumbered.

"The way you dress, I don't think you're aware that you're a heavy-set woman," Stern told her, to which she replied: "I know I'm a big woman, so what?"

The radio host then attempted to convince Smith to weigh herself live on the show. "So I was guessing your weight, and I was going to say, today, can you please get on the scale? And then we'll have an over-under, that's all," he said.

When Smith refused to be weighed publicly during the national radio show, he told the visibly upset model he would give her $3000 and an Xbox for her son, Daniel. When she still refused, he offered to show her his penis. 

"Please? I could win $700... It'll be fun," he said.

It wasn't the first time Stern and his co-hosts had put Smith in an uncomfortable position. During a previous appearance on the show, Stern suggested that Smith should allow a behind-the-scenes staffer named Benjy Bronk to give her oral sex while she was there.

Bronk took Smith into the bathroom. When they returned to the studio, Bronk told Stern they only "made out" because Smith was on her period.

"Anna was nervous, it's the first thing I saw so I didn't want to force her into it," he said on air. "I think she really wants to do it, but not under these conditions."

A few years after the scale incident, Smith appeared on The Sharon Osbourne Show. She told Osbourne and her co-host George Lopez that Stern and his co-hosts actually had a visible scale sitting in the studio, ready for her to step on it. And they all tried to pressure her to do it.

"They were all being mean, saying 'I know you weigh 300 pounds,'" she said. "That's not right for other women, for him to say that."

Smith later lost weight and became an advocate for an appetite suppressant called Trimspa. In 2004, she returned to The Howard Stern Show hoping for an apology.

"You owe me an apology; you called me a big, fat, porker pig and tried to get me up on a scale," she said to Stern, to which he replied: "And who helped you lose weight?"

"Does that get you off, to call people fat? Goodbye, I'm leaving," she said, before storming out of the studio.

Anna Nicole Smith in The Howard Stern Show. Image: The Howard Stern Show.

Smith died in February 2007, from an accidental drug overdose. She was 39 years old.

It's only now, 15 years on from her death, that we are reexamining her treatment at the hands of the media.

Smith's biggest critics picked on her weight, her drug use, and her inability to hold it together under the spotlight. They made her struggle a punchline and used it to sell newspapers and attract advertising dollars. 

Only now can we see that it would have been impossible for anyone to hold it together while people publicly commented on their body, called them a gold digger, and suggested they perform sexual acts for entertainment. 

Even in her wildest dreams, Smith could never have imagined the steep cost of her brief years of fame.

Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me is streaming on Netflix now.

Keryn Donnelly is a freelance pop culture writer and editor. You can follow her on Instagram and TikTok.

Feature Image: The Howard Stern Show/Getty.