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Melissa Prophet is a former beauty queen. She was Miss Los Angeles and Miss California. She was third runner-up in the Miss World Pageant as well as the Miss USA Pageant. She won 14 first place trophies in various contests. She appeared in a nude pictorial in the May, 1987 issue of Playboy. "Melissa Prophet," Ivan Nagy said, was a "house girl" for international financier Adnan Kashoggi, procuring women for him while living in his home, a statement echoed by former Playboy model Cathy St. George, who was friendly with Prophet in the late 1980s, and by film executive Paul Rosenfeld, who knew Prophet through the man she would later marry, longtime Simpson friend Craig Baumgarten. Producer Joel Silver knew Prophet well, too, but was not actually a customer, though Melissa would set him up on dates. Producer Robert Evans actually went into business with Prophet..." (High Concept, pg. 96) In 1986, Playboy Playmate Cathy St. George was invited by her friend Melissa Prophet to attend a Malibu beach party. St. George knew of Prophet as "one of the biggest madams in L.A. at that time." (High Concept, pg. 126) High Concept says Prophet snorted coke with Simpson. (pg. 127) Prophet eventually married former Columbia executive Craig Baumgarten, who was fired by the company when they found out he produced and appeared in the 1974 porno Sometimes Sweet Susan. They formed the management company Baumgarten-Prophet Entertainment, which produced TNT’s "The Hunchback," which starred Mandy Patinkin, Richard Harris and Salma Hayek and "Cold Around the Heart," a co-production with Oliver Stone’s Illusion Entertainment for FOX, starring David Caruso and Kelly Lynch. Prophet and Baumgarten eventually split. Prophet played Nicky's wife Jennifer in the Marty Scorsese movie Casino. Roger Ebert writes in a crush review of 1985's Invasion USA: "The movie's worst, most thankless role goes to Melissa Prophet, who plays a newspaper reporter. She stands around at the scenes of all the many violent crimes in this movie, snapping photographs and being angry. (Like many photographers in the movies, she acts as if photography consists of pointing the camera in the direction of the action and recording the largest possible view.) This woman is angry at everyone. She spouts off to cops, badmouths security guards, and when Norris saves her life from savage terrorists she brushes his hand off her sleeve and bitterly snarls, "Thanks a lot, cowboy!" Never in the movie does she write or file a story or a photograph, and (this is most amazing) at no point does her presence in the movie make the slightest difference. She never interacts with anybody else for any purpose. She just stands around with her camera, being mad." From People magazine 8/8/94: "The woman mentioned most often [about having affairs with O.J. Simpson] is actress Tawny Kitaen [former Penthouse Pet], 32, cohost of ABC's now defunct America's Funniest People and mother of California Angels pitcher Chuck Finley's out-of-wedlock child. Three sources, who insist on anonymity, claim Simpson carried on an extramarital affair with Kitaen in the mid-'80s. During that time, one source says, Simpson regularly ''showered Tawny with gifts and kept her in hotel suites'' that were ''never a long drive away'' from wherever Simpson and Nicole were staying. Kitaen's manager, Melissa Prophet, who happens to be the wife of producer Craig Baumgarten, a longtime friend of Simpson's, declined comment in all matters regarding her client's past or present relationship with Simpson."
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