Shady Shannon

ET’s Kevin Frazier confronts Gary Coleman’s ex-wife Shannon Price about the controversial hospital deathbed photo on the cover of Globe magazine, out now. Why did she take it?

“I know who took them but I want to deal with it privately between that person and I,” Shannon tells Kevin. Asked who took the shots, she replies, “I believe it was a close family member, but I did not authorize them [and] did not authorize them to give them to anyone.” When asked if the person who sold the picture was the person who had the only other copy, she replies, “Correct.” Shannon says she has not profited from the pictures sold to Globe, and when Kevin gave her a copy she said she was seeing it for the first time.

“Why would they want to be so malicious?” asks Shannon. “That’s brutal, tragic, upsetting that someone would put this out.”
Shannon says she’s frustrated that someone sold the pictures, “Because it comes back on me. Everyone thinks, ‘Oh she did it because she’s in it.’”

Shannon does admit to taking other pictures of Gary on her phone because she wanted to hold on to their last moment. “I wanted to have something that I could hold dear to my heart,” she says. “This was my last moment with him.”

As far as the battle of Gary’s will goes, Gary’s former manager Dion Mial is no longer fighting for the estate and the body, leaving Shannon and Anna Gray, who has been CEO of Gary’s company. “She was living with us for two months before Gary had kicked her out,” says Shannon. “He kicked her out because she spit beer on me. She was drinking one night and was out of control. And so Gary kicked her out. … She had told Gary she was jealous of me because I was coming in between him and her. And I said. ‘I thought you guys were never in a relationship,’ and he said she had thought in her mind we were together. Gary never saw her that way.”