What do The Pope and Marilyn Monroe have in common? Sex, scandal, expensive tastes in gowns and they’re both the topic of today’s Gotham Report. Read on…

Lock up your Prada and call off the gay wedding, the Pope is in town! Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Washington D.C. today on his first papal visit to the U.S. He was greeted off the plane by Satan and his clan: President Bush, first lady Laura Bush and their daughter, Jenna.

On the flight to the United States from Rome, his royal Popeness addressed the issue of clergy sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.

“It is a great suffering for the Church in the United States and for the church in general and for me personally that this could happen,” Benedict said. “I am deeply ashamed and we will do what is possible so this cannot happen again in the future.” Ah hum…

Benedict pledged that pedophiles would not be tolerated in the Catholic Church. “We will absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry,” he said. “It is more important to have good priests than many priests.”

Since 1950, the U.S. church has paid out over $2 billion in abuse costs, most of that in just the last six years.

And speaking of sex, scandal and lots of money, the New York Post reports that a 15 minute, FBI-classified, Marilyn Monroe sex film, was just sold to a New York businessman for $1.5 million. The silent, black and white film appears to have been shot in the 1950s and features Monroe performing oral sex on an unidentified man.

According to declassified documents and interviews, when the film first surfaced in the mid-’60s, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had his agents spend two weeks trying to prove that Monroe’s sex partner was either John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy, but they were never able to do so.

The video shows Monroe on her knees in front of a man whose face is just out of the shot. He never moves into the shot, indicating that he knew the camera was there, but Monroe never looks at the lens, said Morgan, who saw the footage.

Keya Morgan, a well-known memorabilia collector who brokered its purchase, said he discovered the film while doing research for a documentary on Monroe after talking with a former FBI agent.

“You see instantly that it’s Marilyn Monroe - she has the famous mole,” he said. “She’s smiling, she’s very charming, she’s very radiant, but she’s known for being radiant. She moves away, and then it [the footage] stops.”

The feds eventually confiscated the original footage - but not before an informant made a copy of it. Documents indicate that former baseball star (and Monroe’s ex-husband) Joseph DiMaggio, attempted to purchase the copy from the informant, but was refused.

Last month Morgan brokered the film’s sale to a wealthy New York businessman who wants to keep this steamy part of Monroe’s past buried.

“He said he’s just going to lock it up. He said, ‘I’m not going to make a Paris Hilton out of her. I’m not going to sell it, out of respect.’ ”

Source: The New York Post