There’s no controversy over the movie scenes or her famous skinny dip, but several stills on the internet purport to come from a nude shoot Milano did for the first issue of Bikini magazine (from the publishers of Ray Gun) in 1993.
In reality, the pics do not all come from there. (That would have been a helluva magazine spread!) Thanks to several of our commenters and some old magazines in my own collection, we are now able to identify a source for most of the nudes.
Four of the images did come from that edition of Bikini. These were the first Milano nudes to appear. She would have been 19 at the time, and this edition hit the newsstand two years before the release of Milano’s first film nudity in Embrace of the Vampire or her first TV nudity in an episode of Outer Limits .
The images are authentic, by Milano’s own admission. Alyssa said in an interview:
“I didn’t pose nude for Bikini. I posed nude for a coffee-table book about celebrities and their tattoos, and the money was going to go to pediatric AIDS. But the book never came out and the photographer sold the pictures to Bikini without telling me. I could do nothing because the photographer owned the rights to the pictures.”
That explanation does not seem truthful for two reasons: (1) No tattoos appear in the photos; (2) One blogger says he worked on the photoshoot in the desert, during which Milano was accompanied by her mother, and he was there as an employee of Bikini magazine.
Not that it really matters. They key fact is that the images are authentic.
The next group comes from a 1995 spread in Celebrity Sleuth magazine, volume 8, number 3. The Sleuth chose the 25 sexiest women of 1995, placing Milano in the #2 spot. That was certainly an appropriate rank for her, perhaps even too low, since Milano burned up the screen that year. In our poll for the top nude scenes of 1995, Milano appeared in both the top film scene and the top cable TV scene!
Note that I am not vouching for the fact that all of these pictures really portray Alyssa Milano. The “muddy” ones are obviously consistent with the sepia-toned pics that appeared in Bikini mag, which Milano admitted posing for in the interview cited above, but some of the others seem doubtful, especially the one on the lower left.
Three years later, a third group was published in a French-language gentleman’s magazine called Newlook in their June, 1998 issue.
This layout represented the first appearance of the color photographs of a woman in Native American gear alleged to be Milano. Newlook did not seem to be completely convinced of their authenticity, since those photos were relegated to the status of tiny inserts, but the editors did also publish a larger (non-nude) image which seemed to be from the same shoot. That particular one portrays a woman wearing a Native American headdress.