LOS ANGELES -- The husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor had a decade-long affair with Anna Nicole Smith and may be her daughter's father, he told The Associated Press on Friday.

The claim, by Prince Frederick von Anhalt, comes amid a paternity suit over Smith's 5-month-old daughter, Dannielynn. The birth certificate lists Dannielynn's father as attorney Howard K. Stern, but former boyfriend Larry Birkhead is waging a legal challenge, saying he is the father.

"If you go back from September, she wasn't with one of those guys, she was with me," von Anhalt told The Associated Press. He said he would file a lawsuit if Dannielynn is turned over to Stern or Birkhead.

Von Anhalt, 59, and Gabor, 90, have been married for more than 20 years.

Gabor, a onetime sex symbol and star of such 1950s films as "Moulin Rouge" and "Queen of Outer Space," has been in declining health in recent years and suffered a stroke in 2005. She was partially paralyzed in a car crash in 2002.

Von Anhalt, who is Gabor's eighth husband, said he and Smith first met in the 1990s when Smith was still married to elderly oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II.

He said Smith approached him and Gabor at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

"She was a very big fan of Zsa Zsa and wanted to be like Zsa Zsa," he said. "She wanted to be a princess."

He said the two started an affair soon after, meeting over the years in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. For much of that time, he said, Smith urged him to make her a princess like his wife.

But short of divorcing the actress, he said the only solution would have been adopting Smith. Von Anhalt said he did consider that and even filled out adoption papers, but Gabor refused to sign them.