The man who claims to have taken the famous ‘Napalm Girl’ photo speaks out in Netflix doc

The man who claims to have taken the famous “Napalm Girl” photo that helped reshape the Vietnam War is speaking out in a new documentary as The Associated Press stands by the photographer who has been credited for decades.

Netflix’s “The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo” focuses on the dispute over who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo seen around the world in 1972. The film claims that AP photographer Nick Ut was wrongly given credit, and the filmmakers tracked down the actual man allegedly behind the camera: Nguyễn Thành Nghệ.

“Nick Ut came with me on that mission,” Nghi says in the Netflix documentary released last week. “But he didn’t take that photo. He took some photos from afar. And that photo was of me.”

AP stands by photographer as new NETFLIX doc questions the authenticity of the famous “Napalm Girl” photo from the Vietnam War

“The AP guy accepted the photo and gave me a printout and the rest of the film. I gave the rest to a journalist in Saigon,” he continued, saying he was paid $20 and took his friends out for drinks with the money.

The Vietnamese journalist said he “rarely” took credit for the photos he took during the war, “only on some special occasions.”

The origins of the documentary stem from Carl Robinson, an AP photo editor who was working in the Saigon bureau at the time the photo was taken. Robinson said he was directed by his supervisor at the time, revered photojournalist Horst Vass, to credit Ott rather than Ngee, and that he did so for fear of losing his job, a decision he said has haunted him for more than 50 years. Fez died in 2012 and Ott was not involved in the documentary.

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Ott “is also a victim in many ways,” said Gary Knight, a photojournalist and executive producer of “The Stringer.”

“I was never consulted, as far as we know,” Knight says in the film. “It was just given to him. So it’s like a suicide statement, you know. Someone threw a hot rock at him.”

Published by the Associated Press Its own extensive investigations in the Origins of the Photo earlier this year and concluded that it was “possible” that Ott took the photo but that it could not be proven conclusively “due to the passage of time, the deaths of several of the key players involved and limitations of the technology.” While the new findings raise unanswered questions, and the AP acknowledges that it remains open to the possibility that Ott did not take the photo, there is “no evidence” that Nge took the photo either.

An AP spokesperson said: “AP standards require that a photo credit be removed if conclusive evidence shows that the person who claims to have taken a photo did not do so. In the absence of such evidence, the photo credit remains.”

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In a statement to Fox News Digital, Utt’s attorney, James Hornstein, said the Netflix documentary presents no new evidence — “no negative, no contact paper, no print, no contemporaneous note, no photographic archive” to dispute that Utt took the photo, highlighting that only “a very narrow circle of individuals” argue he did not.

“Apart from Carl Robinson and his wife, who presented a belated and unconfirmed account of events for 50 years at the AP bureau, the only other supporters of the alternative thesis are Nguyen Thanh Ngo himself, and some members of his family,” Hornstein said in the statement. “Not a single independent journalist present at Trang Bang supports this view. Nor does any AP employee who worked in Saigon on the day of the attack. No documentary evidence—neither negative, nor print, nor contemporary contact paper—supports it. Nor has any historian, archivist, or photographic expert with access to the AP archives supported it.”

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He continued: “The absence of wider support is striking, given the widespread coverage the photograph has received over the past half-century. Had there been credible evidence to challenge Nick Ut’s authorship, it would not have remained confined to a handful of individuals whose accounts emerged five decades after the fact and contradicted the vast body of contemporary testimony. Isolating this thesis highlights the weight of the historical record – and also highlights the speculative nature of the narrative presented in the documentary.”

Netflix did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.