Who Is Mariska Hargitay’s Biological Father, Nelson Sardelli?

Both in her upcoming documentary My Mom Jayne, and a recent episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast, actress Mariska Hargitay, 61, opened up about finding out that Mickey Hargitay — the ex-husband of her mother, Jayne Mansfield, who raised Mariska and her siblings after her mother’s untimely death in 1967 — was not her actual biological father. The Law and Order: SVU actress only discovered that Nelson Sardelli was her birth father after going through some of her mother’s memorabilia after her death, during a meeting with the president of the Jayne Mansfield fan club.

According to US Magazine, Hargitay said after going through the fan club president’s collection and finding Sardelli’s name among her mother’s things, “I knew in one second. I don’t know [how]. I think my whole life, all the millions of moments … little fragments of a memory of a moment of things I caught that went into my subconscious. Then I said, ‘Who’s Nelson?’ I saw the blood drain out of [the fan club president’s] face and he sort of panicked and turned white and he said, ‘Oh, it’s probably not true, it’s probably not true.’ And that’s when I knew.”