Now all of that SEEMS fairly genuine. The girl seems awkward and unassuming enough although she is perhaps a bit too smiley and plays with her hair a bit too much. Michael himself seems very emotional and convincing about the whole thing though, and this was confirmed by venue manager Ed Cavanagh and the producer of the event Al Parinello who both seem convinced it wasn’t a hoax – or if it was then they certainly didn’t have anything to do with it. Also it’s clear that the video has been heavily edited and we haven’t seen everything that is going on it; however I don’t think there would be any revelations from it that haven’t already been covered in print somewhere.

Since Monday though of course, the conspiracy theorists have been out in full force attempting to disprove all of this. A lot of work has gone into tracking down the identity of the girl who appeared on stage. The Smoking Gun are claiming that the woman is actually a 24 year old New York theatre actress called Alexandra Tatarsky, a picture of whom you can see below, and she certainly does look like the woman on stage in the video:

A quick look on her Facebook profile can confirm that she actually isn’t Andy Kaufman’s daughter and is instead the daughter of a 58 year old psychologist called Andrew Tatarsky. Yeah, her dad is called Andrew and looks vaguely like Andy Kaufman in some photographs (although not really if you look at the one below that most people are citing as evidence of this) but it’s not really enough to convince anyone that Andy Kaufman has been pretending to be a psychologist in New York City the past thirty years. It also completely disagrees with the story she gave on the stage on Monday. All of this of course is dependent on the girl actually being Alexandra Tatarsky, that hasn’t been confirmed or denied at this point as the Tatarskys have been unavailable for comment at this point.

The story took an even more sinister turn yesterday when Michael was interviewed on CNN and now believes that he himself was a victim of a hoax. The interview is kind of bizarre and very all over the place and rambling, but it’s clear that after a couple of days of reflection Michael no longer believes that the woman in question is his brother’s daughter and that he has been the victim of a hoax that he believes involved more people than just the single girl. Other websites are reporting though that Michael met Alexandra at a Manhattan gallery show early this year and subsequently hired her to play the role of Andy’s daughter for the comedy awards. Michael vehemently denies this in the interview but at this point who’s to say what’s real and what’s false?

You can check out the interview below but right now we’re stumped. It seems as if at least some of the story is a hoax but who is hoaxing who? Alexandra Tatarsky? Michael Kaufman? Or even Andy Kaufman himself, perhaps even from beyond the grave. We haven’t got a clue, but hopefully someone will get to the bottom of this before long.

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