Andy Kaufmans Brother Says Comedian is Alive in Love and Has a Daughter
A mysterious woman's claims that she is the daughter of Andy Kaufman have helped to revive long-standing rumors -- fueled in life by Kaufman himself -- that the comedian may have faked his own death...

The far-fetched admission, reported first by The Comic's Comic and Defamer, occurred Monday night at the Andy Kaufman Awards, held annually at the Gotham Comedy Club. The woman was introduced by Michael Kaufman, Andy's brother, who first explained how years ago he'd discovered an essay in which Andy detailed plans to fake his death. Official records state the Taxi star died in 1984 at age 35, of lung cancer. Were he alive today, Kaufman would be 64 years old...

Michael [followed directions in a letter he found from his brother about eating dinner in a restaurant in 1999], he said, whereupon a man he did not know walked up to him and handed him a typed letter. The letter, which Michael read for the crowd on Monday night, was allegedly from Andy, who wrote that "everything was great in his life and he just wanted to get away from being Andy Kaufman," Parinello says. The letter also stated that the comedian, famous for his bizarre alter-egos like cantankerous lounge singer Tony Clifton, had fallen in love with a woman and that the couple were raising a daughter together.

Michael then explained that the daughter, now 24, had made contact with him several months prior, and had subsequently agreed to accompany him to the awards...
An account of the event posted to Facebook by one audience member says the woman then told the crowd that her alleged father "is alive" and that "the passing of [their] father [Stanley Kaufman] this July made him want to reach out" to his brother. The account calls the moment "as real as any reality that I've seen..."

[Parinello on Kaufman's funeral in 1984]:
"It was a closed casket," he recalls. "Only the family [and myself] actually saw the body." How then does he reconcile Monday's events? "Andy was an aficionado of meditation," he explains. "One of the things Andy was taught at the highest level was a process where one could slow down his breath to a point where you can literally fool anyone that you may be dead when in fact you are alive. So that's the one thing that Michael checked for."