Elisabeth Bumiller reports for the New York Times. Excerpt:
Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire who is a likely Republican candidate for mayor of New York City, said in a statement yesterday that a lie detector test administered in January showed that he was truthful in denying allegations of sexual harassment by a former employee.
Mr. Bloomberg, who was traveling yesterday in Israel, said in the statement that he had decided to take the test “because I expected that those allegations would surface in the news media as I began to explore the possibility of entering the mayor’s race.”
He also released a statement from the man who administered the test, Paul K. Minor, a former chief polygraph examiner at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “The questions during that examination were formulated solely by me,” Mr. Minor said in the statement. “I concluded that all of Mr. Bloomberg’s responses were truthful.”
Accompanying the statement of Mr. Minor, who is now the president of a private security company in Fairfax, Va., was an eight-page résumé. Mr. Minor did not disclose what specific questions he asked Mr. Bloomberg and did not return telephone calls made to his office yesterday.
Mr. Bloomberg was reacting to an article in yesterday’s Daily News that revived news of a 1997 sexual harassment suit filed by Sekiko Sekai Garrison, a former employee of Mr. Bloomberg’s giant financial information and media company, Bloomberg L.P.
New York voters should be aware that polygraph “testing” has not been demonstrated by peer-reviewed scientific research to operate at above chance levels of accuracy under field conditions. Indeed, polygraph “testing” is not a science-based procedure at all (See Chapter 1 of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector). Paul K. Minor’s reading of Mr. Bloomberg’s polygraph charts is without probative value.