Davis’s account, as reconstructed from these retrospective sources, held that Crawford had reached out to other nominated actresses, to Academy members in various branches, and to people within the industry who might be able to influence the outcome. The specific mechanism she described—direct telephonic or written contact urging votes against Davis—would have constituted an unusual and potentially rule-violating form of campaign activity, though the Academy’s formal rules about campaigning have changed significantly over the decades.
Davis further said, or was reported to have said, that Crawford had positioned herself to accept the awards of any absent nominee—setting herself up so that if Davis lost to an absent winner, Crawford would be the one receiving the statuette.
These allegations rest, as far as the historical record can establish, almost entirely on Bette Davis’s own accounts, offered years after the events described and filtered through Considine’s biographic reconstruction. Davis was still alive when Considine wrote the book; she apparently provided or confirmed the account. But the account did not emerge contemporaneously with the events, and no independent witness has been documented as corroborating the specific claim that Crawford contacted voters.
The advocacy site that offers a two-hundred-dollar reward for evidence supporting Davis’s allegation makes the absence of corroboration explicit: no Academy member has ever gone on record saying Crawford contacted them, and no documentary record of such contact has emerged. The site’s argument—that two thousand eight hundred voters would have produced witnesses if such a campaign existed—is plausible but not conclusive. Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, particularly when the passage of time has removed most of the people who might have been witnesses.