Woody Harrelson continues to work. His father’s story is closed. The headline that links them will link them as long as both are remembered, which is likely to be for a long time: Charles Harrelson’s case is among the most significant criminal cases in the history of the federal judiciary, and Woody Harrelson’s career is among the most distinguished of his generation. The two facts will continue to be placed in the same sentence, because they belong to the same family, and the same sentence is the right place for them.
## A Note on Sources and the Limits of the Record
This article has been constructed from the public record: court documents and case histories, contemporaneous journalism, biographical reference material, and verified public interviews given by Woody Harrelson across four decades. The evidentiary standards applied to factual claims are the standards that serious biographical journalism requires: verified sources, attribution of claims to the people who made them, clear distinction between what is established by the legal record and what is attributed to any individual’s account.
Several things are documented fully: the criminal history of Charles Harrelson, as established by two murder convictions and the extensive trial record in the Wood case; the outlines of Woody Harrelson’s career, as documented in entertainment press and industry records; the specific public statements Woody has made about his father over the years, as reported in the People interview of 1988, the Sunday Times of 2007, and multiple other documented sources; the appeal effort, including the Dershowitz involvement and the 1998 federal court testimony; the death of Charles Harrelson in 2007 at ADX Florence.