Several things are not fully documented and have been treated accordingly. The inner life of the relationship between father and son — what the prison visits were actually like, what was said, what was felt — is not part of the public record and has not been speculated about in this article. The specific experience of discovering a father’s criminal career by radio at age twenty is described in the terms Woody has used to describe it publicly, without embellishment or fictional elaboration. The question of what Charles Harrelson thought about his son’s career, about the appeal effort, about the relationship — is not answered in the sources available for this article, and the absence of that answer has been allowed to stand.
This is the honest shape of what the biographical record can provide and what it cannot. The story of Charles and Woody Harrelson is documented where it is documented and opaque where it is opaque. The article has tried to be faithful to that distinction throughout, presenting what can be established and acknowledging what cannot. What remains — the private experience of a complicated family relationship, conducted largely in the visiting rooms of federal prisons and in letters and phone calls that are not part of the public record — belongs to the people who lived it.
That seems, finally, as it should be.