Lie To Me* – The A-Rod Episode

Sounds like a FOX TV show…but, interesting stuff nonetheless…

Via Newsday -

So how convincing was Alex Rodriguez in his ESPN interview with Peter Gammons on Monday?

Speech and body-language experts around the country gave the performance less than stellar reviews yesterday, and said that there were multiple points where Rodriguez looked as though he was being less than truthful.

“The overall impression is not only that he’s lying throughout, but that he’s unwilling to admit full guilt in all of this with his verbiage,” said Patti Wood, a body-language expert who helps teach corporate clients on how to detect deception. “All that lip stuff where he’s pulling his lips in, all this pulling up the left side of his mouth. It shows he’s not willing to admit full guilt in this.”

Smithtown resident Tonya Reiman, author of “The Power of Body Language,” was intrigued by a movement that Rodriguez kept making with his left shoulder.

“He does a lot of that one-armed shoulder shrug,” Reiman said. “Typically, when someone does that, it means they don’t believe their own statement.”

Janine Driver is a former bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms investigator who now trains corporations and law enforcement officials on how to spot when people are lying. After watching the tape, she believes there were three places where she is fairly sure that Rodriguez was lying.

According to Driver, the first was when he said to Gammons: “To be quite honest, I don’t know exactly what substance I was guilty of using.”

“He starts it with a clause ‘to be quite honest,’ which leads me to believe that he’s not being honest,” said Driver, who is based in Washington. “He’s trying to convince rather than convey … He also leaked a lot of contempt with a half smile, most people call it a smirk. It’s almost a moral superiority and it sort of cancels out the apology and what he is saying.”

Driver also noted that he used the same clause “to be honest” later in the interview when he said that he didn’t know that he had “failed a test 100 percent” until recently when confronted by Selena Roberts of Sports Illustrated. “Maybe he knew he failed a test less than 100 percent, but it looks like he knew,” Driver said.

The third point where he really came across as less than truthful, Driver said, was when Gammons asked him about how he was “introduced to the substances.”

Said Driver: “Not only did he use distancing language. He never even answered the question. He starts talking about all the doctors and trainers he had. This is saying he doesn’t want to answer.”

Driver did have one piece of good news for Yankees fans.

“It kills me to say this because I’m from Boston, but I believe he was telling the truth about not doing steroids when he was with the Yankees. His demeanor there actually seemed sincere.”

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