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At the end of a year in which it would take the revelation that Mel Gibson actually engaged in human sacrifice during the shooting of Apocalypto to top the scandals the Jew-impugning, sugar-tits-slandering star has already weathered, this recent British tabloid report about an Australian woman's claim that Gibson knocked up her hitchhiking mom in the back of a station wagon thirty years ago will probably play more as image rehabilitation (hey, what healthy, horny guy wouldn't pick up an ovulating damsel in distress who needed a ride?) than scandal. Notes Rush & Molloy:

Carmel Sloane, 29, alleges she was conceived when Gibson gave a lift to her hitchhiking mother, Marilyn, in Australia in 1976. "I was a slim young woman in tight-fitting jeans on the side of the road when a station wagon stopped," Marilyn tells Britain's News of the World. "[Mel] said, 'Where are you going?' I said, 'A long way from here.'

"When we stopped for the night, he persuaded me to join him in the back. I told him, 'If anything happens and I get pregnant I'm going to come looking for you.' He replied, 'I'm going to be famous — you'll always know where to find me.'"

It's unclear why she's waited 29 years to ask for a DNA test. But daughter Carmel, who supposedly will file a legal claim this week, argues, "I'm not doing it for his money. I just want to meet the man I've always known was my dad."

Unfortunately, the story makes no mention of the self-professed lovechild's quest to discover the roots of a mysterious love for drink and a paranoid suspicion about the Jewish role in worldwide conflict, so we have no choice but to suspect a crass financial motive for trying to establish paternity at the height of her alleged dad's notoriety. Perhaps she naively believes that the rigors of Gibson's home-based alcohol recovery program may have robbed him of his will to fight off a lawsuit, and he'll happily hand over a pile of money just to avoid confronting the possibility that he was too drunk to remember all the hitchhikers he may have knocked up back in the 70s.