The Meg Whitman housekeeper scandal took a strange turn today when Whitman fingered her own husband as a Jerry Brown operative.

"It's the only explanation I can think of that doesn't make me look like a liar," Whitman said at a press conference. "Griff was clearly manipulated by Jerry Brown and Gloria Allred. He had a gun to his head." (Allred and Brown denied pointing any firearms at Whitman's husband, saying they favor strict gun control laws.)

Whitman offered her "Manchurian husband" theory in an attempt to explain away earlier contradictory statements by her campaign. At a Thursday press conference, for instance, Whitman adamantly insisted she and her husband, Dr. Griffith Harsh IV, never received a letter from the Social Security Administration about possible discrepancies in their housekeeper's work documents.

"If a letter was sent, the housekeeper may have intercepted it," Whitman said. "I have no other explanation."

But when Allred later produced the letter, complete with a note scrawled by Whitman's husband, the campaign backpedaled. "This entire episode is a smear by Jerry Brown," Whitman said today. "It is now clear that he and his union henchmen orchestrated my 1980 marriage as part of a devious plot to have Griff intercept the Social Security Administration's 2003 letter and then lie to me about receiving it to embarrass my campaign."

Whitman also reversed course on taking a lie-detector test about the housekeeper scandal, saying polygraph machines were invented by a Democrat.