Brittany Murphy's Mother: My Daughter Was Not Poisoned

In response to recent claims that Brittany Murphy may have died from poisoning, the late actress' mother has written an open letter insisting that there was no foul play involved in her daughter's death.

"I have no choice now but to come forward in the face of inexcusable efforts to smear my daughter's memory by a man who may be her biological father, but was never a real father to her in her lifetime," Sharon Murphy writes in the letter, published in The Hollywood Reporter. "His claims are based on the most flimsy of evidence and are more of an insult than an insight into what really happened."

New lab report says Brittany Murphy may have been poisoned

Sharon argues that Brittany's father, Angelo Bertolotti, was not involved in his daughter's life until she began to gain fame in the mid-1990s after TV appearances and her role in Clueless.

She goes on to argue that the lab results Bertolotti cites may be faulty. "The lab Angelo used, if you can call it that, is an Internet site that farmed out the actual testing, and then wrote horribly untrue things under the guise of 'analysis,'" she writes. "It mentioned rat poison as a possible cause and claimed to be able to say that a third party murdered my beloved daughter. To even mention that the heavy metals that were listed in his test are in rat poison, leading to articles suggesting Brittany ingested that or anything like it, is absurd. If she had, don't you think it would have shown up in the coroner's test of her blood and tissue?"

Murphy also claims that the foundation Bertolotti has founded in memory of Brittany, as well as a planned book and documentary about her death, are merely money-making schemes. "I am sorry to be so forthright in saying this, but the time has come to bring out into the open the lies Angelo and [Julia] Davis have told now that Brittany can't defend herself from," she writes. "They did it simply to promote their interests, their book, Davis' documentary and career. The time has come for their false statements to be exposed and rebuked."

Read Murphy's full letter here. What do you think of her statements?