EXCLUSIVE! Dad insists: "Lindsay Lohan was NOT blackmailed into appearing on TMZ TV show"

When we'd heard that Lindsay Lohan made an appearance on the inconsequential whitewashed syndicated television version of the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com the other night, we hadn't realized that she'd not only given the appearance of cooperation, but that she'd actually gone into the belly of the beast, sat in on one of Harvey Levin's phony Mr. Chips boypen production meetings and videotaped a bit as if she'd been invited back to Saturday Night Live.

Realizing that she'd endured the equivalent of having tea in the sitting room of her rapist, we immediately assumed that she'd probably been blackmailed by the TMZ street urchin scumbags; that there actually must be some kind of Lindsay Lohan sex tape out there and that the shaved bronzed midget Mr. Levin had done an Old School tabloid trick of offering to trade that sordid potential story for a benediction from the star (as troubled and down as she may be).

So we went to the source-- Lindsay's daddy-- and asked him straight out:

"Is Harvey Levin blackmailing Lindsay or Dina?"

Rev. Michael Lohan insists that it wasn't blackmail after all.

He tells us in an email:

"She DID on her own free will as a joke!! She actually made fun of the paps by doing it showing how they make big issues of little things like shopping for Cheerios."

Let's hope that in this case, father knows best. Because Lindsay certainly didn't...

Meanwhile, our stories on TMZ's Elliott Yamin disgrace apparently struck a nerve and have led to a lot of chatter among insurgents within the Twink Male Zone. And they've been chattering to us.

So stay tuned.