ALT Goal: Bobby Thomas.

ALT It’s been a while since I've posted anything anywhere, but I didn't want to let any more time go by without thanking everyone for all your kind messages of support over the last year and a half. I've learned firsthand how effective a smear campaign can be, so to be clear: The allegations against me are completely and simply untrue. There are emails, text messages and video evidence that flatly contradict them. These allegations, especially the really salacious ones, have been spread and amplified by people who seemed a lot more interested in outrage and getting clicks on headlines rather than whether things had actually happened or not. (They didn't.)

ALT One thing that's kept me going through all this madness is the conviction that the truth would, eventually, come out. I expected that when the allegations were first made there would be journalism, and that the journalism would take the (mountains of) evidence into account, and was astonished to see how much of the reporting was simply an echo chamber, and how the actual evidence was dismissed or ignored. I was a journalist once, and I have enormous respect for journalists, so I've been hugely heartened by the meticulous fact and evidence-based investigative writing of one particular journalist, whom some of you recently brought to my attention, who writes under the name of TechnoPathology. I’ve had no contact with TechnoPathology. But I’d like to thank them personally for actually looking at the evidence and reporting what they found, which is not what anyone else had done. If you are curious about what they've uncovered so far, the link in this post takes you to that reporting.

ALT It's been a strange, turbulent and occasionally nightmarish year and a half, but I took my own advice (when things get tough, make good art) and once I was done with making television I went back to doing something else I love even more: writing. I thought it was going to be a fairly short project when I began it, but it's looking like it's going to be the biggest thing I've done since American Gods. It's already much longer than The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and it's barely finished wiping its boots and hanging up its coat. And I spend half of every month being a full-time Dad, and that remains the best bit of my life.

ALT It's a rough time for the world. I look at what's happening on the home front and internationally, and I worry; and I am still convinced there are more good people out there than the other kind. Thank you again to so many of you for your belief in my innocence and your support for my work. It has meant the world to me.

ALT See Appendix 5 https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/framework-for-managing-the-response-to-pandemic-diseases/#appendix-5-planning-assumptions