Damien McMullen,

TL;DR: You knew Oli and I were together. You knew us. You were there on our first date and in our last arguments. Then, when I figured out that Oli had been in a parallel relationship with his 'housemate' and went to the house to tell him, Oli denied we had been in a relationship and called me a stalker, I asked you, my friend, to tell the truth. Instead you repeated Oli's denial, deleted your messages to cover it up, told me "try getting me to court and we'll see". I fought for months to clear my name while you threatened me with bogus harassment reports for questioning you or telling our friends what had happened. Now I have established what happened, you pretend you never denied it. I will not let this stand.

You and Oli spoke that night, and you subsequently deleted the conversation. When I explained why the timing mattered, you agreed that it looked suspicious, promised to try to recover the messages, and swore not to delete anything further. You later said that Oli probably still had the conversation and that you could "quite easily find out if I wanted to". Naturally, you did not.

Meanwhile, I explained the police case to you at almost comic length. I showed you the statements, read the relevant police formulation aloud, and discussed it with you for hours on recorded calls. You promised repeatedly, and eventually "categorically", to tell the Chernys what you knew. You did not do that either.

Instead, you gradually moved from recognising the relationship to insisting that it had never existed, that it was "all in your head", and that I was "autistic as hell, and methed up", consumed by some sort of "meth-fuelled fantasy". When I continued asking you about your evidence, you began waving the police, my arrest, and the threat of prison at me.

Now the original messages have caught up with you. Having finally looked at the April chats and found yourself actively mediating, you have abruptly decided that my relationship with Oli "was never a question". Excellent. Unfortunately, this leaves the small matter of the preceding three months of denials.

Magnificently, you have now developed a second bout of highly localised amnesia: apparently you no longer know what Oli's police statement says, have asked me whether I have seen it, and have offered to correct it "if needs be". I showed it to you, Damien. This page is about the journey from your first amnesia—what did I discuss with Oli in the conversation I deleted after Sam's arrest?—to your second—what police statement? have you seen it? perhaps I shall correct it tomorrow?.

I remain unconvinced.

Before the amnesia

I have known you for roughly twelve years. You have known Oliver Babington Wilson—Oli to me, "Babs" to various others—for roughly as long. I have known him for about five years, and for much of the last two and a half years we have been boyfriends, lovers, partners, or whatever precise word one wishes to use for the bizarre thing we were doing. You knew this.

When you were speaking naturally, rather than apparently anticipating later forensic significance, you said things like:

I'm so happy to see you got that sorted out.

You're both made for each other; it's very sweet.

That was March. After I hit Oli on 12 April—yes, I hit him; no, I have never denied this—you remained in Facebook group conversations in which Oli and I continued discussing our relationship in language so obscure that only the most talented cryptographer could possibly decipher it: "I love you Sam", "I love you so much", "We're boyfriends, aren't we?". You were there.

On 27 August, after months of behaving as though I were revealing some extraordinary new theory, you finally went back and actually looked at the chats. Your reaction: "lol look at me trying to mediate". When I asked whether your own messages looked like those of someone who had not known Oli and I were together, you replied: "No but that was never a question?".

Ah. We shall return to that.

9 May: the imaginary relationship in which Oli might not "leave" me

On 9 May, you messaged me about Oli. You did not tell me that a terrified ex-boyfriend wanted permanent separation from a man who had refused to accept a clean break. Instead, you told me that he and I clearly had "a unique bond" and that you really thought this was "something you'll be able to work through".

You advised me that "it's pushing him away all the emails and group chats", suggesting that "if you give it a few days with no emails or group chats he'll soon enough speak with you". Most revealingly, you added: "I didn't say he may leave you, nor do I think that's the case".

Wait, leave me? That is a curious thing to say if I am, at that moment, a delusional, meth-addicted, autism-laden stalker whom he wants nothing at all to do with ever again. Your contemporaneous account was in fact perfectly easy to understand. Oli was angry because I had begun speaking to other people about what was going on. If I shut up for a few days, you expected him to resume speaking to me, and you explicitly did not think he would leave me. Maybe this was your interpretation rather than a direct instruction from Oli, but it was nevertheless the interpretation you expressed to me while acting as an intermediary. That is the important bit.

The assault, since we are apparently doing Victorian melodrama now

There is another small example of your historical position changing according to present convenience. Lately, you have discovered tremendous moral horror about my hitting Oli, asking questions like "Did you do this to Oliver Sam?", "Why did you beat Oliver?", "Do you have any shame whatsoever?", and "Would you want to be with someone who hits you?".

I hope you win that Oscar, but for the avoidance of doubt: I hit Oli once. He was being unbearable and appalling in a situation in which he owed me an apology, and I snapped. Here is the audio/video—judge for yourself. Because I had my phone in my hand, the resulting injury was substantially nastier than I intended, leaving a bruise and a small cut. I apologised immediately and offered to go to the police station with him then and there. You can hear me say that.

When he finally mentioned it to the police six weeks later—coincidentally on the very day I visited the Cherny house—I insisted on confessing accurately and providing those recordings. That is why I am being prosecuted and have pleaded guilty. I don't feel unambiguously guilty, but under the laws of England, I am.

I have never performed the ritual in which one announces that There Is Never Any Excuse For Violence in the solemn tone required to pretend this is a proposition revealed to Moses on Sinai. My own moral view is more eccentric. As I wrote to my solicitor:

I think my honest defence to the assault is that Parliament erred in passing the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.

I went on to argue that dignitary injury is not obviously metaphysically incommensurable with physical injury, that Oli had been behaving appallingly for a very long time, and that I did not honestly believe the moral truth was simply that one must never hit anybody whatever happens. I also said that I regretted the extent of the injury, and that with the benefit of hindsight and pre-planning, I would have preferred to slap him or kick him in the shins rather than hit him in the face while holding a telephone. This is perhaps not a defence Lord Coke would have recognised, but at least it has the virtue of being what I actually think.

Nor do I find the domestic-abuse histrionics especially illuminating when applied to the actual two people involved. We are two slightly etiolated, slightly pretty dorks. Oli is taller than me, tougher than me, stronger than me, and perfectly capable of picking me up and physically moving me somewhere if he wishes. I find this electrifying. I am also, very inconveniently, deeply and absurdly in love with him. This is not some Eugene O'Neill play in which the drunken brute returns home to establish dominion over his terrified wife.

I hit my boyfriend once during an appalling row, and he hit me back, less hard. I do not claim this was excellent behaviour. I do claim that turning it retrospectively into the revelation of a relationship based on my physical domination of Oli is ridiculous.

Importantly for present purposes, you did not treat it that way at the time either. You remained in the chats. You watched us continue to behave as boyfriends. In May you were mediating, discussing whether Oli might leave me. Only later did the assault acquire its wonderfully convenient new function: Sam hit Oli; therefore everything which happened before and afterwards ceases to matter; therefore the relationship need no longer be acknowledged; therefore any attempt by Sam to establish what actually happened is stalking. No.

The police version

The prosecution subsequently acquired a much cleaner chronology. The MG5 says: "Wilson confirmed that the relationship ended following this assault". While Oli's further signed statement is not quite so obligingly explicit, it presents all subsequent communications as largely one-sided and unwanted.

The simple story is obvious enough: the relationship ends on 12 April; the ex-boyfriend refuses to accept this, continues writing, eventually visits, and commits stalking. Unfortunately, you possessed direct evidence that this narrative was at least radically incomplete. You had watched us continue the relationship after 12 April. You had been in the chats, acted as an intermediary, and on 9 May you were still telling me what I had to stop doing if I didn't want him to leave me. I did not require you to determine whether our relationship was healthy, exclusive, dignified, socially approved, legally cognisable, or frankly sane. I required you to say what happened.

27 May: the hinge

By late May, I had finally worked out what I thought Oli had been doing: maintaining a parallel relationship with Sam Cherny while maintaining one with me. I told you this. I explained that I intended to go to the Cherny house to tell Sam, and I asked you to pass a message before I arrived so that he could know what I was coming to say, avoiding a doorstep confrontation.

You did not answer. I went. Oli called the police, and I was arrested. That night, you and Oli spoke privately on Facebook, and you subsequently deleted the conversation. The surviving Instagram logs resume at about six in the morning, meaning the missing conversation sits precisely around my arrest and before the police account had finished developing.

I do not know exactly what you said to one another. This is important. I do not know. I suspect, I infer, and I have a view, but I do not possess the deleted messages. Unlike some participants in this saga, I am trying to preserve the distinction between I know, I remember, I infer, and I have apparently just invented a new past which would be convenient if true.

Amnesia I

On 26 June, about a month later, I asked you about the deleted conversation. Your memory underwent a curious evolution over the course of several minutes: first it was about "nothing at all", then "nothing special", and finally, "I think ... it was negative".

When I explained where the conversation sat in the chronology, you immediately saw the problem, noting, "Oh, so that's why those messages are important because they're around that time". You called the situation "very sus", promised to "try and find them" by asking him, and agreed not to delete anything else. This was all reassuringly normal. The timing looked odd; the messages might matter; perhaps they could be recovered; you would try. Then you didn't.

Later, your memory became selectively sharper. The conversation was apparently sufficiently "horrible and negative against you" to explain why you had deleted it. You remembered that Oli was telling you about what had happened, claimed "Well I know what the conversation wasn't", and predicted that I would be "so embarrassed when you realise the truth".

And eventually you said: "I'm sure Oli still has the messages. I could quite easily find out if I wanted to". This single sentence has the great advantage of cutting through weeks of later nonsense: the messages were not irrecoverably swallowed by Meta. Oli probably had them. You could quite easily find out. You simply did not want to.

Meanwhile, I explained the police case to you approximately four thousand times

Your current position includes the claim that you did not know what Oli's statement said. This is complete rubbish. Between June and July, I put the relationship chronology to you in writing with almost parodic precision, and on 14 July, we spent hours discussing the case on recorded calls. Nobody need trust my recollection of them; there are approximately ten hours of audio online from this saga. They can listen until their ears bleed.

On 14 July, I read the official police formulation aloud: "Wilson confirmed that the relationship ended following this assault". I compared that with the April group chats. I read your own 9 May messages back to you. We discussed what Oli had supposedly told the police, and at one point you yourself referred to him having "corrected [the] police report to say that he's not his partner, and that's good enough for me".

Whatever exactly you meant, it is difficult to combine that sentence with your current portrayal of yourself as a woodland innocent who had never heard of any police account. While discussing Heather's statement, you suggested, "Oli probably wrote that, you know". When I asked whether Oli bore responsibility for the fear his story had created, you agreed: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course I do. I think he shouldn't have told you lies. I think this has caused a lot of problems ... You tell one lie to cover another lie up". Again, this is not the language of someone hearing all this for the first time on 27 August.

Damien's Promised Email

I asked you to tell the Chernys what you knew. This did not initially seem controversial. You promised. Then you promised again, and again, telling me, "I'll look at the email and I'll reply", insisting "You write an email ... and I'll send it off", and asserting, "I will do it. Categorically".

I wrote it. You did not send it. Days became weeks. Damien's Promised Email gradually joined Godot, the Second Coming, Madeleine McCann, and Grand Theft Auto VI in that small class of objects whose arrival perhaps ought not to dictate one's immediate plans. This would have been merely funny had you simply procrastinated forever. Instead, you did something more interesting: you started denying the thing you had promised to confirm.

The relationship repeatedly enters and leaves existence

On 13 June you could still acknowledge that it was "QUITE CLEAR YOU WERE IN SOME SORT OF DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIP". By 30 June, Oli "doesn't want a relationship with you, and never did".

On 4 July, you informed me that "Sam and Oli are not together this is all in your head". On 23 July: "Oliver is not in any relationship he never has been". On 28 July: "You speak of a relationship that doesn't exist". By 9 August, I was "autistic as hell, and methed up", suffering from a "meth fueled fantasy" that was "all in your head".

So, when you now tell me that whether Oli and I were together "was never a question", we do have a small documentary problem. It was a question, and you spent weeks answering it emphatically in the negative.

This also rather changes your new story about why you would not help

Your latest account is that you simply did not want to be "dragged into" an unpleasant dispute. This is a wonderfully serene description of events. You had already mediated between us, communicated what you said was Oli's state of mind, spoken privately to Oli immediately after my arrest, deleted that conversation, discussed the criminal case with me for hours, offered theories about Oli's lies, promised to recover evidence, promised to send a correction, discussed whether the court would throw the case out, and alternated between wanting and not wanting me imprisoned according to your mood.

One can perhaps debate whether you were helpful. One cannot seriously describe you as uninvolved.

Why not tell the Chernys?

At one point, you supplied an answer considerably more revealing than a simple desire to avoid drama. When I pressed you about telling the family what you knew, you snapped: "What do you want the family to chuck Oli out" "And then he'll come back to you".

There we are. This does not prove what you and Oli discussed on 27 May, but it does show that you understood perfectly well what revealing the relationship might do. If the Chernys learnt that the supposedly mad stranger at the gate had in fact recently been Oli's boyfriend, and that Oli appeared to have maintained incompatible romantic lives with two people, their view of the situation might alter. It might even create difficulties for Oli. Heavens.

The police become conversational punctuation

As I continued pressing you for the messages, your evidence, and the correction you had promised, you increasingly responded by invoking the police and imprisonment. On 25 July: "if you contact any one else in those emails I will go to the police!"

On 20 August, in front of our friends, you laid it on with a trowel: "I'll call the police and have you arrested today" ... "You'll get a custodial sentence" ... "I'm the difference for you getting custodial sentence and being let out on bail" ... "An apology here vs 18 months" ... "Oliver wants you behind bars".

You did not actually control whether I received a custodial sentence, obviously. The point is what you were doing rhetorically. I was asking you to account for missing evidence and to tell the truth about facts which might assist me in a criminal case, and you were making continued questioning personally dangerous by repeatedly dangling arrest and imprisonment in front of me. This is an unusual method of remaining outside a dispute.

The audience changes

Then something genuinely important changed. The argument stopped being neatly divisible into separate audiences. Mutual friends could read the messages, and the Chernys could potentially compare my account with your own old messages rather than simply receive whatever compressed version happened to reach them. Your positions became harder to maintain independently of one another.

Rather suddenly, your factual position began to move. On 17 August, in a group containing other people, you finally conceded: "I think there was something going on, yes". The next day, rather than say yes, I denied this and I was wrong, you attempted a brazen retcon: "I've always said it. You have recordings of such". Unfortunately, Damien, I do have the recordings. That is rather the problem.

27 August: the old position finally dies

On 27 August, you actually went back and looked at the April chats. You found yourself mediating, and you laughed: "lol look at me trying to mediate". I asked whether your own contemporary messages looked like those of someone who had not known Oli and I were in a relationship, and you replied: "No but that was never a question?".

So, after weeks of "meth fueled fantasy", "all in your head", "never has been", and "relationship that doesn't exist", we had reached: Of course you were together. Who ever said otherwise?

You did, Damien. Many times.

You then tried: "I don't think this changes much". It changes quite a lot. It changes whether I hallucinated the relationship. It changes whether you possessed direct evidence contradicting an important part of the prosecution chronology. It changes what you knew while I was asking you for help. And above all, it changes the question. For months the question was: Did Damien know? You have now substantially answered that yourself. The question is now: If you knew, why the fuck did you do all of this?

Amnesia II: what is a police statement?

And then, magnificently, we started again. I told you that you should have spoken to the police to correct what Oli had said. You replied, "I haven't spoken to the police!". Yes, that was exactly the complaint. When I clarified that I thought you should have spoken to them, you replied: "I mean sure? But I don't know what his statement is?". Then you added: "Have you seen his statement", "I'll correct it if needs be?".

There is something almost beautiful about this. Have I seen his statement? I showed it to you. We spent hours discussing both statements. On 14 July, I literally read the police formulation aloud to you. We discussed his lies, his supposed correction of the police account, and why these messages mattered. You promised to correct the Chernys.

And now: What statement? Have you seen it? Perhaps I shall correct it if somebody eventually establishes that it needs correcting?

This is not forgetting a sentence on page seven. This is forgetting the subject matter of the entire argument. Your first bout of amnesia covered the missing conversation itself; your second covers the ensuing months in which I have been asking you why that conversation and your evidence matter. It is, if nothing else, admirably symmetrical.

The latest explanation: I was rude

You have also lately suggested that your refusal to help can be explained by my subsequent rudeness to you, claiming "The reason I didn't send the email was because you were darn right rude to me after hours of me trying to console you" and "that's why I wasn't here to do you favors". I have indeed been extremely rude to you; I have called you a traitor, a liar, scum, and various other things which will probably not appear in Debrett's correspondence guide.

The difficulty here is chronology. You had already deleted the messages, you had already failed to answer the Chernys, you had already begun resisting a straightforward confirmation, and you had already failed to do the things you categorically promised to do. Later events do not cause earlier ones. Time, regrettably for this defence, runs forwards.

What I actually allege

I think you and Oli reached some understanding—express or tacit—that you would not contradict the account he was giving after my arrest, and I think your conduct over the next three months is extremely difficult to explain otherwise. I suspect the deleted conversation would tell us considerably more.

I do not presently know whether you helped draft Oli's statement, exactly what was said between you, how explicit any understanding was, or whether anything you did satisfies the elements of a criminal offence. Those propositions require evidence I do not presently have. The surviving record does, however, establish rather a lot without them:

That is already quite a lot of unexoneration.

And the assault does not rescue any of this

You are perfectly entitled to think I was wrong to hit Oli. The law agrees with you, and I pleaded guilty to doing it. You are entitled to regard my rather heterodox thoughts about violence as morally appalling; my lawyers are certainly under no obligation to incorporate Parliament erred in passing the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 into their submissions.

None of that alters what you knew. It does not retroactively remove you from the April chats. It does not make your May messages disappear. It does not turn "I didn't say he may leave you, nor do I think that's the case" into a message addressed to a stranger. It does not undelete your conversation with Oli. It does not make later insults cause earlier conduct. And it certainly does not transform "this is all in your head" into "that was never a question".

So, Damien

I am willing to be wrong. If I have quoted you inaccurately, identify the quotation. If a date is wrong, identify the date. If the surrounding context changes the meaning, show the context; and if there is a coherent explanation for your changing account, give it. If the deleted conversation was innocent, there is an obvious way of enormously improving your position: ask Oli for his copy. You have said yourself that he probably has it.

What you cannot plausibly do any longer is behave as though everybody has just arrived and nobody has ever discussed any of this before. We have. At quite extraordinary length. You knew the relationship existed, you knew why the police chronology mattered, and you knew why the deleted messages mattered. You promised to help establish the truth, and then you fought me over it for months. Now you tell me that you agreed all along and ask what statement I am talking about.

No. That is not exoneration. That is the final and most conspicuous contradiction.

— Sam Robinson-Adams