David Batty

So this is when the travel ban on Iranians comes into the US.

And I was at the Women's March with a couple of friends, the anti-Trump march in London.

And I get this message on my phone, oh, we've found your birth father.

When I spoke to my birth father on the phone for the first time, he was really happy and he cried.

We spent an hour on the phone and he told me everything, or he told me his version of events.

of the relationship with my birth mother which was very different from my birth mother's account and then he told me a bit about about his life and he told me a bit about brian that's my half brother but he was really slurring his words and i just thought

he's drunk, you know, and I think he's an alcoholic.

And my half-brother messaged me a couple of days later on Twitter.

And yeah, one of the first things he tells me is, yes, he's an alcoholic.

Yes.

So I went over there in March of 2017 to LA and I remember being absolutely terrified.

And I just remember just being absolutely kind of frozen, just going, what the hell am I doing?

I don't know any of these people.

And I'm going over there for two weeks, being immersed in this situation when I know that there's a lot of very traumatic things have happened.

So all this kind of trauma that he'd been through.

But I think the difference was that this was trauma that was not related to me.

And that made it a lot easier to deal with, actually.

So we met sort of two or three times during that trip.

And he was in a very bad state.

You know, his cognitive decline was really evident.