Emily O'Reilly

You see, I remember, you see, people would ask me after he died, what did he die of?

And I'd start this rigmarole saying, well, he had HIV and then and then and then and then and then and then.

And I remember one time somebody said to me, what did he die of?

And I said, he died of AIDS.

And this person was shocked and I was shocked.

No, he didn't in the sense that, you know, he didn't get...

His immune system was still okay, even by the time he died.

Well, not completely, but... So it wasn't one of these opportunistic infections that ran riot around his body because his immune system was saying.

So I was curious about his death.

From the moment he got Kaposi's sarcoma, I was saying to myself, how the expletive can you get Kaposi's sarcoma on well-controlled antiretroviral therapy and then die...

in London in 2023 like this.

And he looked like an AIDS victim of the 80s or 90s, you know.

So, you know, part of me was, of course, grieving him hugely.

And part of me was still the old investigative journalist and ombudsman.

And because all my professional life was governed by

by one sentence really, how does this happen?

Or how did this happen?

So that's what I set out to do to find out how this happened.

So I was the administrator of his estate.

So that gave me access to his medical records with a caveat there.